This group held a conference call to discuss the announcements surrounding Response Point and determine how we could help Microsoft, the Partner Community and the Customer community in support of the product. The consensus was that while concerned on the lack of detailed information about the product roadmap, we partners would and should continue to support, sell and market the product and we would continue express our ongoing concern and support to Microsoft.

John Frederiksen, the GM of Response Point, had offered to join the call but had a conflict. We were however joined briefly by X.D. Huang, the original GM of Response Point and John’s direct manager. X.D. assured us that:

1) Microsoft will continue to support partners and customers running all current 1.x versions of Response Point;
2) Microsoft is NOT shutting down Response Point, and does have non-mgt personnel assigned to the product;
3) Microsoft is currently discussing what to do as far as Release 2 of Response Point
4) Microsoft plans to release more information about the future direction of Response Point soon, perhaps in one or two weeks
5) The best way we as partners can help the Response Point team is to continue to SELL the product.

The VAR Council was encouraged by the call; and while some of us have reservations, we as a group will continue to market and sell Response Point and we encourage and urge others to do so as well. We look forward to the upcoming Microsoft announcement on the direction for Release 2 of Response Point.

They’re running SP2 on an Aastra system, but although we’ve not tested with Syspine and D-Link we’re pretty sure this will happen with those systems as well.

The customer uses analog trunks with a hunt group, and when one of their people called their published number from the inside (with a ‘9′ of course) not only did the  call not complete, but another existing conversation with an outside party got dropped!  The customer was able to replicate this problem.

So (for now at least) don’t go calling your external number(s) from the inside!!

The update has not been released publicly, but you can get it by contacting Syspine Technical Support at 800-713-3386.

Has anyone noticed that you can configure two VoIP Providers under SP2?

(Example: Dial a “9″ + number for the configured #1 NGT Service and dial a “8″ + number for the configured #2 Packet8 Service)?

 
Do you have a tip of your own that you’d like to see featured here on RPTricks.com?
Use the “Contact Us” page to send it over!

• Do a backup.

• Find and open the corresponding settings.xml (e.g. if your lab phone belongs to user 100, find the file under XXXXX backup @ 2009-XX-XX, XX.XX.XX\Contacts\100\settings.xml

• Find the corresponding call forwarding rule section(e.g.
<callhandling>
  <rule>
   <step timeout=”20” callusing=”internal”>vm</step>
  </rule>
</callhandling>

Change 20 to any number, can be 60(1min), 120(2mins) etc..

• Save the file

• Do a restore

Please note this is just a trick (not documented and not an official solution). 

After you change the value, any change through the UI for this extension will cause the value be reset. So either you don’t change that extension afterwards, or you’ll have to repeat the steps described above again (do a backup/modify timeout/restore).

If you’re using  a Syspine base unit with the built-in ATA, and you’re using Aastra phones, you’re likely to hear sporadic DTMF tones on the phones.  The person you’re speaking to won’t hear this problem, and internal calls or calls via a SIP trunk won’t exhibit this behavior.

After speaking with Syspine we’ve found out that the problem is being caused by the Syspine doing out-of-band signalling via DTMF, which the Aastra phones are interpreting as standard DTMF tones which are then played through the handset.

The good news is that a fix is being worked on.  Syspine and Aastra engineers are collaborating to resolve the issue.  I’m told that it will be a couple  of weeks before the fix is released, in the form of a firmware upgrade for the Syspine ATAs.

We’ll keep you posted and we’ll provide a link to the fix once it’s available.

Auto-Attendant Barge is a feature that allows a caller to interrupt the ‘welcome’ message that RP plays when the Automated Receptionist (Microsoft’s name for the built-in Auto-Attendant) is enabled.  This feature was initially implemented in SP1.  When it was implemented we received many calls from customers who were very happy about this feature, which allowed them to use a longer, more meaningful welcome message.  Since SP2 we’ve received a number of calls from customers who were upset that this feature had been removed.  As a result we really feel that this is a welcom change, and will be well received by RP customers.

The revised software has been ’slipstreamed’ into the standard SP2 download.  This means that it is not available as a separate patch – instead customers should download the entire SP2 solution from Microsoft’s download site, and implement as normal.  If you have not yet implemented SP2, follow the appropriate instructions from your hardware vendor, but remember to use the latest SP2 download, available at the link above.
You’ll need to upgrade both the RP Administrator and the RP Assistant.   We found that the installer for the RP Administrator finished quietly, without giving us any indication that it was complete or successful, so we recommend that you start the RP Administrator and click on the “About” link on the top-right of the application.  The revised software version should be 1.21.5017.0.

Once you’ve upgraded the RP Administrator, you can connect to the base unit.  The software will recognize that the base unit needs to be updated – follow the wizard, taking the default values, and making sure that the system automatically does a backup as part of the upgrade.  At this point everything is running on the new code, but Auto-Attendant barge-in has not yet been enabled.

To enable the feature, click on the “Call Routing” button at the top of the Administrator.  Select “Configure Automated Receptionist Properties” – you’ll see the new feature at the bottom of the box that appears.

You’ll get a warning box about this feature – read it carefully.  This feature isn’t for everyone.

More information can be found on Robert Brown’s Blog.

When the customer calls in, if they press “#” and wait a couple of seconds, they can then speak the name of their destination as normal.

This is certainly less useful than the previous behavious, but it’s better than nothing.

Hope this helps!

 How to recover the phones in web recovery mode:

1.  Phones with web recovery display an IP address on the LCD.
2. Connect to that IP address using a web browser like IE or Firefox.
3. Grab the firmware file of the phone you want to put on the phone.  For example for 6753i RP it would be a file with “6753irp.st” name.
4. If you have a TFTP server with your network you could use that.
      Otherwise you could download PumpKin from internet (freeware). See below about how to use PumpKin.
5. Place the phone’s firmware file in your TFTP’s root path.
6. On the web recovery page of the phone, specify the “server IP” as the TFTP server IP address, the firmware file name as the name of firmware you want to upload to the phone (i.e. 6753irp.st) and choose the protocol as TFTP.
7. Upload the firmware file and the phone should come back on.

A Quick reference for using PumpKIN TFTP server

TFTP Server Set-up

There are a number of TFTP servers available. PumpKIN is one of such TFTP servers. Use the keywords “pumpkin TFTP server” on Google and you should get the web site where you can download the software
from. Installing PumpKIN is straightforward. To configure the directory from where you would be serving the files, click on the Options button on PumpKIN’s main window as shown in the following figure.

PumpKIN Options

It is important to select the “Give all files” radio button under the “Read Request Behavior” category. This makes the files to be served without any manual intervention when requested.

If you want to prevent users from writing files to the directory select the “Deny all requests” in the “Write Request Behavior” category. Click the OK button after you have entered all the required information. All the firmware files should be in the file system root directory. Currently we do not support downloads from files present in sub-directories. Consult PumpKIN’s documentation if you need more information on how to set-up the TFTP server.