[Asterisk-biz] Serious Problem with SNOM Attendant phones - N eedHelp

[Colin Anderson]

This won't address OP's problem, but in my install I had to grapple with
weakness in the operator position (yes we use SNOM's not afraid to admit it,
really like them) and to deal with that I had to change our corporate
culture somewhat. 

The solution was to simply assign every user a DID and inform them that
"this is your personal phone number / fax number, it will follow you
wherever you are for the term of your employment here" and let them do the
rest. Once they got the word out to the dozen or so key people that each of
them talk to every day, call volume dropped to the operator position by 90%.
In this case everyone wins:

-Caller feels "important" because they have a personal phone number to call
and they don't have to go through reception

-Through dialplan magic, call will chase the user i.e. if they are offsite
call is rerouted to their cell if they don't pick up

-Operator was *so* happy that she didn't mind having to "Xfer" --> 4 digit
exten for the couple dozen calls she got during the day, this to her was way
better than picking up the phone 300-400 times a day, as well it freed her
up to take a pee break and the like. 

-Our PBX has the appearance of being more robust from this functionality
even though fundamentally I am working around a limitation. 

Gawd, I love Asterisk. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jerry Jones [mailto:jjones at danrj.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 7:51 AM
To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-biz] Serious Problem with SNOM Attendant phones -
NeedHelp


Polycom is not yet shipping - at least on Monday when I last checked.

We too had so many problems with Snoms in this situation. we have  
stopped using, and most customers want them replaced with Polycoms.

We started using FOP as a display with a dedicated computer and flat  
screen for operators. In most cases the customer just wants to see  
who is on the line and it works very well for this. We do not even  
install with keyboards and mouse so they cannot use for anything  
other than display. I am hopeful the new Polycom sidecars - which  
only work with the IP601 - will be succesful.

On Sep 28, 2005, at 8:08 AM, Dean Collins wrote:

> Polycom have an attendant phone, not sure how large it can expand  
> to but I’ve seen a 3 car photo of one.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dean
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-biz- 
> bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of asterisk at sipspain.com
> Sent: Wednesday, 28 September 2005 8:47 AM
> To: asterisk-biz at lists.digium.com
> Cc: igil at itranser.com; ESanchez at ITRANSER.COM; aherranz at itranser.com
> Subject: [Asterisk-biz] Serious Problem with SNOM Attendant phones  
> - NeedHelp
> Importance: High
>
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> One of my biggest customer, with more than 300 hundred persons  
> using asterisk, is having bing problems with the SNOM phones used  
> at the operator position (Attendant Console). We currently have 3  
> operator attending incoming calls and bypassing them to the rest of  
> the company.
>
> We did not find any alternative for SNOM to use as Attendant  
> Console (phone for the operator). We need Operators to have a  
> keypad where the could observe the most important extensions of the  
> office, and be able to transfer a call very fast (just pressing a  
> button).
>
> Recently, SNOM released a new model. The SNOM-360 phone, that was  
> ideal for that.  However, it only supports one keypad (around 30  
> extensions), althought previous models were able to support several  
> of them. SNOM tolds us they are working on this, but they would not  
> have a solution until end of the year (at least). We had pay in  
> advance for the models a lot of time ago, but it seems there is a  
> lot of problems with SNOM stock, and they did not got units to  
> server us. Finally, and due a hard preassure, SNOM sent us directly  
> 3 used phones they got in their lab. We received the password of  
> only 2 of them.
>
> A week after being in production, we started with a lot of problems  
> with them. Such as phones reboot themselfes each 10 minutes. We  
> tryed to upload a more recent firmware, but one of them got  
> broken.  We have NOW in production just on phone, that still  
> reboots each 10 minutes.  Problem is on the SNOM phone, since with  
> all the phones we have connected to Asterisk everything goes ok.
>
> Customer is unable to attend all theirs calls, and is really  
> upset.  I need to react very fast.
>
> Trying to anticipate to this, one of our developers did a program  
> for the Operator. That program used the Asterisk Manager API of  
> asterisk in order to check events, and allow the operator to use a  
> program to chek extension status and forward the call to any  
> extension very fast. However, it seems that Asterisk becomes  
> unstable when has a lot of traffic and your are using one of those  
> programas, and having that program installed caused a lot of  
> crashes (we think Asterisk Manager API is not very stable, so  
> far).  We do not like FOP because it is complicated to use for an  
> untrained operator, that could easily lost calls, and do incorrect  
> operations. We need a more powerfull software for this.
>
> I saw that 3COM has also attendace phones with a lot of extensions,  
> but they do not distribute yet that phone on Europe.  I need a very  
> fast and urgent solution for my operators, and have a phone for  
> them asap.
>
> Could any one, please, suggest me any solution ? Any one could  
> serve me really fast a Attendance Phone, with a lot of extensions,  
> for using on Asterisk to deal with this problem? (please, no more  
> SNOMs, customer does not want further to see them).
>
> Since this problem is really urgent I will appreciate if any one  
> having any proposal could contact directly with me at andres at  
> europesip.com. Any suggestions of specific phones with keypads (to  
> be used as Attendance Phones) or programs we could use for the  
> operator, will help a lot.
>
> kind Regards,
>
> Andres
>
>
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