CenterPoint is a comprehensive communications software product with
extensive CTI functionality, including screen pops, fax-on-demand, voice mail, broadcast
faxing, desktop faxing, and broadcast e-mailing. CenterPoint also has a built-in contact
manager for effectively managing your important corporate contacts. CenterPoint takes
disparate communication options, including faxing, e-mailing, paging, and contact
information, and combines them into one unified graphical user interface, greatly
enhancing productivity and improving organization.
INSTALLATION
When we tested CenterPoint, we used a Pentium 200, which ran Windows NT Server 4.0 and
contained a Brooktrout TruFax 2-line fax board Subscribe FREE online at www.ctimag.com and
a Dialogic Proline/2V 2-port voice processing board. We used the Dialogic board
auto-attendant and voice mail. We also set up a NetWare 3.12 server to run the required
NetWare Telephony Services. The NetWare server contained a NetPhone voice processing
board, which is where we connected our analog phone extensions.
NetWare Installation
The most difficult part of the installation had nothing to do with
Coresoft’s product. Instead, what gave us trouble was setting up the NetWare server.
To install NetWare, you begin by setting up a small DOS partition. We set it to 10 MB,
formatted it, and made it bootable. We then executed the NetWare install program, and had
the setup program use the rest of the free space (1.1 gig) on the hard drive for a NetWare
partition.
Then, when we tried to mount the volume, we found it took far too long. So, we
repartitioned and reformatted the hard disk. Then, we tried again, but it still
didn’t work. All we got was this message: “Please wait. Mounting volume.”
We decided to let the program run overnight just to see if we’d get some sort of
error message. When we checked the next morning, we found the volume had been mounted, but
we couldn’t transfer the system files to the volume. We decided to swap out the
NetPhone board and the hard disk and put it into a newer machine just to eliminate the
possibility that the first PC had some strange bug or incompatibility with NetWare. But,
once again, we had difficulty mounting the volume.
We came up with a theory that maybe NetWare 3.12 couldn’t handle the size of our
1.2-gig hard drive. There was a limit in Windows 3.1 that required special dri vers and/or
a newer BIOS to access over 528 MB. So, we decided to try one more time to partition the
1.2-gig hard disk, but this time we told the NetWare setup program to only use 700 MB of
the 1.2 gig hard disk. When we did this, the volume mounted in about 15 seconds.
We were wasting over 300 MB of hard disk that had been left unpartitioned and unused
— but, heck, we were happy just to get our NetWare server working! We transferred the
system files, installed the telephony services, and then set up some user accounts —
tasks that took all of 15 minutes (a welcome change from spending a day and a half trying
to get the hard disk to mount properly).
Hardware Installation
After we set up the NetWare server, we installed the Brooktrout 2-port fax board and the
Dialogic 2-port voice processing board on a Windows NT 4.0 Server. When we installed the
appropriate Dialogic and Brooktrout drivers, we encountered no problems, no hardware
conflicts.
Software Installation
Next, we inserted the CenterPoint 2.0 CD-ROM and installed all the appropriate
server software, including the Automated Telephony Server program. Basically, the NT
Server is used for processing voice mail, sending and receiving faxes, as well as
administrating the voice mail and faxing systems. Finally, we set up the client machines.
That was pretty straightforward and occasioned little difficulty. Overall, we gave
installation an excellent 4.90 rating.
DOCUMENTATION
CenterPoint’s latest documentation wasn’t available in hardcopy yet, so we got a
sneak peek at it in its electronic form. The documentation, which Coresoft Technology had
zipped up and e-mailed to us, was quite thorough. It even included information on how to
set up a Dialogic board and install the NT drivers, as well as how to configure an email
postoffice, set up a NetWare server, and install NetWare Telephony Services. The
documentation files, which were studded with screenshots, included many step-by-step
instructions, including details on how to set up voice mail ports and mailboxes. There
were even instructions on how to use Windows NT security in cooperation with CenterPoint,
which is something you don’t see very often. A lot of CTI products we’ve seen
expect you to know Windows NT security, and thus usually omit this information from their
documentation, or just gloss over it.
The installation instructions were very good, too. Detailed instructions, accompanied
by numerous screenshots, take you from start to finish, including tips on integrating with
Comdial, Altigen, Lucent, and other switches. Although we reviewed documentation that was
still incomplete, and although we find it difficult to rate documentation that is still in
electronic form, we gave it an excellent 4.95 rating.
FEATURES
Desktop Call Control
- See who is calling with caller ID.
- Answer, hang up, transfer, and conference using the mouse.
- Send an incoming call directly to voice mail without answering it first.
- Organize your most frequently called contacts into a “hot list” directory that
will pop up when you pick up the phone. (You can turn this feature on or off.)
- Drag-and-drop a document from your desktop or Windows Explorer onto a CenterPoint
contact or group of contacts to send that document by e-mail or fax (broadcast e-mail,
broadcast fax).
- Customize the toolbars, which can display large icons, large icons with text, small
icons, or small icons with text.
- CenterPoint takes disparate communication options and combines them into one unified
graphical user interface, greatly enhancing productivity and improving organization.
Integration
- Retrieve messages from CenterPoint’s interface instead of Microsoft Exchange’s
Inbox.
- Integrate with third-party contact managers such as GoldMine and Act!
- Access SQL- and ODBCcompliant databases.
- Take advantage of support for four PBX platforms: Comdial DXP, Lucent Definity, NetPhone
PBX618, Nortel Norstar, as well as TAPI 2.1 and TSAPI switches.
- Take advantage of support for Exchange, Outlook, and GroupWise e-mail interfaces.
Other
- Interactive voice response features: auto-attendant, voice-prompted fax-on demand,
audiotext.
- Faxing features: broadcast faxing, desktop faxing, and fax-ondemand. Also: DID fax
routing.
- Call control features: set rules for advanced features (for example, deflect selected
callers to another extension, such as a personal assistant, or to voicemail).
OPERATIONAL TESTING
CenterPoint’s caller ID lookup presents you not only information about who is
calling, but will also tell you the importance of the caller in the screen pop. Thus, if
you are on the phone, you will see, on the computer screen in the Calls window, an
indication that an important phone call has arrived. See, in Figure 1, the main graphical
user interface for CenterPoint, which displays the Calls, People, and Messages windows.
Any of these windows can be turned on or off if you click on the appropriate toolbar icon
at the top of the screen. Thus, with this feature, you can omit unnecessary displays and
conserve “screen real estate.”
Call Control
CenterPoint rules allow you to perform advanced call control features. For
instance, you can set a rule to have certain callers “deflected” to another
extension, such as a personal assistant, or to voice mail. (Handy if you’d rather not
deal with pesky callers.) We tested other call control capabilities such as dragging and
dropping an incoming call — on the first ring — directly to the voice mail icon.
This feature, which worked flawlessly, is nice if you are already on the phone and
can’t take an incoming call. You can be polite and save the caller from having to
wait 4-7 rings before the voice mail system automatically kicks in.
Usability
CenterPoint really went out of their way to give you multiple ways of doing things,
customizing things, and improving usability. For instance, if you don’t like
drag-and-drop, you can rightclick on a contact. Then, you can send a message or
hold/restore, hang up, transfer, or conference a call (Figure 2). Another nice feature:
CenterPoint uses it’s own graphical user interface for accessing your Exchange or
Groupwise e-mail. Therefore, you don’t need to load Microsoft Exchange or GroupWise
to access your email.
Conferencing
Conferencing calls, always one of the most frightening and troublesome things for
just about anyone, is very easy within CenterPoint. You can use the right-context menu to
conference someone into the current call, or drag-and drop one caller onto the other,
which was our preferred method. In Figure 3, note how the last names are displayed
separated by commas, which we found to be a useful feature.
No Confirmation, Please
We really liked the ability to turn off confirmation messages. For instance, when
you click on the hangup icon, a display ask, “About to hang up with Do you wish to
continue?” Now, for many people (including us), this confirmation box is nothing but
an extra mouse-click. A nuisance. But CenterPoint can accommodate us impatient types. It
provides a check box where you can click on a message stating, “Please do not show me
this message again.” Click on this box, and you will disable the confirmation dialog
box.
There are other confirmation dialog boxes you can disable, such as those that appear
when you delete e-mail messages. We give Coresoft kudos for their consideration of users
who hate confirmation dialog boxes and wish to disable them.
Contact Manager
Refresh: One thing we noticed right away was that we had to manually “refresh”
after adding or changing a contact record, by clicking on the Refresh button; otherwise,
the grid would display the old information. We’d like to see the program
automatically refresh after you’re added a record or changed an existing record.
Also, after changing data, it’s difficult to determine if the system has saved the
new data since there is no OK or Update button to save your changes. When you close the
window, you won’t see the new changes in the grid right away. Once again, this is
because you have to click on the “refresh” button after you add or change a
record.
Adding Customized Fields: A tab within the PeopleTracker screen allows you to switch to
the customized field screen where customized fields can be added for storing other
important information. One suggestion we have for the customized fields is to add security
on these fields. Currently, CenterPoint takes the view that every contact record within a
corporation should be shared between all the employees. They have a valid point.
However, if a corporation didn’t use contact manager, and wished to use
CenterPoint’s, then some form of security would be necessary. For instance, such a
company would like to distinguish between confidential data and data meant for sharing. It
might have data, say, on a sale. The company would like that data to be shared between
sales and accounting, so accounting would know how much income to try to collect. On the
other hand, the company might have data on how much a vendor is past due, total income
collected, and other private corporate financial details. Therefore, security on the
customized fields would be a nice addition.
Integration: CenterPoint integrates with GoldMine and Act! so you can use
these contact managers in place of CenterPoint’s contact manager. Thus, CenterPoint
gives you the best of both worlds — either use CenterPoint’s contact manager or,
if you are currently using GoldMine or Act!, integrate directly with CenterPoint 2.0 to
accomplish call control and messaging.
The properties screen is where you can set various options, including those for the
voice mail system, rules, and events. The tab screen displayed in Figure 4 is the
third-party tab, which is where you select your e-mail system as well as check the status
of any thirdparty contact manager integrated with CenterPoint.
Importing Records
At first, we had difficulty locating an import/export feature. But eventually,
while browsing the Coresoft CDROM, we saw a directory called “ImpExp,” which
looked enough like “import/ export” to warrant a closer look. In this directory,
we saw a Windows help file and an executable called CPImpExp.exe. After we double-clicked
on the help file, we knew we had found what we were looking for.
Basically, the import/export utility doesn’t get installed into the CenterPoint
program group by the installation program. You have to install it yourself by dragging and
dropping the file wherever you want it, or you can just run it directly off of the CDROM.
We dropped the .EXE and .HLP files into the CenterPoint program group just to keep all the
programs together. Also, we didn’t want to have to pull out the CD-ROM whenever we
need to import/export records.
Fax-OnDemand
We were thoroughly impressed with CenterPoint’s use of Windows Explorer for
managing the fax-ondemand documents. Adding a document to the fax-on-demand system was a
simple as dragging and dropping a file from Windows Explorer into the
“C:\CPData\ShareDoc\Fax On Demand” folder (Figure 5). CenterPoint automatically
assigns the next DTMF digit (ID) to the document. It also includes a description field,
which you can modify. All these documents are converted on-the-fly on the server, and all
the popular formats are supported. An index file, with its corresponding descriptions, is
automatically created and updated each time a document is added to the server.
This index file of all the fax documents can be requested by the caller to determine
which document(s) are required (Figure 6). Up to 99 fax-ondemand documents can be stored
on the server. We noticed the Refresh button was cut-off on our screen, which we suspect
had to do with the resolution setting for our test PC (1024 X 768). This is a common
resolution, however.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
Contact Manager
CenterPoint’s contact manager isn’t meant to compete with packages such as Act!
or GoldMine; however, it could still be quite powerful with some minor improvements. Some
of these improvements include:
- Security on notes (permissions to view).
- Multiple select delete notes. (Currently, you can only select one note at a time to
delete.)
- Drag and drop to launch a call. (Although you can click on the Make Call icon with a
contact selected, you can not drag and drop contacts from the PeopleTracker to the call
window to make a call.)
- A simple program for scheduling next call backs.
Tracking Calls
We’d like to see a “call log” feature, which would allow us to
track incoming and outgoing calls, as well as allow us to call back any missed calls using
caller ID information.
Fax Features
Currently, the fax-ondemand system only supports one treelevel. We’d like to see the
capability to create subfolders in the next version for better organization of the f
ax-ondemand documents.
Also, the fax queue doesn’t provide a button that lets you put faxes on
“hold.” Such a button would be particularly useful if you needed to reboot the
server. After all, you don’t want to reboot the server in the middle of a fax
transmission.
Other
- Unsent e-mails can cause display problems under the “From” column. (See the
sidebar entitled “If There’s A Bug, We’ll Find It.”)
- The e-mail display could be more flexible. (You can’t click on the Subject or From
column headings to change the sort order. You can only view e-mails sorted by date/time.)
- You can only access folders via the Inbox folder, you cannot access your folders via
your e-mail. (Coresoft told us they are adding this feature to an upcoming release.)
- The import utility should be automatically installed and integrated with the main
CenterPoint product.
- We liked the blue phone icon, which appeared in the lower right tray icon area whenever
a new voice mail arrived. During our tests, however, the icon suddenly stopped working.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to check with technical support to see if they had
a fix for this problem.
CONCLUSION
We were very impressed with CenterPoint, a product of uncommon sophistication and
flexibility. CenterPoint tightly integrates voice mail, faxing, fax-on-demand, contact
management, unified messaging, and call control all in one software package. Few CTI
products offer such a large feature set.
If you were to attempt to match CenterPoint’s functionality by integrating, say,
separate fax-on-demand and contact management systems, you’d probably find that the
programs were not as tightly integrated as CenterPoint’s solution. Also, you’d
probably pay more. On the other hand, your company might already have a fax-on-demand
system, or some system with advanced features of the kind offered by CenterPoint. In that
case, NetPhone’s PhoneMaster might be a good, low-cost alternative. (See the review
on NetPhone’s PhoneMaster in this issue.) Still, $199 per seat is very reasonable,
considering the many features and powerful functionality which CenterPoint brings, via one
integrated system, to each of your company’s desktops.
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