Moving from a Mitel PBX to Lync 2010 (part three of three)

So we had reached the end of our journey, staff moved, Contact Center deployed. Time for the final push to migrate remaining analogue devices and switch off the Mitel.

For this part we continued with the company who started us on the Lync journey - Eurodata, but by now they had been consumed by Trinity Expert System who during the planning stage were taken over by Liberata. This caused some phone calls to confirm contracts being in place and existing bookings would be honoured but the scheduled time was met and we had support for the choosen weekend.

As we had Lync working with the Mitel/Dialogic setup we felt the route with least risk was to use a second Media Gateway (Sonus) to configure the ISDN onto which gave us the option of falling back to the Mitel/Dialogic configuration if towards the end of the maintenance window we had not got everything configured.

On the new NET UX1000 Sonus SBC 1000 the first challenge we encountered was configuring the number manipulation we had on the Dialogic (number re-writing on outgoing calls to present our non-geographic number for certain calls) and also to support what I like to think of as dynamic outgoing number rewriting but in getting suppliers to understand it can be refered to by any of these names:
  • ISDN Option 4 (noclip)
  • CLI Type 4
  • CLI No Clip
  • Presentation Number Type 4
  • CLIP No Screen
I'm including all of these here for the benefit of search engines as getting information was difficult to find in one place. The best non-technical description is from Ofcom:
Presentation Number Type 4
A presentation number available for the onward transmission of the originating number where a call breaks into a private network and breaks out again before termination, as in a DISA scenario. On the break out leg the number is generated by the user's equipment although it will have already been verified in consequence of having been delivered to the private network. To maintain the verification it is necessary to ensure that the number submitted by the private network is the number that was received.
Network providers wishing to offer a type 4 service will require a contractual commitment from customers that they will only submit CLIs that have been received from the public network. Unlike other types of presentation numbers, type 4 numbers may not always be diallable; this will depend on the nature of the number received from the public network
In Lync terms the best use of this is for Simultaneous Ring. An example is:
I've set my desk phone to SimRing my mobile as I'm waiting for an important call from the local Dominos. I don't want to answer a sales call though. The inbound call from Dominos (01553 777228) is to my Lync DDI (01553 667796) which SimRings my mobile (07775 560821). On my mobile I see the incoming call as 01553 777228. This is not possible without the ISDN option 4, at best you would see an incoming call from your DDI or maybe even the ISDN pilot number.


The upshot of all of the above was an extra few hours getting the Sonus box to do the same as the Dialogic, luckily the consultant we had has posted about the issue so hopefully that will help any future Sonus users.

Our final challenge was moving faxing over to the Lync Environment instead of having it hanging off the back of the analogue ports on the Mitel. We already have our remote site with analogue phone lines from Lync via a AudioCodes MP114 but faxing I had never been able to get working in a consistent way.

The solution was to have the AudioCode MP's homed twice, once on the Sonus box for fax (ISDN > Sonus > AudioCodes > Fax)



and also homed in the Lync topology for analogue voice (ISDN > Sonus > Lync > AudioCodes > Analogue Voice)



After a ream of paper and many many test calls we had a stable solution for faxing (100% success rate).

Late night Sunday we had everything in place, so I sent an email to all staff letting them know we had completed the works and went home. Monday morning came and my IT Support mantra came into play - "If you do your job properly, no one will know you have done anything."

The only fly in the ointment was the Dialogic Removal - we had left if powered on and in the Lync Topology just in case the was any major problems so after 12 hours of running on the Sonus I powered it off, and the following happened, my lesson, remove things from the Lync Topology before powering them off.

So after 7 years of faithful service it was time to:





 

Thanks for reading.


Moving from a Mitel PBX to Lync 2010 (part two of three)

By April 2013 all staff had been moved over to Lync 2010 Enterprise Voice and we started to look at the options for a Contact Center replacement.

After looking at a few of the different offerings in the market place we actually settled on what we had: prairieFyre for Lync (the Mitel 6100 is written by prairieFyre and then rebadged).

After placing the order with Koris (our implementation partner for the Contact Center rollout) Mitel then came in and purchased prairieFyre! We have had assurances that the product will not disappear though and that it will be marketed as part of the MiVoice lineup (edit 24/7/14 - looks like they kept their word).

As we standardised in the Contact Center we used our yearly PC refresh to prep new PC's for all of the Contact Center staff, the idea being that on cut over day we would unplug all PC's and phones on desks and plug in the new PC and new Jabra Pro 930 devices:


Whilst testing the solution we hit the following bug "AVMCU does not support DTMF in Lync 2010 Server or Office Communications Server 2007 R2" this was a massive issue for us as our legacy call recording solution injected DTMF tones into the call to stop and start call recordings to protect us from fraud and to comply with the PCI DSS requirements. After discussions with the supplier we felt that the best option was to source a new Lync Compatible call recording solution for those staff that take card payments. After researching the market and deploying a couple of POC's we choose Verba as the solution. One of the most interesting parts of their solution is what you can record depending on where the software is installed. We choose to install on the Mediation Servers which in our environment was the Front End Pool as this felt the least risky option - prairieFyre already changes the flow of calls so we were uncomfortable with two products potentially competing!

Go live was nice and smooth with the cut over happening on our quietest day of the week, staff coped well but after a few days were complaining about the ring tones in the Jabra being too quiet to hear. To compensate we found the ideal solution in Busylight, its a USB Lync Qualified Presence indicator with ring tones built in meaning that you can set the audio controls on the PC to whatever you want (muted) separate from the ring tone and light to notify you/others of incoming calls and presence state.


Once rolled out we were then ready for the final challenge - migrating fax machines and powering off the Mitel.