September 1998

TeleVantage 2.0

Artisoft, Inc.
5 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142
Ph: 800-914-9985; Fx: 617-354-7744
E-mail: [email protected]
Web site: www.artisoft.com

Price: Starts at $750 for the server software and $115 for each trunk or station port. (In addition, customers must buy Dialogic trunk and station card(s). They may also need to install Dialogic BCP connection panel(s). An audio-on-hold module is optional.)

RATINGS (0-5)
Installation: 4.5
Documentation: 4.5
Features: 5
GUI: 4.5
Overall: A

Artisoft, a computer telephony mainstay well known for its IVR systems and development tools, recently augmented its offerings with TeleVantage, a PC-based telephone system. Designed for small to medium-sized businesses and branch offices, TeleVantage is a software solution that delivers the capabilities of a conventional PBX, and much else besides.

As a PC-based PBX, TeleVantage doesn’t rely on expensive phone sets, which are typical with proprietary PBXs. Also, it allows users to access features via a graphical user interface, instead of a phone set’s LCD. More important, however, is the flexibility of the PC platform. While a proprietary PBX limits users to built-in features, a PC-PBX delivers new features as quickly as developers can create them.

INSTALLATION
Installing TeleVantage 2.0 from scratch requires a dedicated NT 4.0 Server with Service Pack 3.0, running on a PC with at least a 166 MHz processor and 64 MB RAM. The server must also have Dialogic trunk and station boards; each is available in several models.

Artisoft requires a BCP connection panel for installations of 8 trunks or 24 or more stations. (The BCP panel is very simple to install — it’s simply a matter of plugging in four cords.) An audio-on-hold module is optional. Client PCs need only 486-66 MHz processors, with 16 MB RAM for Windows 95 or 32 MB RAM for NT 4.0 Workstation.

Our system, a turnkey IBM 200 MHz Netfinity server, arrived with all the software preinstalled. However, installing the software ourselves would have been simple. Updated drivers for the Dialogic boards ship with the CD-ROM, along with CallManage, Inc.’s least-cost routing software and a licensed copy of Microsoft SQL Server 6.5.

Installing the actual TeleVantage software involves running a standard Windows install wizard, setting a master password, choosing subdirectory paths, and setting station IDs. TeleVantage guides you through configuring access rights, steps that will vary depending on whether your system runs under an NT domain or a Windows 95 workgroup. (After rebooting but before configuring users, you can decide whether TeleVantage should assign its own IP addresses to clients. Otherwise, if your network has a master DHCP server, you’ll want to assign TeleVantage its own static IP address.)

Next, you need to configure options for the local e-mail gateway. Also, you have the option of setting the TeleVantage Server to run when Windows NT starts. In any case, at this point, you may complete the installation by rebooting. (Administrators can install CallManage at any time.)

DOCUMENTATION
TeleVantage comes with separate manuals for installation, administration, and operation. All three are terrific. Each is packed with screen-shots, and each presents material at a level appropriate for the intended audience — users don’t need a doctoral degree in computer science, and administrators don’t have to wade through text that has been watered down. The installation manual in particular is first-class, with sections for upgrading from TeleVantage 1.0. This book also discusses precisely how to install Windows NT, the service pack, the Dialogic boards, and even a BCP connector.

The manuals for the administration program and the client are excellent. The administration manual covers everything from server basics to trunk lines to user management, from auto-attendants to system monitoring to using CallManage. The client manual, written (thankfully) in plain English, eases users along TeleVantage’s steep learning curve. The book was so readable, it could have been an after-market "how to" book, of the sort found on Barnes and Noble shelves.

FEATURES
The primary feature of TeleVantage is its ability to deliver a multimedia presentation of incoming calls and messages at any location you choose, instead of just ringing a telephone or activating voice mail at one central repository (like your desk). For example, messages come to whichever PC, remote telephone, or pager you like, at which point you can take the call, send it to voice mail, or forward it to... anywhere.

TeleVantage lets users create rules based on caller ID or PIN information. These rules can also depend on the time of day and many other user-defined parameters. The result? Creative users can have calls do (nearly) anything.

Entire organizations can implement similar tactics. TeleVantage can have infinite auto attendants, each with up to 12 options. A minor issue with TeleVantage is its 144-user limit, but using multiple levels of auto attendants can make a company seem much, much bigger than it really is.

TeleVantage’s fax module is a favorite of ours: It doesn’t exist. The non-existence of an option so common in other PC-PBXs surprised us at first, but we came to realize that this could be advantageous. Do you remember how you hated the math features of WordPerfect for DOS? Do you remember the early attempts of Microsoft Word to incorporate desktop publishing features? Artisoft has wisely chosen to leave faxing to the RightFAXs and Omtools of the wired underworld.

But Artisoft knows better than to ignore fax altogether. TeleVantage will automatically detect when an incoming call is really a fax call. You can configure TeleVantage to route all fax calls to a particular station, where — amazingly — you, the brilliant MIS manager, have installed real network fax software. To the incoming fax, it’s all the same system, and your users don’t have to settle for the mediocrity of a pretend LAN fax solution.

Overall, the beauty of TeleVantage resides in its abundance of features. In particular, the client software, which occupies 3 MB of disk space, provides a rich array of options. The user interfac, modeled after Microsoft’s Outlook program, provides access to everything through a combination of icons, pull-down menus, buttons, and a refreshing document list. There’s a user phone book, groups, routing lists, and call waiting. (The last option includes the ability to put individual members of a conference call on hold, which was conspicuously missing from version 1.0.) Other client features include:

• Caller "announcements" (associating incoming callers with .WAV files).
• Toggle button (outputting audio through PC speakers or the telephone).
• Customizable telephone ring tones (reserving special tones for specific events).
• Do-not-disturb button.
• Textual reminders/notes for voice mail messages.
• Remote access to dial-out functionality (allowing privileged users to dial out of TeleVantage from remote locations).
• Contact manager compatibility (Contacts importable from any standard contact manager).
• E-mail and pager notification of all or selected incoming messages and voice mail.

Within the administration software, which uses 33 MB of disk space, options include an intuitive user management interface, generous voice mail length (limited only by the size of the server PC’s hard disk and space allocated in each user account), and a dynamic indicator to show the ratio of hard disk space to minutes of speech that a .WAV file can accommodate. Other administration options include:

• Station sharing (multiple users can share one station).
• Customizable voice prompts.
• Full range of available dialing prefixes.
• Device monitor.
• Year 2000 compliance.
• Simple audio-on-hold connections (devices attach via RJ-11 connector).
• Automatic archiving and purging of old files.

OPERATIONAL TESTING
As we mentioned, TeleVantage’s learning curve is steep, but that applies primarily to using TeleVantage, not to customizing it. So, we tested nearly every feature. To begin, we created a new user, and we added several fictional contacts to the user’s phone book, assigning some of them a personal code number. We also checked out some of the administrative features. We paid especial attention to customization and monitoring.

Entering Contacts
To enter contacts, you simply choose "new" from the menu and key in the appropriate details. There’s a clever voice title option that lets you capture a person’s name in a .WAV file when they call TeleVantage for the first time. Users can assign that .WAV file to the contact’s personal code, so TeleVantage can announce repeat callers in their own voices, not yours. Because of this code/file association, callers needn’t say who they are every time they call you.

Contact Groups
By placing several contacts into a master file, you can broadcast, reply to, or forward messages to everyone in the group at once. Groups submit to rules the same way that individual contacts do. Entire groups also submit to cut, copy, and paste rules, which makes adding or editing similar groups simple. Groups, like contacts, can also be imported or exported between other contact management software.

Remote Access
Although most PC-PBXs concentrate on the features available through a GUI, Artisoft hasn’t forgotten about remote access through a telephone. Administrators can configure a simple method to log in from a remote telephone. By default, this involves calling your office, pressing pound, and entering an extension number and password — no more difficult than accessing messages from a conventional voice mail system.

After logging in, if you have the appropriate privileges, you can actually make a telephone call from TeleVantage. Simply press the pound key, and you get a dial tone. Calls made in this manner "come from" the TeleVantage unit at the office, not the remote location, which can present tremendous cost savings, especially if your TeleVantage unit has CallManage configured. Some features (like call waiting) won’t work when you call from a remote location, but you can have TeleVantage hang up its end without hanging up yours, so you don’t have to call TeleVantage again to make another call. Remote access is also a useful tool for in-house employees who don’t have a PC — there’s no reason these employees can’t make good use of TeleVantage accounts too, though their options are limited.

Device Monitor
Using the device monitor (which starts automatically with the server and runs as an icon on the Windows taskbar), you can see which stations are idle, on-hook, off-hook, in use remotely, and logged in. The device monitor also shows trunk activity and trunk status, and whether in-use trunks are accepting inbound calls or making outbound calls. You can also restart trunks and insert or remove trunks without stopping the server, but you would still need to restart the server (after manipulating the trunks) before your changes would take effect.

Call Log
The call log displays a record of all calls made and received on the TeleVantage system, and it can generate traffic analysis reports. Call log columns are customizable; not all applications of TeleVantage need to display all columns. Available categories include indications of whether a call is inbound or outbound, the call’s origin and destination, the number of the originator (if inbound) or the dialer (if outbound), the start time and duration, the holding duration before a call was answered, whether or not inbound callers left a message, the call’s incoming trunk or station number, and the number of parties who were involved with or received the call. Administrators can also set how many calls are shown at once, and when to auto-archive and purge obsolete information.

Checking Voice Mail And Disk Space
TeleVantage will display a warning when the SQL server is 80 percent full, but the size of the database is another customizable feature. Yet another way to save space is to move TeleVantage’s system prompts and voice files to another hard disk, but of course you would need to shut down the server before doing so, and you would need to reboot it after.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
We think TeleVantage is a great package, but we do have a few criticisms. For example, while every voice mail message can have corresponding notes, and while users can forward the .WAV file and the notes to other users, there’s no means of attaching files.

We also appreciated Artisoft’s decision to leave many fax options to other providers, that is, to fax experts, but what if a small company could afford only one package — TeleVantage or a fax server, but not both? We think there’s still a reason to include a fax module, even a primitive fax module.

Finally, just two more points: We’d like to see TeleVantage work with other brands of boards beside Dialogic. And we’d like to see some kind of multimedia tutorial. While TeleVantage is a powerful product, it’s useless if non-technical employees don’t know where to start.

CONCLUSION
TeleVantage 2.0 did more than turn in an award-winning performance, it raised our expectations for all PC-PBXs. TeleVantage’s quality is what other PC-PBX developers should aspire to beat. We also appreciate TeleVantage’s attention to detail. For example, the documentation was superb, which is always important, especially for a product as complicated as TeleVantage. Finally, TeleVantage is reasonably priced, considering how much it can do.