Envox 6.1

RATINGS (0–5):
Installation: 5
Documentation: 5
Features: 5
GUI: 5
Overall: A

TMC Labs has been testing application generators for over 10 years; many � such as Artisoft�s Visual Voice, Parity Software�s VOS, and others � have come and gone. Through all that time however, Envox has continued to penetrate the market, improve their product, and even acquire competing app-gen companies such as Show N Tel.

Each time we examine Envox�s communications development platform we are impressed at how much more functionality they add and how easy they make it to develop VoIP applications, IVR/autoattendant/voice-mail applications, voice portals, unified communications, mobile Internet, and more. Heck if they make it any easier to develop complex telephony applications we may as well tell all programmers to pack their bags and move to India. Oh wait, that�s already...never mind!

In any event, Envox 6.1 is an open, standards-based communications development environment that supports VoiceXML, speech, Web services, and VoIP capabilities all on a single platform. We took Envox 6.1 for yet another test drive and one again we were very impressed.

First we examined the user interface of Envox 6.1 to see if they made any usability improvements over prior versions. Once again it had the same friendly drag-and-drop capabilities. All of the various blocks are broken into menu categories letting you quickly find and place a new block on the screen. The categories include: script, variable, database, datacom, telephony, e-mail, file, and more. The development screen also featured the ability to put �yellow sticky notes� next to each block describing what it does (Figure 1). We also liked that the development screen featured context-sensitive help, which allowed us to double-click a block to open it, then put our cursor into a field we had a question about, next press F1 (for help), and the appropriate help screen was automatically displayed.

You have two choices for development. You can use the renowned Envox Studio 6.1, a proprietary development platform that supports just about any standard you can think of, or you can develop standard VoiceXML applications using Envox VoiceXML Studio. We developed several applications and tested them. We should point out that Envox includes several sample examples both for Envox Studio 6.1 and Envox VoiceXML Studio which made it much easier to get up to speed in developing applications of your own.

After you create your application, you simply assign the application to one of your licensed channels from within Envox Console (Figure 2). We should mention that Envox has both a hardware and software simulator that lets developers emulate telephony hardware/software without having to invest in hardware in order to test their applications. We tested the emulators and they worked quite well. In fact, we set up a VoIP application to accept incoming SIP calls and then used the SIP-based SJPphone softphone client to call the Envox application server using an IP address. The application server answered and played the prompts and accepted our DTMF digital clicks entered via the softphone client. We also tested Voice XML applications, which executed via an application server hosted by Envox, and these applications too performed flawlessly.