Mass dialer for IN-HOUSE calls?

[jeffgozatx]

Hi ~

We run a Mitel 2000SX Light with 700+ phones.

Due to the nature of our work, we need to be able to broadcast a message to a large number of phones In-house at one time. Can anyone provide insight on a system that could do this or a way that Mitel can connect a number of phones in one call without adding them one by one in a conference call?

Thanks!
Jeff

 

[northportphoneguy]

Greetings,

I believe the answer you will get from the gurus here, is there is no way. We have struggled with the same problem. Our facility, a non profit research lab, has over 40 buildings and in excess of 1200 extensions. It is a campus setting, just without a resident student population. Our administration wants to have a way to notify all staff in the case of an emergency, like, god forbid, a shooter on campus.

The Security department signed up with a service called SwiftReach (this is not an endorsement), which can notify people by phone, cell, email and text message. You can make multiple lists/groups such as a group to call all staff, a group to notify just one building, or a group to notify all the grounds guys to man the snow shovels. It is an offsite service who, when you press the send button calls each phone in your list.

One of the problems with such a system is that they can quickly overrun your trunks because they are capable of making hundreds of simultaneous calls. In our case, we have 2 PRIs which is 46 channels so for our test run we asked SwiftReach to throttle the calls to a max of 24 at any one time because we did not want to block to many normal calls. We then pared our phone list to 830 extensions, taking out faxs, conference room, alarms, etc. Our test run message ran 30 seconds and we asked the caller to listen to the entire message so we could time how long the process would take and we scheduled the test for 11:00am.

Watching the PRIs indicated that the 24 channels that SwiftReached used were 100% used and the remaining group did have idle channels so I did not have any blocking. However, in the case of a real emergency there has to be open lines to call out, so letting SwiftReach us all channels could also be a disaster. Bottom line. It took SwiftReach one hour and 15 minutes to call all all 830 extensions with a 30 second message.

To make this work we definitely have to get our staff to sign up using cell phones and text messages.

Hope this helps.

 

[nytalkin]

Look into upraging to a 3300 controller with latest s/w. Many option available to acomplish emergency notifications etc.

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED!

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

There are several 3rd party (external) service providers that can accomplish this.

However, a warning....
If you do it, I strongly recommend you send the emergency notification to the cell phones and email ONLY and here's why:

Your PBX can only handle a certain amount of concurrent traffic. Similarly, you only have a certain amount of trunk capacity. In time of an emergency you sure don't want your phone system tied up. Similarly, unanswered "emergency" notifications would naturally land in voice mail. Bingo, you've just hit another choke point & locked out all your voice mail ports. By the same token, when the incoming blast of notification calls are completed, now you've got a gazillion message waiting lights turned on which in turn is going to result in a flood of calls to your voice mail system trying to retrieve these messages.

NEVER-EVER send emergency alert notifications to your voice mail system!!!! In the first place, by the time you're able to retrieve those messages, the information is likely stale. Secondly, you've brought your VM system to its knees, locked up every port so nobody can access it, creating even more chaos.

Think this through very carefully before you end up shooting yourself in the foot. Send the alerts to the cell phones and to email as text messages only. Do not allow the service provider to call the individual internal extensions.

 

[jeffgozatx]

Thanks for the feedback.

I wanted to have a system "in house" (rather than a service) for the very reason I didn't want to tie up our external ports. My idea is to have dedicated plids/extensions so it will dial an internal call.

Jeff

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

To my knowledge there is nothing available in Mitel's product line that is capable of accomplishing what you propose. This is either going to require a 3rd party application ($$$) or an external service.

Using phone (voice) notification means that a message has to be played to every person you wish to notify. Since you cannot accomplish this en-masse without bringing your PBX to its knees, it becomes a serial task, ie one at a time.

I really-really recommend you think twice about any system of doing "voice" announcements or voice alerting. Email/Text-messaging works so much better.

 

[IrwinMFletcher]

Agreed, PBX's are configured and deployed based on traffic tables, what you are asking is well outside of those boundaries.

Also, just so I understand the test that you did, you have 830 extensions, 30 second message, and 24 channels? That's 830*30/24 = ~18mins. Where did the other hour go?

 

[LoopyLou]

Saw a emergency or disaster system that worked on a 3300 with 5330 sets. Third party developer created the product. It was meant for school boards where a teacher could trigger an emergency on their phone and it would handle a large variety of emergency responses ( displayed message on the set, flashed lights on the set or sent an announcement through the speaker). King of cool.

Also have seen a third party app that expands the group page function beyond the limit of the 3300. This server sets up and pages the groups independent of the 3300. This product used SIP trunks so it was limited by the number of SIP trunks the 3300 can have.