Voice-Only voicemail options to replace phonemail 1

[hamncheese]

What product are you using if your not using Xpressions or phonemail. I need capacity for a 1000 users and 40 call-processing boxes. I'm going to replace 2 nodes of phonemail but I won't be going unified with our email system. I would expect to have some integration issues with message-waiting and callback if I don't go with Siemens, but I need to look at a couple of other manufacturers too. I'm curious what your using and what kind of problems you ran into during implementation.
Thanks.

 

[donb01]

I replaced our PhoneMail with AVST CallXpress (now CX-E) because I knew I was going to be upgrading all of my systems in the next few years and I wanted a system that could integrate with most any PBX. They don't have a direct interface to simulate the PhoneMail one, but their default menus are not the worst.

I think it is great because you can start out with less, and then just add all the UM and speech processing features later if you decide you want them by buying a license key. Mine has the basic voicemail, 450 UM licenses, I got 50 Personal Assistant licenses free, and I'm using their ScheduleXpress module to allow me to schedule my call processing menus by date or time of day. So my sites can have one menu during the daytime when they are open, and a completely different one at night when they are closed - it is very cool. I did not license the speech recognition stuff. I have about 750 voice boxes, and maybe another 100 CP mailboxes and announcements.

I am running a single box configuration with both the system and call processing servers on the same box, 24 channels of optiset port integration (which I will probably change to IP when I upgrade to the IP PBX. As you commented I do have some problems with MWI integration, but only because I have a mixed environment of 9006 and Hipath 4000. If I had just one or the other I would not have issues, but both systems do it a little differently and CallXpress supports only one type of MWI at a time. What the problem consists of is that the PM users are used to pressing their PM button to call voicemail. Because of my strange integration requirement we have to use MB buttons instead of PHML buttons. If you press the MB button the might goes off because the PBX shuts it off (form the Callback) but CallXpresss does not know the light is off because IT did not shut it off, and due to programming efficiency it will not send out another activate light command if it thinks it's still on. I easily worked around that by simply telling CallXpress to update the message light status every 2 hours for all mailboxes. Since I don't have a ton of mailboxes that doesn't strain the system too bad. It also gave me the option to override the default action of not sending a light-on command if the light was already on, and lets me send a light-on command with EVERY new message that is left. Between these two workarounds I've pretty much addressed the MWI issues.

Otherwise I love it. They have user forums on the AVST website that pretty much allow us customers to work together to solve problems, and also the staff monitors it and will chime in on questions from time to time. You do have to work through an authorized reseller in order to get the product. Black Box Network Services is who I use for what sales and support I need.

At the same time as I did CallXpress I also rolled out the Captaris RightFax platform, which seamlessly integrates into CallXpress for fax and document delivery - some of those features are much better experienced with the Unified Messaging options though. I would expect that if you are not going to be doing much with UM in your system it might come fairly cheap.

Anyway, that's the direction we went, and we haven't regretted it yet.

 

[keyset6]

donb01 - Do you know if Siemens is still supporting Phonemail? I heard even for contract customers hard drives were hard to come by if they failed. I thought Phonemail had good audio quality and was easy to work with. Just wondering are you going to stay with Siemens for voip?

 

[donb01]

According to the memo on my bulletin board, as of March 31, 2011 Siemens has end of life'd all of the "legacy" products, including 9006 and Phonemail, and will no longer provide custom MAC (which means everything is limited to stock on hand from your support organization or the 3rd party channel). I thought PhoneMail did a great job, and yes, it was very easy to work with. I actually still have my single node Phonemail 6.4 with two drives sitting in the phone room keeping someone from stealing my real estate.

Yes, I have planned to stay with Siemens for the VOIP rollout, for a couple of reasons which really piss off the barrage of vendors that keep hassling me. One of the reasons is that we have already rolled out the 4000 V5 at one site and it has been running for 3 years with no problems. We already know it works for us and is reliable, and I already have about 30 IP phones rolled out in various remote locations off of it. Because we are a healthcare organization with the main hospital and 7 sites and about 1200 devices it would be a tremendous hassle to try to do them all in one weekend. The nice thing about staying with Siemens is that the networking protocol between sites does not have to change initially, which means I can drop in each remote site without anyone else in the network really knowing it's happening. We build the system, set the IP phones, swing the PRI from the old system to the new, and the CorNet trunk, and we're cut over. Then we go back and pick up the old stations and remove the old system. Eventually when they're all up we change to IP for the inter-facility links and either re-task the DS1s as more bandwidth or just eliminate them completely. The only significant outage will be at the hospital, and only then because it will take a while to swing the 3 primes and 7 DS1s, plus move the voicemail and RightFax over to the new box. That is the most seamless upgrade path I could have imagined. Another reason is that I want to run a hybrid system because of the hospital. I want the redundancy of TDM phones alongside the IP phones in critical locations, so in the event something happens to the network or we have a facility power failure I can sustain basic communications and paging. This solution will also play very well into that. We will take the existing "brain" I already own and upgrade it to V6, then move it to the main hospital. Each individual remote site will be survivable and will retain its own trunking in the event it loses communication with the mother ship. That also allows me to minimize the IP network traffic that would happen from routing all the external traffic for the remote sites across the network, and if I have a PRI failure at any of the remote sites I will be able to do backup dialing from the mother ship or one of the other remote sites, and I can also use CLAR (AT&T thing) to move that site's traffic to a different PRI and then route it across the network until the outage is repaired.

I've spent a lot of time trying to develop a system that will give us the most flexibility and redundancy, and also minimize the disruption to the organization when we roll it out. I guess we will find out! I am planning on making the vendor "haul away" all of the old stuff that I can't re-task as part of the deal to save me the disposal and hauling costs. They have a resale operation so I'm sure it will have at least some value to them to recover their costs.

 

[keyset6]

Interesting - I know Siemens in this area sold or transferred service to another company for the legacy products. Many Siemens techs were laid off and hired by the other co., some 4000 system customers and a few not satisfied with the other company's service (NDI?) are still serviced by Siemens. It does make sense staying with Siemens with the system you've built and the method you can cut over. Nice redundancy in case of a failure too. Good thing I asked for 9006s that have been retired in the last year for parts! Looks like in a bind there's a few vendors out there with a decent parts supply.
I spoke to an insurance company that about a year ago retired a 9006.4 - threw away the cabinet and oPtisets! Hate when that happens.

 

[donb01]

I bought my last one from a bank. Cabinet and brains but no phones. I needed it for the software upgrade because they have no more memory modules to do upgrades to 9006.6 from what I gather.

I use Black Box Network Services (Norstan) for my sales and what little service I use - I pretty much self support my systems for all but the really complicated stuff, and one of the techs even told me to grow a set and do one of those once too. They have been servicing us (as Norstan) for 25+ years and we have never had any problems. I'm in the WI - MN service area.

 

[keyset6]

Norstan - that co. actually serviced a customer of ours in New England who's headquarters was in Oklahoma (Can't think of the name of it) but subcontracted Siemens. Norstan would ask us at Siemens to call their dispatch center to close tickets with them. Seemed like a good group to work with. Once I upgraded an ACD server on a 9006.5 (U4?) and working with the Norstan guy on a snag I ran into was fine. It was like the Norstan version of Siemens TAC. Hey I don't blame ya for not wanting to get in too deep at times! What's nice now is having an old 'lab' switch I can work on, test DAT drives, make replacement hard drives etc. Ironically none of that when I was with Siemens.

One thing I did that surprised me - could have sworn I was told it wouldn't work. Loaded the lab switch with database A. Removed hard drive A - installed hard drive B. Did EXE-UPDAT:BP,ALL and database A was written to hard drive B. Booted from hard drive B to verify it was good. It was the same Unix version, but I thought when I tried that years ago got some kind of mismatch error. Maybe it was something else not matching up. Good idea purchasing the cabinet and CPU to have as a spare. Otherwise maybe they would have thrown it away.

 

[donb01]

I have actually done the same thing. When I upgraded one of my sites with a model 30 to a model 80 (the one I bought from the bank) I have tossed used hard drives in that cabinet and used it to build the drives so I can just take them to the site and swap them out (that's what the tech told me to grow a set and do). I did do one thing that was completely ballsy once because I didn't know what else to do. I had a site where the HD failed and I <ahem> didn't have a current backup. As you know on the Siemens switches the telephony will stay up even if the drive takes a crap as long as nothing needs to do a reload from the drive. I figured worst case was I was going to have to go back to the last 6 month old backup.

There were two different drives used (at least) on the 9006 platform. I believe it was the quantum fireball drive that if you went in and deactivated unix and the drive, and then removed the drive carrier (to replace a bad DAT drive, for example) would not automatically spin up and restart when you put the drive back in. You HAD to power cycle the system to get the drive to restart. The second drive I'm aware of (either WD or Seagate) would spin itself up and go back to normal as soon as you pushed the drive carrier back in. On that particular system at the time I was able to do the unix recovery on another used drive (database was restored from the 6 month old backup), put the drive in the system, activate unix and get the interface up, and then (after a brief prayer) doing EXE-UPDAT several times, which believe it or not completely updated the 6 month out of date database on the drive. I couldn't keep the grin off my face for a week for pulling that out of my butt! Of course being at the top of the food chain there really isn't anyone to share the victory with.

I have a 9006.5(A) system right now that needs a unix recovery - it seems OK, but it says the boot file is corrupted so it won't load unix. I don't have a drive to build for that one, so I haven't done anything with it yet, I have made some substantial changes to it while it is fragged and I'm worried about losing the changes. I think the RMX partition is OK, and the drive is not showing any errors when I run tests on it, so if it takes a power dump it *should* restart - just no unix. I haven't wanted to mess with that one so far.....

Nice thing about the 4000 is I can disk image to a CF card, and in an emergency I can actually boot the system off of the CF card. It also supports an offsite ftp backup so I could restore from that or another CF card if necessary till the drive gets replaced.

 

[keyset6]

Nice keeping the Mod 30 to setup hard drives. Sounds like we have the same thing in mind. I've replaced 4 9006 hard drives in the last 5 years - brought a backup to my site that had retired 9006s and I think one hard drive we bought. I run the RMX recovery script on the existing database. That does require intervention of course several times since some files are already there - I have to go into live RMX mode, do commands then resume the script. That way I don't have to also re-install Unix, which I'd need to do if I completely formatted the drive. Sometimes I wonder though, may be easier to format the HD and let the scripts run to get the expected results. At least all of the systems gave me fair warning by going downhill by the hard drive becoming quite loud. Downtime was maybe about 5 -7 minutes - I'd bring the built drive and install it before business hours. That's great you were able to do an actual recovery with EXE-UPDAT, and the prayer didn't become a swear.

I must have the quantum fireball drives now - because I know in the past I've been able to replace DAT drives during business hours with no interruption at all on a Mod 30. That would explain why the last 2 I did I had to power recycle the system. At least I made sure no one was on a critical call. I know that's harder to do in the enviroment you're in. Nice being able to backup and boot from a CF card with the 4000, as well as an ftp backup. That's one thing I like about the 3000 - several backups can be stored on different sources.

 

[donb01]

The 3000 is basically a newer version of the 150. I have one of those too, but am not using it any more. For that I would keep one copy of the KDS on my laptop and then make 2 floppies - one for the site that stayed in the cabinet, and one for my office just in case. It had some nice features, but certainy was a wierd bird from a programming perspective. Nice thing about 9006 and 4000 is you change one thing at a time and you can fix it if you goof up. With the 150 (not sure on 3000) you download the whole brain into your computer, change it, and then re-upload it back. One fat finger when you weren't looking or something like that and the whole system hiccups when you upload the changes!

 

[keyset6]

We have a few 3000s, like you said a weird bird in a couple ways. I still find it odd that the line light doesn't illuminate until a connection is made. The DISA feature is somewhat complicated - so I simplified it with the old analog line into a trunk port method. Another nice but unusual feature was the online mode, kind of like a silent DISA. When we changed our outgoing routing to a different trunk group using a temporary outgoing test number I could call my cellphone from the online 'phone' and at least verify the CID being sent was correct. Back in the day when we had diskette drives I thought the .kds was just a little too big to fit on a diskette, maybe not all systems. I have several copies of the backups and at times put them on our shared drives so anyone can get them.

Was talking to a former co-worker who's still at Siemens - he said the backup media on the 4000 is actually a 500gig hard drive? That's quite a backup media. I remember the old Rolm 8000s could be upgraded to 256K - that's K. !

 

[donb01]

When we upgrade our systems we will be going to V6 of the 4000, which is supposed to be more daunting, but I doubt it will scare me too much. I don't know what they use for drives on that version, but the 4000 went from having an MO (Magneto-Optical) drive for backup to a CF reader. I don't know how big the MO drive cartridges were, but the whole system right now can be backup up using 3 2GB compact flash cards (one for Data, one for System, and one for some other stuff) - plus you could also create a boot image on a CF card for an emergency. Compared to that, 500GB is a huge drive - even the old 9006 beasts only had like 1GB drives and could be backed up on one DDS90 DAT Tape. I wonder if he is talking about the new 8000 OpenScape platform that is pure IP. That thing was pretty jaw dropping when I got a demo of it - but not the right solution for us right now.

My 150 was only two cabinets and about 100 phones and stuff - I could typically get at least 2 .kds files on a 1.44MB disk. Hell, I started with a CBX 8000 - big old orange beast that got fed 8-inch floppy disks for backup!! Those were the simpler days, that's for sure!! LEX, REX, NEX... I can't remember all of it.

 

[SiemensLifer]

The Siemens person was more than likely giving you a system drive replacement info. The Hipath 4000 V6 is not the same structure as the V5 an older. The system utilizes 2 self contained host machines (if redundant) running Linux and runs Hipath Software as seperate vm's or Appliances (V6.0 and .1 than V6.2).
Yes to get a full drive backup a Mirror drive is created and then marked as a recovery drive. so it would require a 500gb drive.
The Hipath 4000 databackups only require the space needed for the amount of data. The data backups are sent to other media (FTP site, local connected machine, etc..).