Product Sheet - TeleVantage 7 What's New

Since its introduction, Vertical TeleVantage has been recognized as providing superior functionality and ease of use. As a software-based IP-PBX, TeleVantage lets you increase the functionality and benefits of your phone system with a simple software upgrade instead of a “fork-lift” replacement. TeleVantage 7 includes many new enhancements that benefit your business. The following is just a sampling of the powerful new capabilities included with TeleVantage 7.

Legacy Digital Phones Support
There are millions of legacy digital phones in use today in small and medium-sized businesses, and often customers feel locked into solutions from a specific vendor. TeleVantage 7 adds built-in support for legacy Avaya, NEC, Nortel and Siemens phones, as well as continues to support Toshiba phones, so customers can protect and leverage their existing infrastructure investments, while gaining the significant productivity and customer service benefits provided byTeleVantage.

Digital Phones Supported
For years, if a customer bought a phone system from a certain vendor, when that customer outgrew the system or wanted to upgrade, they would typically feel compelled to buy from the same vendor, just to be able to re-use their phones. TeleVantage 7 breaks the mold and opens the door to productivity and flexibility for customers who want to use the legacy digital phones they already have. Digital phones supported by TeleVantage 7 include:

Avaya (and Lucent) Magix 4400 series, 6400 series, 8400 series and Legend MLX phones
NEC Dterm III and Dterm E phones
Nortel Networks Norstar 7000 series and Meridian 2000 series phones
Siemens Optiset E series of phones
Toshiba DKT 2000 series and 3000 series (in 2000 mode)

Digital Phone Features - DSS/BLF Support Added
TeleVantage 7 builds on its prior support of Toshiba phones to deliver a rich set of TeleVantage features to digital phones. Features include: Caller ID display, Message Lamp, voice-first answering, intercom, paging, hold, transfer, conference and many otherTeleVantage functions that can be assigned to buttons on the phones. TeleVantage 7 allows a single button to be used as an extension speed dial, as well as showing the “in use” status of that extension, providing Direct Station Selection/Busy Lamp Field functionality to operators and others in your organization.

SIP VoIP and Pure Software IP-PBX
Voice over IP is the fastest growing segment of the telecommunications industry today. Many VoIP products require customers to make an all or nothing commitment to using VoIP, and in the end often don’t deliver enough business benefits. With TeleVantage, that’s all different because customers can choose to use VoIP where and when it best suits their businesses. Customers can connect remote and home employees into the main office, and save money and create better interoffice productivity by routing all long distance calls between offices over LAN/WAN connections. And since TeleVantage is a superior phone system, it adds even more power and flexibility to support for VoIP.

Session Initial Protocol (SIP) Support
SIP is quickly being adopted throughout the telecommunications industry as the predominant protocol for VoIP. Many SIP phones and service providers now utilize interoperable standards and have come down significantly in price when compared to initial VoIP initiatives. TeleVantage 7 now supports SIP in addition to existing H.323 VoIP support. A range ofVertical-branded SIP phones, as well as the widely adopted eyeBeam softphone from Xten Networks, can be used to take and place calls with TeleVantage 7. Customers can use SIP phones for everyone in their organization, or choose to use them just for remote and home workers who can behave as extensions just as if they were in the main office. Customers can also use the softphone with just a headset connected to a PC, without the need for a physical phone; this is especially handy for traveling users who can plug in their laptop at any hotel in the world with internet access, connect back to the office network, and place and receive calls like they were just down the hall. Customers can also have external phone calls connect to and from the office via the growing ranks of SIP carriers and service providers, enabling significant savings on long distance bills.

Pure Software-Only IP-PBX
TeleVantage 7 can now be installed with Intel®NetStructure™ Host Media Processing (HMP) software as an alternative to Intel Dialogic boards. When installed with HMP, TeleVantage requires no additional hardware beyond the server itself, greatly reducing costs and easing deployment and configuration considerations. This is the ultimate IP-PBX configuration, with all phones and connections to TeleVantage using SIP or H.323 VoIP protocols. Any required physical connections, such as to legacy PSTN lines or FAX machines, can be made by a set of supported PSTN and station VoIP gateways.

Richer IP-PBX Support : Peer-to-Peer Voice Over IP and Quality of Service Features
Implementing VoIP throughout an organization will of course increase network usage. TeleVantage 7 adds features to help customers manage this type of configuration.

TeleVantage uses technology from Intel, Dialogic boards or HMP software, to provide digital signal processing for functions like conferencing, call recording, playing messages or music on hold. With TeleVantage 7, voice packets are relayed from one SIP phone or connection to another for any call not requiring these types of Intel resources. This saves money since customers only need to buy enough Intel resources for calls that will require Intel functionality.

Voice communication over IP can be very time sensitive, with matters of milliseconds of delay sometimes affecting the perceived quality of a call. To help maintain Quality of Service (QoS), TeleVantage 7 supports DiffServ QoS settings for SIP and H.323, allowing voice traffic to be prioritized above other data on the network and delivering a high quality phone conversation.

More Flexible , Lower-Cost Dialogic PSTN Trunking Board Support
Vertical has worked closely with Intel for years to leverage the best of the Dialogic telephony board product line in TeleVantage. TeleVantage 7 adds support for ISDN PRI connections on Intel’s DM3 family of boards. This means customers can now add four T1 or E1 circuits to TeleVantage using a single board, keeping costs down as the TeleVantage system grows with customer needs. And many of the boards customers may already be using with TeleVantage for VoIP can now also provide additional T1/E1connectivity, adding to the value of the hardware customers already have. Additionally, boards from Intel providing 4 analog trunks and 8 stations can now more effectively be used in systems with other boards, utilizing resources from all boards at once.

Enhanced Contact Center With Skills-Based Routing
Handling multiple inbound or outbound calls is an ever-growing part of business for many companies. TeleVantage has long included Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) and contact center capabilities that are considerably less expensive than other comparable contact and call center systems. TeleVantage 7 features significantly expanded contact center capabilities that help customers better manage queue and agent performance to deliver improved customer services and lower costs. And unlike other call center products that require complex advanced programming, TeleVantage provides administrators with appropriate permissions control of contact center features through an easy point-and-click interface.

Skills-Based Routing
Sometimes customers find that they have groups of agents handling similar calls but the agents’ skills or the requirements of the callers are not all the same. TeleVantage 7 adds skills-based routing to allow customers to distribute calls with various skill requirements to the agent with the best matching skills. For example, Spanish-speaking callers are only routed to Spanish-speaking agents. Skills are a powerful way to maximize call center resources and customer satisfaction at the same time, by making sure calls go to the agents who are best equipped to handle them.

Other Contact Center Enhancements
Several other enhancements have been made to the TeleVantage Contact Center, including the ability for supervisors to be able to sign other agents into/out of a queue. This helps supervisors manage their staff and call flows, even remotely. Also, now in TeleVantage 7 customers can define custom-routing algorithms, blending any of TeleVantage’s standard call distribution algorithms with each other, or with agent attributes like cost or skills. For example, customers could blend “least talk time” with a negative agent “cost,” so that your most expensive agents take fewer calls, freeing them for other tasks.

Reporting Enhancements
Reporting is the best way to look at historic contact center data, so that customers can continue to improve contact center performance and customer service. To that end, several reports have been added to the TeleVantage Call Center Reporter, including:

Agent by Queue and Skill Configuration
Agent Performance by Skill
Call Distribution by Skill and Agent
Call Distribution by Skill and Queue
Call Result by Skill
Queue Call History Detail
Service Level by Skill
Skill Assignment by Agent

Additionally, changes in Personal Status can now be seen in the Call History By Agent report and Agent History by Queue report.

Dramatically Increased Scale and Functions for Archived Recording Browser
TeleVantage has long been able to record all or select calls in the system, delivering tremendous value at no additional cost to contact centers and any business that needs to record calls. With TeleVantage 7, the Archived Recording Browser has been greatly enhanced to allow anyone with permission to search, manage and listen to millions of MP3 format call recordings and voice mails at no extra charge.

Simplified Administration
TeleVantage has always delivered an easy-to-use, point-and-click interface for system administration, and been extremely flexible in meeting customers’ business needs. TeleVantage 7 builds on this to provide superior system management.

Batch User Creation and Modification
Creating new users with all the right settings on some systems can be tedious work, and modifying groups of users at once can be equally or even more tricky. With TeleVantage 7, bulk user creation and modification is easy, saving customers time and money. TeleVantage lets customers import user names from text files or Microsoft Active Directory. Customers can define user and phone templates with all relevant settings and apply them to groups of users as they import them or even to make modifications down the road, such as changing the voicemail box size for everyone in the Sales Department to 30 minutes instead of 20.

Cradle to Grave Call Tracing/History
Sometimes it becomes important to see exactly how a call made its way through the system, such as what trunk line the call used, what announcements were played to the caller, what digits were dialed, what music on hold they heard, what TeleVantage routing rules were used to deliver the call to its destination, etc. TeleVantage 7 now provides a Call History window showing all this detail for administrators at the system level, as well as for individuals using ViewPoint on their PC to manage and view their own calls. This can help administrators quickly and easily identify trouble on a specific line from the phone company or understand why a caller heard a certain menu or reached a certain contact center agent, as well as help them to efficiently make changes as desired. Users can see which personal routing rules were used to deliver calls to them and best fine-tune and leverage the power of TeleVantage to even further enhancement their communications productivity.

Other Enhancements
TeleVantage now supports TAPI under shared desktop scenarios such as Citrix or Microsoft Terminal Server, enabling click-to-dial and screen pops from applications like Microsoft Outlook, ACT!, or Goldmine for multiple users all connecting to the same machine. Other system enhancements include the ability to view all system DID numbers within the Administrator Dial Plan view and also support for streaming musicon hold from designated files, rather than having to utilize physical ports on boards, thereby lowering cost ownership.

Improved Productivity Across the Entire Organization
TeleVantage has long been recognized as delivering the most functionality in an outstanding desktop user interface, TeleVantage ViewPoint.

With TeleVantage 7, desktop features are easier and more accessible than ever, enabling new users in your company to get up-to-speed right away. A welcome wizard greets new ViewPoint users and walks them through the recording of their voice title, voice mail greeting and optional entry of their personal numbers, as well as leading them to an online “TeleVantage QuickTour” on how to use TeleVantage. Additionally, customers can have ViewPoint provide a “Tip of the Day” each time it starts, so they can quickly learn how to maximize TeleVantage usage and reduce costs for training new employees.

Users who prefer to not have ViewPoint pop onto their full screen can now use the TeleVantage Desktop Alert application to have a small customizable window pop up with icons for the most common call handling needs.

TeleVantage Instant Messaging
Voice conversation is just one way people communicate these days. Text instant messaging continues to grow in usage, but most solutions are more targeted at home users than being right for businesses and are often not secure since text can travel outside the office to a messaging provider’s system just to come back to the person down the hall. TeleVantage 7 now includes instant messaging within ViewPoint. Simply select a user within the extensions pane and right click to send an instant message totheir PC screen. Users can check some facts with a colleague while on an important business call, contact center agents can consult with an expert or summon a supervisor, or co-workers can make quick plans for an impromptu meeting, all without having to interrupt the call they are on. And since it’s all handled within ViewPoint, users are assured of an easy user interface and secure transmission of their text since it never leaves your secure corporate network.

TeleVantage 7 is available through the company’s worldwide network of value-added resellers and systems integrators – called Vertical Business Partners.

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