new to phone systems

[WhippingBoy]

Some help would be greatly appreciated. I started a new job, and well being the computer guy, of course the big wigs decided that I am now also the phone system guy. No one here understands excatly how our system works, except that when it doesnt, I must fix it, yes, now, not in a few minutes, but now. Having said that, could someone point in the proper direction to start my research on my new task

Thanks in Advance

Rich Stanley II

 

[WhippingBoy]

Ummm, I forgot to mention what kind of system that we have.
It is a merlin magix relaese 1. With winspm v 3

 

[mpstech]

Go to

http://support.avaya.com/japple/css/japple?PAGE=avaya.css.CSSIndex

Try to find the documents you need. Mike

 

[verland]

I am in the same boat as WB, but have the luxury of learning on a non-production system. It's a Legend 6.1 with Merlin Mail 3. I've printed out and bound all relevent manuals (something like 10,000 pages).



Any advice for learning this? Otherwise I am just going to begin with the installation guide and planning manual, start reading and doing. Looks hard but I've always wanted to figure these out.

 

[gregarican]

As long as you can grasp the general phone system concepts of extensions, trunks, groups, features, COS, etc. you should be able to pick up what Avaya's specific peculiarities are.

One thing that really annoys me if you are adding trunks to a system is that assigning them in the system automatically adds them in as individual line buttons on the main operator's phone. That means existing buttons are overwritten. Causes a few problems. I've had to resort to manually assigning trunk by trunk and going back into the operator's phone and changing the overwritten button back. Unless there's a better way I'm at a loss here.

That and the fact that a lot of the older MLX phones "get fried" in that the flex board underneath the buttons gets oxidized and stops working. We lose about a phone every 1-2 months due to this.

But reading the documentation will help you get an idea of what all's involved setting up and maintaining a Merlin system. The planning guides and forms help condense things a little. The online HTML feature reference guide is a good primer as well.

Hope this helps!

 

[gshaheen]

You have my sympathy. I'm a phone tech, so my answer may be a little biased. In most companies, the phone system is the most important piece of equipment they have (if your customers cant contact you, they call your competition, right?) So why do these "big wigs" insist on having someone with limited or no experience troubleshoot such an important piece of equipment?

They need to get their heads out from their you know what. I've seen it a thousand times, penny wise-dollar foolish.

They won't pay an outside phone tech $80/hr or so to come in and fix a problem properly, but its OK to take an employee who cost them $30-$40 per hour when you add in benefits, who will spend all day trying to fix a problem.

In the meantime they might have lost customers over this!

You can definitely learn the system in time (its not that hard), but your boss should be smart enough to realize that just throwing you into it with no training could be costing him more money than he or she realizes (or wants to realize)

 

[gregarican]

Another thing that helped me pick up the Merlin system was some computer based training that came on an Avaya CD. I ordered this and WinSPM in one bundle. Each training section that you complete comes with a certificate you can print out. That way I could demonstrate I picked up the concepts.

Previously I started out learning on larger Nortel and Rockwell phone systems. They had a lot more sophisticated features and more complicated ACD/IVR interoperability. That made picking up the Merlin a bit easier since it's a lot simpler. Overall I agree that the Merlin's pretty straightforward and not too insurmountable. But like gshaheen said, throwing someone into it with no exposure or prior training is penny-wise dollar-foolish. At least push your employer to spring for the CBT or maybe an outside tech to come in and show you a couple of basic things!

One of my biggest beefs about the Merlin in general has been getting docs for the modules. For example, I had to install Merlin Magix at one site in order to implement voice/data tandem switching with an older existing Legend. The Magix INA card came with absolutely no documentation, so I had to dig around old Lucent and Livingston FTP directories in order to find user manuals and programming command line syntax. It took longer to find the docs than to program the phone system!

Perhaps that's a repercussion of a phone system going through so many hands --- AT&T, Lucent, Avaya, etc.

 

[Guest_imported]

I was in the same boat a year ago and I just read the documentation and know I know the whole thing. The key thing that helped me was to learn the Merlin Magix Programming book forms and the Help key on top of the WinSpm program