Remote Agent Setup & Call Reporting

[tek4tip]

We are currently running CS1000 RLS 4.5 with SCCS 5.0 software. I have been tasked to come up with a solution to track/report on a remote SCCS agent. My PBX vendor suggested that the best possible way to establish the agent would be to place a small 221 Contivity box (to establish a tunnel) at the agent's location (home) with an IP phone. Has anyone ever done this? If so, were you able to successfully report on their calls (incoming and outgoing) using OTM & SCCS? What were the Pros & Cons? Secondly, what are some other viable cost effective solutions that might work?

 

[captaingadget]

The contivity solution would without a doubt work although I have not used this solution. I suspect the biggest problem would be with call quality as (as far as I know) broadband does not have any concept of QoS. So it all depends on what else is going on with the bandwidth as to the overall voice quality. But none the less it will give you the reporting solutions you require.

Alternatively you could use the remote office 9115 together with a reach line card. This uses a meridian digital phone set at the remote end rather than an IP phone.

I believe Nortel may be withdrawing this product shortly which is a shame because it works quite well.

 

[mklein76]

If you have VPN I suppose you could tunnel into your network and get an IP phone working as if it were physically in your office. As long as your firewall isn't blocking the ports that the IP phone needs, then it should be no different than an agent in your office. Call quality is probably the biggest concern. Personally, we've had some problems getting the soft phone to work over VPN but our network guys haven't really diagnosed the issue yet.

Matt
Forex Capital Markets
CS 1000E VoIP/Symposium Admin