Upgrading to CallPilot 3

[NastyNed2]

Thanks to all of you who responded to my recent (before Christmas) thread about the pros and cons of TDM versus VoIP. I hope we stay TDM in our larger buildings and go to VoIP in the smaller ones so they can be part of the dialing plan.

I'm about to move from MerMail to CallPilot next week. do any of you have suggestions as to beneficial new features I should be sure to take advantage of, and any possible "enhancements" to be wary of? I've already seen the application builder for menus, and it looks a lot easier than the old MM method. I have a lot of people who share desks and phones (day shift and afternoon shift) and they all have a menu to direct the caller to the proper person's voicemail box. The annual seating shuffle happens next week, and I'm hopeful that the menu app builder will help it go much smoother. Last year my daughter asked my wife, "How come Daddy doesn't come home anymore?

 

[x11tech]

Implement overflow to CallPilot Faxing on your analog fax lines. This way when multiple people attempt to fax you on your fax lines, instead of being busy, the call is directed to CallPilot which answers and accepts the fax.

Then set up the fax mailbox to deliver-to-fax all received faxmail, with the delivery location of the fax machine that was called.

This allows you to emulate "queued reception" of inbound fax messages.


Faxing is antiquated, but it's a feature that I like to throw out there for any customers that still rely heavily on physical copies of all documentation.


Likewise, if you have desktop messaging licenses, you can deliver faxes to email. This is nice as it gives you an easy way of digitizing documents, which you can then convert to PDF via one of a dozen methods (Adobe Acrobat Professional or CutePDF are two ways that spring immediately to mind.)


Not knowing much about your business, I'm not sure what other features would be useful for your environment.

 

[tnphoneman]

Here are some steps you need to take BEFORE starting the migration. Hopefully your vendor knows this.

1. Every mailbox has to be in a class of service. It can not have a personal class of service.

2. Class of service names. If they match what comes default in CallPilot they will not migrate properly. What I do to resolve this is for example the class of service named "Executive" I would rename "MM Executive"

3. Restriction permission lists work the same as class of service above. For the RPL of "LongDistance 1" I rename to "MM LD01".

Here is the reason for this....Say you don't do as I suggested and you go ahead and migrate the system data, durring the migration process the RPL "LongDistance 1" will be changed to something CallPilot decides since it already comes with a RPL of LongDistance 1. Ok that does not bother anything YET! Now you migrate the mailboxes and they are assigned the RPL of "LongDistance 1" which is wrong because CallPilot changed the name of the RPL you migrated and LongDistance 1 came default on CallPilot as completely restricted. This is because you did not change teh name before the migration.

This also lets you know easily what was migrated from Meridian Mail. Save yourself the headache and change the names in Meridian Mail to something you know will not match what comes default in CallPilot.

Also check for any mailboxes over the storage limit. I made the mistake of not doing that one time and there was a mail box with over 900 messages and it took over 1.5 hours to migrate that one mailbox.

Hope this helps. Good Luck

 

[janaya]

Here is what I do.

1. Set up server 3 days prior to migration. That means all ports in Call Pilot are pre-programmed
2. Load all patches, especially the Call Pilot Manager
3. Load all hotfixes and virus protection
4. Set all RPL's. Anyone with a specific revert DN will NOT migrate if this is not done

5. Check your MM user names for non-alpha numeric characters. These will NOT migrate either
6. Let users know they have to reset their Remote Notification. This information does not migrate either.
7. Tell MM storage abusers to clean up their mailboxes. This saves time in the restore.

Get a server for Call Pilot Reporter. All those things you did in Tools are in the Reporter and not resident on the Call Pilot Server. A PC will work but you need Win2003 Server for it to run.

If going to Succession 5.0, then rebuild the Meridian Mail ports so they have a different ACD queue. Then point the old queue number to the new queue. You can't remove sl1 phones in Succession 5.0 because SL1 is not a vaild phone type any longer. You can remove them by MOOSLT, but you cannot out the ACD queue. This will allow you to reset the old MM access number to a CDN.

If you are already on Succession, set up your Call Pilot ports and ELAN settings ahead of the migration and it should take you no longer than 6 hours on day of cutover.

Hope this helps

John

 

[NastyNed2]

Thanks, tnphoneman. I'll print this out and ask the vendor tomorrow. He's been pretty good at pointing these things out already. I've already changed all personals to something else.

How do you find out the number of messages? I've only been able to see how many MINUTES are stored in each mailbox. I've also cleaned up a LOT of them that haven't been logged into for over 99 days (a few of them almost 10 years)!

Janaya, what should I do with non-alpha characters? I use the slash on menus where two people share a phone. On individual mailboxes, I don't think I have any non-alphas, but I'll look. The vendor has preprogrammed the menus using the underscore rather than the slash.

We've cleaned house already. One guy had 345 minutes, another had 245 but didn't know it (main number at a firehouse). Our worst one now is 42 minutes.

Based on number of mailboxes and percentage of voice storage used, our vendor is estimating 3 hours.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[tnphoneman]

You will only see the number of messages durring the migration into the CallPilot. You have done good by looking at the storage used. You should be fine.

 

[janaya]

On non-alphanumeric characters you have to remove or they won't migrate. You just need to come up with a naming scheme that you can remember.

John

 

[I2007]

One thing I see usefull is the feature of "message forwarding rule" in callpilot. Many tends to install the callpilot desktop application to receive faxes and voicemails from callpilot to outlook or lotus notes mailboxes. If you have desktop licenses in the callpilot the message forwarding rule can automatically send faxes or voicemails to a mailrecipient without installing anything on the receiving computer. They will only receive faxes and voicemessages directly in their mailbox and can choose how to deal with them as they want...

No more passwords for the mailbox questions, or troubleshooting the callpilot desktop application on every computer, or for that matter mailbox storage problem in callpilot.

I2007