FortiVoice Reseller Training

Transcription

FortiVoice
™
Reseller Training
Table of Contents
Part One: Why FortiVoice?........................................................................................... 1
Part Two: FortiVoice Features........................................................................................ 7
Part Three: Phones, Software and More..................................................................... 32
Part Four: Qualifying the Customer, Qualifying the Site.............................................. 46
Part Five: Installing and Configuring FortiVoice SMB Systems ..................................... 56
Part Six: FortiVoice SMB Systems and VoIP ............................................................... 112
Part Seven: Troubleshooting FortiVoice SMB Systems ............................................... 144
Copyright © 2013 Fortinet, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction, adaptation or translation without prior written permission is prohibited, except as allowed under the copyright
laws. Fortinet trademarks, servicemarks, trade names, and logos (together, “Marks”), including, but not limited to, “Fortinet®”, “FortiVoice™”, “FortiGate®”, “FortiGuard®” and
other Fortinet Marks including those listed at http://fortinet.com/contact/marks.html, are to be used solely to the benefit of Fortinet and in compliance with Fortinet’s applicable
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Rev. August 19, 2013
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FortiVoice™
Reseller Training
Part One: Why FortiVoice?
Why FortiVoice?
Big market segment
Before we get into all the “how to’s” about FortiVoice
systems, I want to talk about “why”. Why should you sell
FortiVoice systems?
There is just no shortage of end-customers. The phone is
an absolutely essential tool for every business in the world.
And amazingly, the customer base is recession-proof.
Obviously, individual businesses are not recession-proof, but
the number of businesses has actually risen in the US in the
last few years, according to Dun and Bradstreet, as you can
see here.
It’s the money!
It’s cash, pure and simple. We’ve sold over 100,000 of
these products, most of them through resellers like you.
Long-time resellers of ours know that you can make money
selling the system, and you can deploy the system without
all the costs associated with competing products.
If you sell telephony hardware today from other manufacturers, you’ll find that FortiVoice will fit into your line-up for
customers who are too small for your other products. For
you, FortiVoice will ensure that you can capture customers
who might otherwise slip away if you don’t have a solution.
If you sell network stuff, you are definitely leaving money
on the table if you don’t sell phones. Every one of your
customers today uses telephones, and they’re buying them
from someone. Why not you?
Plus, unlike with network security apparatus, phone
systems generally sell with a phone for every user in the
customer’s business. Those phone sales add up fast.
FortiVoice can help you capture those sales, and that can
double, triple or even quadruple your order size.
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Globally, 137,000 businesses start up every day. Every day.
99 per cent of them are small companies. Now, we make
two kinds of FortiVoice systems, one line for small and
medium businesses with up to 400 phone users per location, and one for offices of up to 2000 users. I’ll talk about
the bigger systems later, but I want to start with the SMB
systems now, because of this statistic. 99% of all new businesses are small businesses, and small businesses are one of
the things that FortiVoice does exceptionally well.
Top selling points: value
And, there’s a ton of potential there. If you sell telephony
products, you’re already aware of that. The hard part has
always been reaching these businesses, particularly the
smaller ones. The smaller businesses are a lot different
than their bigger brothers and sisters, and the solutions
available to them have traditionally been too expensive and
too complicated for them or too dumbed down to deliver
good features.
That’s where FortiVoice phone systems come in.
Here’s a look at what FortiVoice SMB systems do and why
they’re the right system to help you land sales from your
SMB customers. These are their major selling points.
First up: FortiVoice SMB systems are all about value.
As you probably know from the field, the number one
thing you encounter when you’re trying to sell anything to
a small business is a tight budget. Who’s ever heard of a
small business with money to burn? The really small ones
have owners who feel every cost as though it’s coming out
of their own pockets, and none of them have a lot of cash
to spare. This is more true today than ever.
Small businesses like a good bargain, and they’re suspicious
of over-engineered products that cost a lot of money.
But they’re not stupid. Most small businesses know that
the cheapest solution isn’t always the best solution. What
they’re really looking for is value. They want to know that
what they buy will do what they need it to do at the lowest
possible price.
That’s the guiding vision behind FortiVoice SMB systems.
That’s what we look for in our phones. We’re not hung up
on being at the bleeding edge of technology. We’re not
hung up on a particular network. We’re just hung up on
delivering the features small businesses need at prices that
fit their budgets. We’re not making voice-activated touchscreen phones. We’re making essential tools that small
businesses can afford.
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Top selling points: features
Top selling points: simplicity
Second is our feature set.
So, FortiVoice has great value and great features for small
and medium businesses. But the most important thing
we build into every FortiVoice system isn’t a feature. It’s
simplicity.
With our SMB systems, our goal is to deliver big business
phone features at small business prices. Features that help
small businesses improve their professional image, control
costs and stay connected anywhere.
Whether your customer is a little two-man startup in a
garage or a sophisticated multi-location operation, their
FortiVoice system gives them the same features.
It’s all built-in. Everyone gets their own extension. Voicemail
for everybody, and it includes voicemail to e-mail — now
even the smallest company can receive and manage their
voicemails from their e-mail. Auto attendants mean small
business owners can give comprehensive options to callers,
or even run two or three businesses off the same system
with customized greetings for each. Remote extensions
keep employees connected on their cell phones. Instead of
calling an employee’s cell phone number, now customers
can just call in and dial their extension.
And there’s more: multilingual operation, ring groups, dialby-name directories, music on hold... and much more.
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For small business customers, simplicity is a huge relief.
Most of small business owners we deal with don’t know
anything about phones or phone systems, and they don’t
want to know. They’re too busy running their businesses, so
they don’t have the time and they don’t have the inclination.
Unlike most of the solutions offered by our competitors,
FortiVoice systems are easy to understand, easy to buy and
easy to use. That makes them easy to sell.
This is one of the biggest differences between our systems
and the traditional systems made by manufacturers like
Mitel or Toshiba.
Top selling points: easy set-up
Again, for your customers who can’t afford a technician
visit every time they do a move, add or change, they can do
it themselves. Or you can do it remotely. It’s a great pitch
for the many businesses that are too small to have in-house
IT people, and it ensures that you don’t need to deploy
your senior techs for customers who need changes.
Top selling points:
modular growth
Part of our commitment to simplicity is that installing a
FortiVoice SMB system is easy. If you’re used to selling and
installing the traditional phone systems on the market,
you’ll put fewer of your resources into getting your
customers up and running. Our smallest systems can even
be installed by your customers themselves, which means
you can still capture the sale for customers who are so
small they balk at installation fees.
If you’re a network VAR who’s not familiar with traditional
telephony manufacturers, consider yourself lucky!
FortiVoice systems have standard RJ-11 connectors, so for
our systems, in the bulk of the office spaces you encounter
that have standard wiring, you’ll just plug everything in and
you’re good. If you’re using VoIP or IP phones, all you need
is some basic familiarity with IP networks, and with basic
LAN best practices, which we’ll tell you more about later.
Configuration is a snap, too. FortiVoice was designed to
be configured by someone with no telephony experience
— which is pretty much every small business owner.
Our Windows-based configuration software comes with
the system and is easy to use and contains no industry
jargon. You just load it up and attach it to the system,
either directly or through the LAN, and then do the initial
configuration. The system doesn’t have to remain attached
to a computer to work, by the way.
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FortiVoice also grows with your customers.
FortiVoice can accommodate up to 400 users per location.
Some small businesses stay small, others are built to grow,
and in some cases grow rapidly. FortiVoice can handle that.
Individual systems have capacity for up to 100 extensions,
and up to four can be networked together to work as a
single system with up to 400 users. So when your customers grow, you can slap in another system without sacrificing
their previous investment, and there’s no learning curve for
them. Everything works the same as it did before.
Top selling points:
hybrid VoIP/traditional
of customers. You can even start customers off with
traditional systems and add VoIP later when the customer
wants it. FortiVoice makes the transition to VoIP easy.
Plus, you can reap extra recurring revenues by selling
FortiCall VoIP services to your customers. Your customers
get a one-stop solution, you get a recurring source of
revenue. Everybody wins.
Top selling points:
phone freedom
And it works the same way no matter how your customer
wants to connect. VoIP? Traditional PSTN lines? T1 PRI
connections? Well, that’s up to them. FortiVoice is a true
hybrid phone system.
Your customers can integrate teleworkers or seamlessly
connect multiple locations directly over the internet, or
they can connect to the increasingly proliferating world of
VoIP services.
Some of our customers don’t use VoIP at all; they’re
completely content to run on the traditional public
switched telephone network (PSTN), which for them means
increased reliability, simplicity and lower costs. That’s fine
with us. We give them the power to choose. You’ll find
many examples in the field of businesses that are perfectly
served by the good ol’ PSTN.
Even among those that do want VoIP, in our experience,
very few small business buyers want to abandon their
traditional phones or lines and switch completely to VoIP.
More commonly, they’re wondering if they can incorporate
some VoIP in order to save money or to increase their
communication abilities.
FortiVoice delivers the best of both worlds. And by being
both things, it means you can sell systems to both kinds
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FortiVoice is also a hybrid system on the extension side. It
works with analog or IP phones. You can mix and match
analog and IP phones as your customer’s needs dictate.
You’re not even limited to our phones. The system works
best with our proprietary FortiFone telephones, but
FortiVoice systems also work with any standard analog
phone and selected SIP-based IP phones. That gives you
and your customer the flexibility to outfit their offices with
whatever phone makes the most sense.
No matter which network your customer uses, VoIP or
traditional or both, and no matter which phones they’re
using, analog or IP or both, FortiVoice works the same way,
with the same prompts and the same management software. It’s simple.
FortiVoice™
Reseller Training
Part Two: FortiVoice Features
Why FortiVoice?
have multiple unit systems in multiple sites, they all deliver
the same great basic feature set to the users.
Auto attendants
This section goes a little further into the nuts and bolts
of what FortiVoice does. I’m going to start with the small
business systems first. The larger systems’ features work
in much the same way, with just a few differences that I’ll
note along the way.
The same features
One of the FortiVoice system’s most powerful features is
the auto attendant.
Of course, everybody on earth is used to dealing with auto
attendants, and for telephony guys, it’s not very exciting.
But for your small business customers, the auto attendant
really represents what FortiVoice is all about. It gives them
the power to sound more professional and run their offices
more efficiently. It saves the time, money and frustration of
answering and directing calls. Some of our customers are
simply delighted that they don’t have to pay somebody to
answer the phone all day.
So, what does it do? Well, it answers the phone, of course,
and gives callers a variety of interactive options that
you will configure for your customer, or perhaps they’ll
configure themselves.
Every FortiVoice SMB system, no matter what size, has the
same set of powerful features. This is a FortiVoice FVC-100,
but the same features apply to the FVC-40S, 40, 70 and the
100T. Whether you take our smallest 2-line system or a
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The auto attendant answers the phone with a message
recorded by you or by your customer, either directly from
an extension, or uploaded from a file on a PC. You can also
have them professionally recorded if you like, which gives a
really slick image to your customer.
These are, most commonly, internal extensions, but they
might also be external IP extensions at, say, a teleworker’s
home office. More about that later.
When the auto attendant answers calls, callers can perform
several options. You can configure the system to allow any
combination of these.
They can dial any remote extension.
Remote extensions can be any phone number, anywhere.
Most customers use them for cell phones for mobile
employees, but it could also be a home phone or a phone
in another office somewhere. Again, more on this later.
They can dial any local extension number.
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Or they can access the dial-by-name directory to reach an
extension.
This is another standard feature of all FortiVoice systems.
Here, of course, the auto attendant invites them to dial the
letters of the name of whoever they’re looking for.
They can enter the first one, two or three letters of the
user’s name, and you specify in the management software
whether the system searches first names, last names or
both.
They can also dial ring groups.
This is another great feature. Ring groups allow you to
configure any group of local extensions to ring in unison.
So you can configure groups like, “press 1 for sales, press 2
for support,” and so on. And then all of the phones in your
sales department ring simultaneously. You can even give
the different ring group calls distinct sounds, so the guy
sitting at his sales desk knows if the call that’s ringing his
phone is in from the general sales ring group or a direct call
to his extension.
If a matching entry is found, the system will play the user’s
name and extension number. The caller can then dial 1
to connect to the user’s extension. If there are multiple
matches, the caller can dial 2 to hear the next matching
name and extension number.
They can leave a voicemail message directly in any
extension’s voice mailbox, without ringing any phone at all.
FortiVoice includes built-in voicemail. More on that shortly.
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They can jump to another auto attendant.
There are 20 auto attendants on our SMB systems, and
100 on the 200-series systems, so you can build deep and
powerful setups for your customers. You can use different
greetings on each incoming line, allowing sophisticated
multi-tenant setups. Or you can make it multilingual, where
users choose to go to the auto attendant that speaks the
language of their choice. Or different departments can
have their own auto attendants with their own options.
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Or they can listen to an announcement. The announcement
feature is great, too. It allows customers to cut down on
time-wasting calls for basic information, like the business
hours or location.
You can also configure the system to allow a receptionist
or anyone to answer incoming calls without going directly
to the auto attendant. All this gets done in the FortiVoice
software, and it’s a snap. This is the Auto Attendants page
in the software for the SMB systems.
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Voicemail
Each FortiVoice SMB unit has one voice mailbox per local
extension, plus…
one for each remote extension…
and 10 general-use mailboxes. So in addition to individuals
having voice mailboxes, you can have one for general
inquiries, or one for the sales department or whatever. Or
you can set up temporary voice mailboxes for time-limited
promotions or specific situations.
And, of course, you can retrieve your messages remotely,
from any telephone, inside or out of the office. And you
can forward a voicemail to other voice mailboxes. You can
also set an option to play announcements without allowing
callers to leave messages.
FortiVoice also comes with its own voicemail. Voicemail is
another feature that sounds kind of ho-hum if you’re in
the telephony industry. It’s not like this is bleeding-edge
technology. But again, it’s one of the things that makes
FortiVoice great for small business. Your customers can
cut out costs for voicemail services. Not just from their
landlines, but from their cell phones too, if they’re using
them as remote extensions. It’s a small cost reduction, but
multiplied over all employees and every month, it adds
up fast.
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And the system stamps each message with the date and
time received, which is pretty standard.
FortiVoice voicemail includes remote message notification,
forwarding capabilities, and voicemail to e-mail options.
You can set the system to deliver automatic notification at
a cell phone, pager or any other external phone when new
voicemail arrives, in addition to the message waiting indicator on the desk telephone.
You can also set up voicemail to e-mail, so that FortiVoice
notifies the recipient by e-mail that a new message is in.
You can either just leave it as a notification, or you can
include the voicemail as an audio file. Our customers love
voicemail to e-mail, because it makes managing messages
so much easier.
Not only do you get to skip the whole rigmarole of
dialing in to your telephone and touch-tone dialing your
way through your messages, but you can easily retrieve
them when you’re on the road with your laptop or on
your Blackberry or iPhone. It keeps all of your messages,
whether phone or e-mail, in your one mailbox. You can
see at a glance who your voicemails came from, so you
can listen to them in order of importance, rather than
chronologically. Plus, they’re easier to fast forward and
rewind, easier to store in useful, accessible ways, and
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easier to forward to colleagues. Once you start getting your
voicemails in your e-mail, you’ll never want to go back to
the old way.
As you can see in the example here, you can also see when
the message came in and how long it is, and you can save
or delete the message at the mailbox. And note that even
if you delete the message from your voice mailbox, you
still have the audio file in your e-mail, so you can keep
literally all of your e-mail forever without ever hitting your
FortiVoice voicemail memory limit.
The SMB systems come with 28 hours of voice memory
that gets shared between mailboxes and auto attendants.
The 200-series systems have a whopping 900 gigabytes of
voicemail memory.
Connect Anywhere extensions
This is one of the most powerful FortiVoice features.
Remote extensions and, on the SMB systems, external
IP extensions give you the ability to extend the phone
system beyond your customer’s walls so that they can stay
connected no matter where they are. They can respond
to customers faster, collaborate better and stay in touch
anywhere.
Any phone, anywhere can be integrated with the FortiVoice
system as a Connect Anywhere extension — cell phones,
home phones and phones in other cities, or even other
countries.
Connect Anywhere extensions are ideal for mobile and
teleworkers. Customers, partners and suppliers can reach
them by dialing the main office number, whether they’re
teleworking, on the road or in the office. This is great,
because nobody has to give out anything but the main
office number to be in touch.
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Just like local extensions, you can configure Connect
Anywhere extensions to your customer’s call cascades for
sophisticated call routing options. We’ll cover this in more
detail in just a minute. You can have your calls ring first at
your desk, then your cell phone, then your home phone.
For incoming callers, the experience is seamless; you can
take their call on the golf course without them knowing
you’re out of the office.
There are two kinds of Connect Anywhere extensions:
remote extensions and external IP extensions.
First, remote extensions. Any phone number, anywhere
can be a remote extension of the system. Perfect for cell
phones and mobile workers, FortiVoice remote extensions
are more than simple call forwarding. You can transfer and
screen calls from your remote extensions. It’s like having
your phone system with you anywhere you need it.
Each FortiVoice system includes capacity for half as many
remote extensions as the total local extension capacity.
So the FVC-40, for instance, has capacity for 20 remote
extensions. The 200-series systems have capacity for 100
remote extensions each.
Call cascade
Second, external IP extensions. These are available on the
SMB systems only. You just connect an IP phone to the
Internet anywhere and it becomes an extension of the
system. Down the street or around the world, it will work
exactly like a local IP extension. That means it can be part
of ring groups or cascades, and it can receive intercom
calls. It’s the ideal solution for teleworkers or business
owners who want to keep a business phone at home.
You require broadband internet at both locations. Each
external IP extension takes up an IP extension resource,
so the number you can have per system depends on the
size of the system and how many internal IP extensions
you’re running.
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Call cascade is a powerful tool that routes incoming calls
through an almost limitless variety of options if the person
the caller is looking for isn’t at his desk. At its most basic,
this can work like a find-me-follow-me or call forwarding
service, as shown with remote extensions: calls can ring
first at the desk of the target customer, then at his cell
phone and then at his home phone. If the call fails to reach
its target, it can go to voicemail.
But call cascade can do more than that. You can forward
the call to other local or remote extensions, or to ring
groups or to an announcement or auto attendant. So
if you’re not available, the call can go to your partner,
for example. You can see this is where you set it up in
the FortiVoice software for the SMB systems. It’s a little
different in the 200-series systems, but the principles are
the same.
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Plus, you have the flexibility to treat calls differently at
different times of day or based on whether the extension
was busy, didn’t answer, rejects the call or was on do not
disturb. Remote extensions and ring groups can have
different handling based on whether they’re busy or not
answered. With all of them combined, you can build a web
of call cascades that’s going to capture every call.
Call forwarding and screening Call hold/transfer/park
Anyone in the office can forward calls to any local or
remote extension, or even another phone number out of
the office.
Of course, FortiVoice has the basics, including hold, transfer
and parking calls. You can hold calls even at phones that
don’t have hold buttons, just by pushing flash.
On the small business systems, remote extensions can also
screen calls, even at phones that don’t have caller ID or
with calls that have the caller ID blocked. Here’s how it
works:
You can transfer calls to any local or remote extension, ring
group or directly to any voice mailbox. You can announce
the transfer first and return to the call if the person you’re
transferring it to can’t take the call, or you can do a blind
transfer.
First, there’s an “accept/reject” setting. When you answer
a forwarded call, you hear a prompt saying: “You have
a forwarded call.”, and you choose whether to take it or
reject it to your call cascade.
Second, there’s a “play caller’s name first” setting, in which
the system prompts callers to record their name at the
sound of the tone before putting them on hold. When
you answer the forwarded call, FortiVoice says “This is call
forward, you have a call from...” and plays the recording.
In both cases, you accept the call by pressing the # key
or reject it with the * key. If you reject the call, it gets
routed according to options you’ve specified, so it can
go to voicemail, hang up, go to another local or remote
extension or to a ring group or auto attendant.
Parked calls can be retrieved from any extension. Calls on
hold can only be picked up at the extension they’ve been
held at. But if you have to direct a call to someone who’s
not near the phone, you can just park the call and then
page the recipient, who can then pick the call up from any
local extension. This is especially useful in big facilities like
warehouses or manufacturing plants, where workers are
frequently not at their desks, but somewhere else in the
building. Each FortiVoice system has 10 park “orbits”, so
you park a call by pressing *510 or the park button on the
phone, and the system tells you which orbit it’s in, 500 to
509. You page your call recipient, saying, “Charlie, call for
you on 502,” and Charlie can pick it up from any phone by
dialing **502 or unpark 502, depending on what kind of
phone he picks it up at.
And with both held and parked calls, the FortiVoice system
reminds the person who put the caller on hold or park if
the caller is still there by ringing their phone at intervals
that you set.
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Call pickup
PA, set and group paging
In addition to parking calls, FortiVoice also allows users to
pick up ringing calls from other extensions. You just dial *7
and the number of the ringing extension to grab a specific
call, or *9 to pick up any ringing call.
If your customer has a public address system in his facility,
FortiVoice can be attached to that for overhead paging.
You just pick up the phone and dial *0. And with selected
FortiFone telephone sets, you can also have set paging.
Intercom
Two-way paging is a call from a local extension to another
local extension that activates the speakerphone of the
dialed extension. The user at the dialed extension can
reply through the speakerphone. You can perform twoway paging from any local extension to any FortiFone
telephone. You dial *84 and then the desired extension.
One-way group paging is a call from a local extension to
another local extension or to a ring group that activates the
speakerphones of the dialed extensions. The users at the
dialed extensions cannot reply through the speakerphone.
You can perform one-way group paging from a local
extension to a FortiFone telephone by dialing *85 and the
desired ring/page group.
And, of course, FortiVoice allows extensions to make
intercom calls, so they can call one another, without using
any line resources, and they can call remote extensions and
external IP extensions, which would use a line or a VoIP
trunk. And it works just like you’d expect; you pick up the
phone and dial the extension.
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Hybrid VoIP/traditional
FortiVoice and VoIP
FortiVoice lets your customer connect how they want to,
via VoIP or the traditional telephone network, or both.
First, and probably the most common, is it allows
connection to VoIP services. Our own VoIP service is called
FortiCall, and it’s tailor-made to work with the systems.
You get a recurring revenue stream if you sell this with the
system. We’ll get into detail on that later.
Three of the models, the FVC-40, 70 and 100, have
capacity for VoIP and PSTN connectivity. The FVC-40S is a
VoIP-only system.
FortiVoice VoIP is based on SIP, the industry standard, so
it’s made for interoperability with industry standard devices
and services.
FortiVoice works with VoIP in three ways.
But you’re not tied to FortiCall. We’ve also tested and
approved a set of VoIP service providers for interoperability
with our systems, and it’s growing all the time.
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Multiple languages
The second way is branch-to-branch networking. Two
FortiVoice systems in two locations can be connected
directly over the internet. Each office on a FortiVoice VoIP
network can dial directly to any other office, eliminating
inter-office calling charges. You can even take calls at one
office and transfer them to another branch to be answered.
And it doesn’t matter if the offices are in the same city or in
a different country, you pay no phone charges at all.
Having employees, partners and customers who speak
different languages can get complicated. But FortiVoice SMB
systems make it easier with multilingual capabilities that
help your customers communicate all over North America.
The system prompts in the SMB systems are available in
Spanish, French and English, and you can set the language
you want for different auto attendants. So if you have
both Spanish and English customers, they can select the
language they want.
So while FortiVoice says, “one moment, please” to your
English customer, it can also say, “Uno momento, por
favor” to your Spanish customer.
You can set the language of choice at extensions too, so
having workers who speak different languages in the office
is no problem.
And then there are external IP extensions. That’s an IP
phone connected from outside the office — works just the
same as though it were inside!
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Nobody likes to be put on hold, so FortiVoice call queue
lets you give callers the choice of staying on hold or getting
out. When they call an extension that’s busy, callers get
prompted to leave a voicemail, back up to the previous
auto attendant or continue to wait on the line.
If the caller chooses to wait, the person who’s being called
gets prompted at the extension with a beep. If multiple
callers are waiting, they can answer them in the order they
arrived, or cycle through them to decide which call to take
first.
So customers and employees get to choose their language.
But what about the person configuring the system?
FortiVoice software for the SMB systems also speaks
Spanish, French and English, and you can switch from one
to another any time you need to. And that means you
can sell the system to anyone who speaks any of those
languages.
By combining FortiVoice call queue capabilities with ring
groups, you can build sophisticated call groups for better
customer service. Like uniform call distribution, you can
configure call-centre style departments for your customers.
Call queue
For sales, technical support or other departments with
heavy call traffic, call queue ensures that your calls get
answered in the order they were received and that callers
aren’t trapped on hold.
Call queue is an excellent tool for great customer service
that’s available on the FVC-40S, 40, 70 and 100. It gives
callers options to get them out of hold, it lets you answer
multiple calls in the order they were received and build
sophisticated call groups for speedy customer responses.
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Every 60 seconds callers in the queue hear “Your call
is important to us. Please remain on the line. To return
to the previous menu, press *.” Ring group extensions
that become available start ringing within 10 seconds of
hanging up their previous call. The delay allows time to
make a new call or activate Do not Disturb to log out.
When the extension answers, they’re prompted to accept
the queued call or leave the caller in the queue.
Mode scheduling
User privileges and PINs
With mode scheduling, FortiVoice can automatically treat
calls differently after hours and on holidays so that your
customers’ callers get handled professionally no matter
when they come in.
You can assign different classes of service to extensions and
users so the system controls who can make what kinds of
calls. Typically, this is to restrict long distance calling, but
you can also define which features a user group can access.
Every extension gets a set of user privileges, but you can
also assign personal identification numbers to individuals,
so they can transcend an extension’s class of service. So for
instance, you restrict the “employee” class from making
long distance calls, but a manager can enter her PIN at an
employee’s extension and make a long distance call.
You can schedule different auto attendants to answer the
phone differently after work hours or on weekends, giving
emergency contact options if you like, letting callers leave
messages if nobody is around to take a call or simply telling
them when you’ll be open next. You can even set FortiVoice
to close for lunch.
Pick from a standard calendar of official holidays or input
your customer’s special closing days.
Plus, FortiVoice is flexible. In addition to scheduled mode
changes, your customers can manually change modes any
time they want, onsite or remotely from any telephone.
The 200-series systems have even more modes, so you can
make a different mode for every day of the week if you
want to.
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Blocking and routing
Call back/Call bridge
The system can also automatically place specific types of
calls on specific lines.
Call back and call bridge are a nifty pair of small business
features that you can use to save your small business customers money when they’re on the road or if they’re heavy
cell phone users. This is on the FVC-40S, 40, 70 and 100.
This is good for clients who have a phone line or lines with
a particularly good long-distance rate, or if you want to
ensure that inter-branch calls use your VoIP connection
rather than your traditional lines.
Call bridge allows you to seize a line from your FortiVoice
system when you’re called in from another phone
anywhere.
And here’s how call bridge can help heavy cell phone
users. First, for cell plans that include a “My Five” or
“Five Favorites”, you just have your customer include
her own FortiVoice system number within the five free
calling numbers. Then, when she wants to call virtually any
number from her cell phone, she just calls FortiVoice first,
dials a code to grab an outside line, and that’s that.
Or, if your customer doesn’t have a “My Five” plan, but
gets unlimited free inbound calls, he can engage call back
to call his cell phone. When FortiVoice calls back, he can
seize a line and off he goes. No-charge cell use, as much as
he wants.
With call back you call your system, hang up after two
rings, and it calls you back. So this works for someone
who’s working on the road in a hotel. Nothing burns up
money faster than a long distance call from a hotel. With
call back/call bridge, the long distance call is from the
FortiVoice, perhaps on a low-cost VoIP line, to the hotel,
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not from the hotel to wherever, with the hotel premium.
It’s not on the hotel bill at all, and you can place as many
calls as you want and check your voicemail while you’re
at it.
Ring Groups
For customers who have hardcore road warriors, the call
back and call bridge features alone can make a major
difference to overall communication costs.
Music on hold
Ring groups were covered a little earlier, but here are just
a couple of things about FortiVoice ring groups that you’ll
find handy.
First, you can configure each ring group with different ring
cadences, so that you’ll know just by the sound whether
the call coming in is for sales or service or whatever.
Customers love this one for the polished, professional
image it provides. They can just plug FortiVoice into any
standard audio source, like a CD player or the radio and
voila! Music on hold. Or they can upload music files and
have music on hold without an external device.
Lots of FortiVoice customers take the music on hold feature
one step further by recording promotional messages to
inform waiting customers of new products or services.
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Second, you can use that feature even for very small
companies that don’t actually have ‘groups’ per se. For
instance, with ring groups you can make two extension
numbers for one user. If the president of the company
wants to answer only certain callers and let all his other
calls go to voicemail, you set him up as extension 111,
say. So in the dial-by-name directory and on his business
card, he can be extension 111. But at the same time, you
make him the only extension in ring group 300, and give
that ring group a distinctive ring. He gives extension 300
to his mission-critical customers or suppliers or his wife or
whomever. When they call, he can hear by the ring style
that these are hot line callers. When anybody else calls, his
phone just rings the normal way.
Call detail record logging
line usage for a day, number of inbound calls, average call
wait times, average call times and number of calls per line.
It’s a wealth of information that can help clients improve
customer service and increase efficiency.
For customers who need very detailed reporting, you’ll
likely want to recommend our call reporting software. It
takes the CDR information and turns it into very powerful,
sophisticated reports that are more accessible to the
average user.
Conference calls
Call detail record logging tracks the calls that go through
your system with sophisticated information, including call
length, line usage, wait times and all the transfers or holds
that happen to a call.
If you have customers who bill their clients for calls, like
lawyers do, for instance, FortiVoice call detail record
logging allows your customer to assign account codes to
calls and then track precisely how much time was spent
on the phone with them. Even if they’re not billing clients
for time, call detail record logging can help improve
efficiency by allowing them to analyze the amount of time
they spend on the phone with their customers, suppliers
and partners.
Call detail record logging tells you the date, time and
duration of a call, whether calls were inbound or outbound
and caller ID name and number (if available). It also
indicates such events as whether a call was answered by
the auto attendant, transferred to an extension, queued
at an extension, transferred to voicemail or blocked. It’s a
complete history of everything that happened to every call.
You can store the information as a file or have it displayed
live on your computer as it happens. Your call data can also
easily be imported into an Excel spreadsheet so you can
group, sort and tally critical business information like total
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FortiVoice SMB systems handle conferencing in two ways.
For quickie ad-hoc conferences with three parties, you
just put the first party on hold, call the second party and
press the Join softkey. Voila! Instant conference. You can
set up conference calling between three local extensions,
two local extensions and one outside caller, or two outside
callers and one local extension.
FortiVoice builds the conference without requiring a
telephone company 3-way calling/conference service, but
for your smaller customers who might have only two lines
and need to conference with two outside parties, you can
use same line connect to hold the conference on one line
and leave the other line open for business.
In that case, users will just dial 80 after putting the first
outside party on hold, in order to invoke the 3-way calling
service. Doing that requires the phone company service,
of course. For groups larger than three, FortiVoice has a
conference bridge. Works just like you’d imagine it to;
everybody calls the conference bridge number and then the
specific conference room number the moderator assigns.
Up to 8 people can join a conference room.
Hunt group balancing
Automatic fax detection
Hunt group balancing allows you to set options with line
hunt groups to ensure that your customer’s phone lines are
operating in the most efficient way possible for outgoing
calls. This is on the systems that use PSTN lines, so the
FVC-40, 70 and 100 only. So if you set up a hunt group
with, for example, four lines, you can set the system to
start with the line after the last hunted line in the hunt
group. This way telephone lines are used more evenly for
outbound calls.
Automatic fax detection is another money-saver for small
business customers. For all of those businesses who have
a dedicated fax line, they can plug in to the FortiVoice
system, which automatically detects CNG tones and sends
those to the fax machine.
When there are no faxes, which for most businesses is most
of the time, the line can be used for regular phone traffic.
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For example, let’s say a hunt group has lines 1, 2, 3 and 4.
The last call with the hunt group used line 2. The system
will first check line 3 for availability.
This hunt mode can reduce costs if the line toll increases
after utilization exceeds a threshold. For example, assume
each line costs 5¢ per minute for the first 100 minutes, and
then costs 10¢ per minute. The circular hunt mode makes
it more likely users will finish the first 100 minutes on each
line before the thresholds are exceeded and higher charges
are incurred.
Remote management
System speed dials
FortiVoice configuration can be done over IP, so you or
your customers can change the settings anywhere with
a computer that’s attached to the internet, as long as
the target system is on a LAN configured for remote
management.
System speed dials allow the user to quickly dial outside
phone numbers from any local extension. Because the
speed dial numbers are maintained within the FortiVoice
system, they don’t need to be programmed into each individual phone. That saves you time when you’re configuring
the system.
This allows you to troubleshoot customer concerns or
handle changes without leaving your desk, which is a lot
easier and cheaper than rolling out a truck. Lots of our
resellers do management or upgrades remotely.
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Caller ID based routing
Line appearance
Caller ID based routing allows you to set up call handling
based on the caller ID information of an incoming call.
Lots of small businesses need a system that provides
line appearance, especially if they want to have calls
answered by a live person who would then transfer calls to
extensions, and therefore needs to see who’s on the phone
and who’s not. Line appearance is common in key systems,
which are fundamentally inferior to full PBX systems like
FortiVoice. But although FortiVoice is not a key system,
the SMB systems provide line appearance in a couple of
different ways.
For example, if the call is from an important client, it can be
routed directly to the president’s extension.
You can define up to 200 caller ID entries to be handled
up to ten different ways. You have the exact same options
for handling these calls as you do for configuring your
telephone lines. So they can go to extensions or groups or
whatever.
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First, several of our IP phones offer line appearance, and
we’ll touch on that later. For SMB customers who don’t
use IP phones or who want an even more powerful ability
to see and control their calls on their computers, there’s
our optional FortiVoice Console software, which we’ll
cover later.
Hotline
Distinctive ring
Hotline allows a phone on the system to dial any number
as soon as it’s lifted from its cradle. It’s great if you have
a door phone, where there’s a locked entrance with a
phone outside that can ring, for instance, a general ring
group with a distinct pattern so that everybody can hear
that someone’s at the door. Or courtesy taxi cab phones in
grocery stores. Or any other kind of hotline application your
customer needs.
Distinctive ring is a telephone company service that
provides multiple phone numbers on one telephone line.
Each one of the phone numbers rings the phone with a
different ring pattern. The ring patterns have one, two,
or three rings in each burst, so just by listening, you know
which number was dialed.
FortiVoice can detect distinctive rings on each of its lines,
and use them to route faxes to a fax machine and voice
calls to an auto attendant. Or it can separate home and
office calls for customers who have a business operating
out of their house. Or a customer can run two different
businesses on one line with one FortiVoice system and
different auto attendants. Or you can use one number to
invoke a FortiVoice call back.
Depending on your service provider, distinctive ring is also
referred to as Ident-A-Ring, Ident-A-Call, Ring Master,
Teen Service, Double Number, Personal Ringing, Ring Plus,
Smart Ring Service, Special Ring, Customized Ringing, Call
Sign, My Ring, Duet — Phone and Fax Multiple Number, or
Smart Ring.
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200-series features
In the portal, they can set their caller ID. They can set their
voicemail options, including how long the phone rings
before going to voicemail and where the system sends
e-mails. And just like the small business systems, you can
have an e-mail notification of a voicemail message, or you
can include the actual message itself. They can set up the
follow me settings, speed dials, and they can manage their
outgoing message from there.
Each user can also set up a personal blacklist, preventing
unwanted callers from reaching their extension.
Lastly, the 200-series also has an extra layer of security,
which enterprise customers appreciate, by using SIP over
TLS where supported. This adds another level of encryption
to protect packets of voice information while they’re in
transit.
The 200-series systems have most of the same features,
with just a few extras that I want to highlight here.
First, call recording. This does just what it says, allowing
users to record calls.
Next, the web interface. Unlike the SMB systems, the
configuration for the 200-series is entirely web-based. So
you can configure it on any machine anywhere you want.
What’s really interesting is the web-based user portal. This
allows the users on the system to configure some of their
own settings.
They can log in to get their voicemail on the web portal,
access the company directory and see their call logs, and
they can set their own preferences. It’s easier on you or
the customer’s IT department, because they don’t have
to individually configure the details of each individual’s
phones, but it’s also better for the users, because they can
tweak their settings any time to make their phones work
exactly the way they want them to.
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FortiVoice™
Reseller Training
Part Three: Phones, Software and More
Phones
If you want to have offsite workers with full extension
capabilities, you’ll also need to do that with IP phones.
Plus, most FortiVoice SMB system can use 4 or 8 analog
phones, depending on how many analog extension ports
it has. But the majority of the extension capacity is for IP
phones.
The FVC-40S and 200D don’t have any analog ports, so
you can’t use analog phones with them. The 200D-T has
one analog port.
So in many cases, you’ll want to sell IP phones. However, IP
phones are not without their drawbacks. For one thing, IP
phones require a LAN, and they require some knowledge
on your part about networks and networking best practices
to ensure their smooth deployment.
This module delves into the rest of the FortiVoice product
line-up, which includes phones, additional productivity
software, FortiCare and FortiCall VoIP services, all of which
you will be selling to your customers.
This is not a technical analysis, but rather an overview to
familiarize you with the products and their features so
that you know what each product can do. We’ll dig in to
the technical side of installation and configuration in an
upcoming chapter.
Now, about phones: the system works best with our
FortiFone phones, but you can also use FortiVoice with any
standard analog phones on the SMB systems and selected
IP phones, so if your customer has some existing phones
or special phone needs, you can take care of them. It’s a
flexible hybrid system that offers you a lot of freedom in
the way you outfit your customers.
**********
When you’re selling the phones, it’s all going to boil down
to what your customer needs, and what they’re equipped
for. Two of the main drivers you’ll run into with the SMB
systems are line appearance and capacity. If your customers
require line appearance on their phone, and many of our
customers tell us that they do, then you’re going to sell IP
phones.
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Also, IP phones won’t work without power, but analog
phones can. In the event of a power outage with an FVC-40,
70 or 100 system, all calls get routed over line 1 to jack E4.
If you have an analog phone connected to jack E4, it will
continue to function. No other extensions will function,
whether they are analog or IP phones, but you can still
answer incoming calls. Even if you’re using IP phones for an
SMB customer’s system, you may want to keep an analog
phone connected to jack E4. Once the power comes back,
the system will resume normal function.
So there are some things to bear in mind when you talk to
your customers about a deployment.
FON-260i IP phone
FON-360i IP phone
Now let’s look at each of the phones, starting with our
entry-level IP phone — the FON-260i.
The FON-360i is a terrific telephone, and one of our most
popular. This one has 6 programmable appearance or
feature keys, and you decide what to configure these for.
These keys are paired with big, multi-colored LED lights, so
it’s extremely clear what state the phone is in.
This is a simple, inexpensive stripped-down IP phone for
users who don’t need all the bells and whistles. It has no
blinking line appearance lights, no complications. You just
dial it and talk. Great for courtesy phones in reception areas
or for staff with low feature requirements.
It’s got 4 programmable feature keys and 8 dedicated
feature keys, and a half-duplex speakerphone. You should
be aware that this is the only IP desk phone in the lineup
that doesn’t offer line appearance, though, so if a user
requires that, you need to move them to one of the other
phones, like the FON-360i.
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It’s got 3 softkeys and 11 one-touch feature keys.
It’s got a reversible stand, so you can place it at two
different angles, depending on user preference, and has
POE and 2 Ethernet ports, and a delayed ring option that
allows users to pick it up when it’s flashing, before it starts
to ring.
It’s also got a nice touch that all our phones have, and
that’s the ability to print the dialpad label directly from
the software. You’ll appreciate this when you’re doing an
install with 20 phones and you don’t have to handwrite
20 different dialpad sheets after you do your configuration.
You just press a button and the sheet pops out of the
printer all neat and tidy. You just cut it out and pop it in.
FON-460i IP phone
FON-560i IP phone
The next phone in our line is the middle brother of the
series. This is the FON-460i.
Next up is our real powerhouse phone, the big brother
of the group, the FON-560i. This phone has some terrific
features that allow it to do some things that our other
telephones just can’t do.
This phone is a little bigger, with 10 of the same style of
easy-to-see, easy-to-use appearance or feature keys. And
this phone, like its even bigger brother, the FON-560i, can
be expanded with up to 2 FF-50E expansion units, that
bring it up to 34 appearance keys.
And, like the FON-360i, this phone has dedicated feature
keys, softkeys, an adjustable stand, POE, 2 ethernet ports
and the printable dialpad.
Both the FON-460i and FON-560i have gigabit ethernet
ports.
The base phone itself has 22 appearance or feature keys,
which you can expand to a whopping 46 if you add
2 of the FF-50E expansion units. Obviously, this is the
phone that your customers are going to want on their
receptionists’ desks. And as with the other phones, these
feature big, bright, multi-colored LED lights, so it delivers
a really optimum usability. It’s very obvious when a line or
extension changes states.
On top of that, it’s got 11 feature keys, the delayed
ring option, 2-digit speed dials and the same printable
dialpads as the other phones. And you can imagine how
handy that’s going to come in with a phone that has
46 appearances!
The FON-560i also has an optional Bluetooth® module. The
phone can operate with a Bluetooth headset. This is really
a premium IP phone with a whole lot of power, and it’s got
excellent audio quality.
Just one thing about these three phones; the line
appearance keys don’t work with the 200-series systems.
On the 200 series, you can use these as one-touch
feature keys.
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FF-50E and FF-65B
FON-600 analog phone
Last, there are a couple of accessories for the phones. I
mentioned the FF-50E just now, and here it is. This is the
device that attaches to the FON-460i and FON-560i, adding
12 programmable LED buttons. You can use two per phone.
The FON-600 is our analog phone. As you can see, it’s
got a big adjustable display that a lot of customers like.
This one has full headset support, with both RJ22 and
2.5mm headset jacks and a dedicated headset button. It’s
got multiple rings and ring once. The FON-600 also has a
combined power and phone cord.
The FF-65B is a Bluetooth module that plugs into
the side of the FON-460i or 560i and lets you use a
Bluetooth headset.
FortiCall
That’s it for phones. Now let’s look at our FortiCall phone
service. As mentioned earlier, FortiVoice phone systems
work with the traditional telephone network and with VoIP
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services. FortiCall is our proprietary VoIP service, which
gives your customers the benefit of one-stop shopping and
gives you a source of recurring revenue. Every business has
phone service of some kind, and they’re paying someone
for it, so why not you?
(excluding NWT) at $24.95 per line. There’s a two-line
minimum purchase and each line comes with one free
telephone number. Extra phone numbers are only a dollar
a month, so it’s easy for your customers to have as many
DID numbers as they need, or to set up specific numbers
for specific uses or to help track promotions or do whatever
they want to do. The phone numbers can be in any of the
area codes covered by the service, so a business in New
York can have a “local” phone number in LA, for example.
Toll-free numbers are also available, as is international
calling.
You receive 10 percent of the billings, outside of
emergency services fees. That means you get commission
on each initial sale, but also on every monthly bill for as
long as the customer uses the service. They add another
line? Your revenue increases. A toll-free number? Your
revenue increases.
Your customers can manage the service themselves over
the web portal, where they can check their billing and
easily add more lines. That’s something our customers love;
they can add a line or a number instantly, with no waiting
for the phone company to come and no additional fees
beyond the cost of the line or the number. It’s easy.
FortiCall standard lines give your customers unlimited
calling in the continental US (excluding Alaska) and Canada
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Your FortiCall commissions are tied to your FortiPartner
incentive card. Just enter (or have your customers enter)
your reseller code when signing up for the service. If you
don’t have your FortiPartner incentive card yet, you need
to get one. Your code is in the top left corner of your
dashboard at the ACB promotions website.
You’ll see here that there’s also a free trial available, so if
you’ve got a customer who’s sitting on the fence or has
any doubts about the quality of VoIP service versus the
traditional telephone network, they can try free outbound
calling for 300 minutes or 30 days, whichever comes first.
Productivity applications
Here’s how you sign up. Visit www.forticall.com and click
Sign Up. You or your customer can sign up. You’ll need the
system ID and MAC address of the relevant system, and the
credit card information of your customer. And this is where
you or your customer must enter your 5-digit reseller code
for you to get compensated.
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Now let’s take a look at our software applications. These are
a couple of software packages that extend the functionality
of FortiVoice SMB systems for customers who need it.
FortiVoice Console
As you can see, the interface allows you to see lines, your
active calls, and icon-based views of all of the users you
care about in the office.
Each user gets to choose what they want to see and
not see, so the FortiVoice Console is a very flexible tool.
Receptionists can see who’s available to take calls and
who’s busy or on do not disturb. Managers can see at a
glance anytime who’s working the phones and who isn’t.
And everyone else can collaborate better by seeing the
status of coworkers and communicating through the
built-in chat feature.
Calls
First up is the FortiVoice Console. This is a software version
of an attendant console phone, but because it’s software,
and because it can reside on every workstation in your
customer’s office, it does much more than your standard
attendant console phone.
One FortiVoice Console license covers all of the employees
in the office. FortiVoice Console allows everybody in the
office to see their calls and control their calls right from
their computer. They can see who’s calling, drag and drop
calls and manage their call queues, and they can see the
status of everyone in the office they want to see.
What happens when you get a call? You get a little popup window that tells you who’s calling. This works just like
Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail notification, down in the lower
right corner of your screen.
When you bring the application to the foreground, The
My Calls window shows you the calls that you get or make
at your extension. The window lists caller ID info (if it’s
available), the number, duration and status and whether a
call is internal, inbound or outbound.
This is what it looks like.
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Queues
Display
If you have more than one call queued at your extension,
you can see them both, which delivers the obvious benefit
of allowing you to answer calls in order of importance,
rather than the order they arrived.
Don’t want to see the lines? No problem. You can minimize
that window with a click if the line view isn’t important.
Call control
Lines
You also see the change in the status to the line that the
call comes in on, when it changes from green to red.
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You can control your calls from the FortiVoice Console
window just as you would from your phone. So you get
buttons here to hold, transfer, send to voicemail, park,
page and hang up. You can also transfer calls by just
dragging them and dropping them on the icon that you
want to transfer to. It’s intuitive and easy. And that can be
a local extension, a remote extension or a ring group, and
you can show those all together or in separate tabs to keep
things organized the way you like.
Status
The icons show you the status of the people in your group.
Because each user selects what this window shows, it’s easy
to make sure it’s relevant. Receptionists will want to see
everybody in the company, and so might employees in very
small companies. In bigger companies, employees will more
commonly limit the display to those coworkers with whom
they typically collaborate.
Red guy with the little phone means that person is on the
phone. Red blinking guy means that phone is ringing.
You can see that some of those guys have a little square
image on their lower left. That’s not a bag of popcorn, it’s
the chat icon, which indicates that the user is logged in and
available for chat.
You can see the different possible states in the icons here.
The little green guy? He’s on hook, ready to take a call.
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Some of our resellers have actually sold the FortiVoice
Console on this feature alone, to customers who forbid
standard chat applications on their corporate networks, but
want to have the improved employee collaboration that a
dedicated chat application can deliver.
Managers of groups that are phone-intensive can also
mandate that their users sign in for chat when they’re
available to take calls so that the icon window indicates, at
a glance, what the phone coverage is; who’s at their desk
ready to take calls and who’s not.
Icons
And you can also see here that if you hover on an
icon that’s on the phone, you can see who that user is
connected to, and how long the call has been in progress.
Chat
You’ll also see a couple of other icons; the grey hand icon
showing when an extension is on ‘do not disturb’.
I mentioned the built-in chat feature earlier. It works just
like most chat software, and it allows, for example, the
receptionist to alert other staff of incoming calls when
they’re on another call. In our shop we use this all the time.
If I’m on a sales call and I need to get some information
for a reseller from our support gang, I can just open a
chat session with one of them and get the answer at my
fingertips, without putting my caller on hold.
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There’s a grey icon that indicates an unregistered IP
extension, …
and ring group guys.
So that’s the fundamentals of the program. Again, each
user gets to design what his or her console shows in terms
of lines and extensions. That’s all under the View menu
in the Client preferences section. They can also customize how it notifies them of calls and chats, and even what
color it appears as.
FortiVoice Console has a free 30-day trial period that you
can use to your advantage when you do an install, because
a lot of people really like the software once they use it. So
you can install it even if your customer doesn’t buy it up
front, and once they’re hooked you can make the sale.
and then there’s these little remote extension guys, …
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FortiVoice Console is a license-coded application, so when
your customer buys it, they just get an e-mail with the
code, and they use that to visit an activation website to
activate their FortiVoice Console. So you don’t even have to
make a site visit to get it running for a customer.
Call Reporting
Reports
Our other optional software application is a little more
specialized. Meet Call Reporting, the application that
tracks and reports data about your SMB system usage. As
with the FortiVoice Console, this application works with
the FVC-40S, 40, 70 and 100, but is not for use with the
200-series systems. Call Reporting delivers a wealth of data
to the kinds of customers who need to monitor call activity
in detailed reports. It’s especially useful to customers who
run phone-intensive sales or support organizations and
want to track and review extension or department usage,
and for customers like lawyers, accountants and other
consultants who bill for advice delivered over the phone.
You can also generate reports on all incoming calls —
who answered each call, the caller ID the call came from,
duration of the call, incoming ring times, unanswered calls,
and even calls to your advertised directory numbers.
Call Reporting works by collecting all of the data generated
by the FortiVoice system call detail record logging into a
database from which it generates a multitude of reports.
Call Reporting can give your customers all the details they
need about who is making and taking calls, how long they
last, exactly how much they cost and more.
All events on your FortiVoice system — including transfers,
calls on hold, and time spent in a queue, are tracked
and reportable through the easy-to-use FortiVoice Call
Reporting interface.
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You can run reports whenever you need them, over any
time frame you like; the last hour, day, week, month or
year. And you can run them in real time if you need to
actively monitor the performance of, say, a sales team.
Or you can schedule reports to be e-mailed automatically
when you want them.
And, like the FortiVoice Console, Call Reporting is a licensecoded application, so when your customer buys it, they just
get an e-mail with the code, and they use that to visit an
activation website to activate their software. So again, you
don’t even have to make a site visit to get it running for
a customer.
FortiCare
One thing you’ll want to add to every FortiVoice sale is
FortiCare. It’s the service package that will allow your
customers to access technical support beyond your first
line service, and will allow you to use our support team
when working on a particular unit that has problems. It
also allows you to get an advanced hardware replacement
if a unit is defective in the field, and it gives you or your
customer access to software updates for the system.
FortiCare coverage lasts for one year and costs significantly
less than our least expensive telephone. You can buy up to
five years of FortiCare coverage at a time.
It’s an easy upsell and ensures that your customer keeps
their system up and running and up-to-date. We also offer
the systems bundled with the first year of FortiCare. We
find that customers prefer that because it simplifies the
pitch. But it’s up to you. You can sell the systems separately
from the FortiCare if that’s what you want to do.
If they don’t want to buy FortiCare with their system,
they’ve still got a one-year limited hardware warranty, 90
days of technical support and 90 days access to software
updates.
Incidentally, there is no FortiCare for phones, which are
covered by a one-year limited hardware warranty as well.
And that’s it! You’re now familiar with the full line of
FortiVoice products.
45
FortiVoice™
Reseller Training
Part Four: Qualifying the Customer,
Qualifying the Site
Part Four: Qualifying the Customer, Qualifying the Site
Qualifying the customer,
qualifying the site
We’ve learned through experience that if you give the
customer the wrong system, they will get very unhappy
very fast, and they’ll complain and give you headaches, and
possibly even return the equipment so that you make no
money.
So that’s what this part of the program is about: avoiding
headaches, avoiding complaints and ensuring that your
word of mouth stays strongly positive.
How do you do it? You sell them the right stuff at the start.
We’ll go through the list of things that you should consider
when you start a discussion with a customer.
How many lines?
How many lines does your new customer need? Sounds
simple, right?
Well, sure, for telephony professionals, this is no big deal.
For customers who have never had a phone system, even
simple questions like this can pose quite a challenge.
If you’re replacing a system, the customer ought to know
how many lines they have. They’re paying for them, so they
tend to be a little more aware.
If your customer is just getting started, though, you might
have to explain the whole concept of the number of lines
being the maximum number of concurrent calls. And in a
few minutes we’ll look at the whole issue of whether the
lines are going to be VoIP or traditional PSTN lines. But to
start, you need to determine number of lines.
Make sure you check things like whether or not they need
a dedicated fax line, or a line that can handle credit card
transactions. And does the president or owner need to
have a dedicated line or a direct phone number?
Remember to ask about the customer’s growth plans. It’s
usually cheaper in the long run for the customer to buy a
system with extra line capacity if she expects the company
to grow beyond its initial line usage. But not every
company expects to grow.
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If your customer isn’t sure, it’s no big deal. And it’s no big
deal if the customer underestimates their growth, because
FortiVoice is a modular system that’s easy to add to when
they need it, right up to 400 users per location in the small
and medium business systems. But like I say, it’s usually
cheaper to buy a little extra capacity up front.
Is the customer replacing an
existing system?
How many extensions?
Here’s another simple one. You just get a head count of
who needs phones. And find out whether they need any
common area phones, like lunch rooms, meeting rooms for
conference calls, or the courtesy area at the front desk.
If they are replacing an existing system, in some ways all of
the previous things get easier, because those customers are
more likely to understand the concept of a phone system.
As I said, they’ll probably know how many phone lines they
have, for instance, and they’ll certainly know how many
extensions they’ve got.
But if you’re replacing a system, it’s also important to
give them the functionality they’re used to, and believe
me, we’ve learned this the hard way. If they have line
appearance, for instance, you better give them line
appearance.
What it boils down to is: do not try to teach people a new
way of using the phone.
So, if they had line appearance, you’ll want to sell them a
system that can deliver line appearance, so the FVC-40S,
40, 70 and/or 100, along with our IP phones. It’s also a
good idea to ask them why they’re replacing their old
system. Issues with features? Performance? It’s a good
question to get a better understanding of what they’re
looking for in their new system.
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What’s their wiring like?
there to each office. Once in a while you’ll run into offices
that are wired in a series, which looks more like the figure
on the right here, where a line goes to one office, and then
branches off to the next and the next and so on. If that’s
the case, you’ll have to rewire if they want analog phones.
Then there’s the question of their network. If they’ve got
CAT5 wiring with network drops at each workstation, you
might be able to use IP phones without doing any extra
wiring. That’ll depend on their data traffic. Low data traffic
offices can run the phones and the computers on the same
network. More about that in a minute.
What’s their call volume like?
The existing wiring can be a factor in the overall cost of the
installation, so that’ll drive some customer decisions. You’ll
probably have to visit their facility to figure this one out,
since most customers really have no idea what kind of wiring they’ve got. If the customer’s space is already wired for
analog phones, it’s cheap and easy to recommend analog
phones.
Standard wiring
Ask your customer if he’s got any report of monthly call
volumes, or at least any idea of how much traffic they get.
You want to try to determine whether their current setup
is limiting, or, conversely, if they’re oversubscribing for
services.
Ask about the percentages of inbound versus outbound
calls. Ask about local versus long-distance calls.
Do they have one line per person? If so, you’ll probably be
able to reduce their monthly costs by reducing the number
of lines.
Ideally, you’ll have standard star wiring, with a central
demarcation point where the phone lines come into the
office, and a star topology of CAT3 wiring that goes from
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Can you use the fax line for outbound calls? Lots of our
customers dump the dedicated fax line in favor of sharing
that line for outbound calls.
It’s wise to have a discussion about line access restrictions.
Customers typically prefer to keep most of the lines
available for incoming callers, but most are willing to
accept limited outbound access during busy traffic times if
it saves some money on lines.
After you’ve made the sale, you can also run call reporting
on the first month’s usage to see if you can fine-tune the
line use. Are the needs being met? Can you do further line
reductions?
VoIP, PSTN, T1 PRI?
And it’s a lot easier to add lines with FortiCall VoIP service
or with most other VoIP providers. Usually you can do it
online in ten minutes, whereas if you’re dealing with the
phone company, you know how that goes; they have
to schedule a rollout to get a new line to a client, and it
always takes longer than you want it to.
So there are a few reasons for your customers to consider
VoIP. It can be good for you too, if you sell FortiCall VoIP
service. You get a source of recurring revenue from that.
On the other hand, there are a lot of reasons to recommend
the good ol’ PSTN. Mainly, it’s just more reliable. The
traditional telephone network, with its “five nines”
reliability, beats counting on your internet connection to
carry your calls. The network’s down? So is your phone.
That’s why some of our customers keep at least one analog
line and an analog phone.
Above a certain size of office, around ten lines or so, many
customers will want T1 PRI service, since it’s cheaper than
phone lines. In that case, your options are the FVC-100T or
the 200D-T, which are the only systems in the family that
support T1.
T1? E1? PRI? Huh?
Some customers will already have decided that they want
a VoIP provider, or that they just want a traditional system.
If they already have one or the other, they’ll probably just
want to stick with it.
But there are a lot of options here. Many of our customers
use VoIP for cheaper outbound calling, while using their
PSTN lines primarily for inbound calls. If your client does a
lot of long distance, there can be significant savings with
VoIP too.
In some cases, depending on the provider, your customer
can make multiple calls on a VoIP line as well, adding to the
efficiency of the system.
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For those of you who don’t know, here’s a little PRI 101.
PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. It’s a protocol for
telephone communication that gets sent via T1 or E1
connections.
T1 is actually short for “Trunk Level 1”. A T1 is a digital
connection between a telephony provider and your
customer.
The phones: analog or IP?
An E1 is the same thing, but it’s used by everybody else in
the world outside of the US and Canada. Except for Japan,
which uses J1. Go figure.
T1 can carry 23 calls, and E1 can carry 30. And, as with
VoIP trunks, you can have a bunch of different numbers
per channel, allowing your customers to have different
dedicated phone numbers for every worker, if you want to.
That’s direct inward dialing, or DIDs.
Emergency calling
Now, what about phones? How do you assess what kind of
phones your customer needs?
The majority of phones that you’ll sell will be IP phones,
with perhaps an analog phone as a back-up for your
small and medium business customers. The 40S and 200D
systems don’t support analog phones at all, and the
200D-T only has one analog port. Analog phones don’t
support line appearance either, so most small businesses
prefer the IP phones.
And just a side note there; FortiVoice FVC-40, 70, 100 and
100T systems even retain some emergency functionality
when the power goes out, if you have a PSTN line and an
analog phone plugged into extension port E4. You can’t
VoIP without electricity. Some of our SMB customers like to
keep an analog phone around just for this purpose.
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Occasionally, you’ll run into a very small business that might
prefer an all-analog setup. This comes up sometimes with
old-timers who don’t have a computer network and only
feel comfortable with an old-fashioned standard telephone.
That’s fine, and you can accommodate them, but cost is
another driver. You can have more users per system if you
use IP phones.
Phone capacity
Analog or IP?
To pick an example, let’s say you sold a FortiVoice FVC-40
to a customer. The FVC-40 has a capacity for four analog
extensions.
Now, that said, we find it’s usually best to keep everyone
in the office in the same phone family. It’s easier on them,
and it’ll be easier on you if you train them on one family of
phones. And the FortiFone telephones work best with the
system, taking full advantage of all of its capabilities.
So if you sold the FVC-40 to a customer who wanted to
outfit 10 or 12 or 15 or 16 phone users, you’re going
to have to use at least some IP phones. Up to four of
the phones can be analog, but any over four must be IP
phones. And that’s just a limitation of the number of ports
to plug phones into. If the customer needs more analog
extensions, you’ll have to sell an additional system.
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If your customer has a receptionist who needs a console
phone, the only choice there is the FON-560i phone.
Do they need to connect teleworkers? Probably they’ll
want to go with IP phones. FortiVoice can integrate
teleworkers in two ways: using the remote extension
feature, the teleworker can be reached with three digits
just like a local extension, and they can put callers on hold
and transfer them. But for an extension in their home that
works identically to the ones in the office, you can use an
external IP extension. To set that up, you need a FortiVoice
SMB system, and broadband internet at the office and at
the teleworker site. The teleworker’s extension can then
work just like one in the office, including being part of ring
groups and call queues, and they can see line appearances
the same way they would appear in the office.
Network best practices
User number vs. traffic
If you are installing IP phones, it’s important that you
understand a few things about the network in order to
ensure that the phones perform the way your customers
expect them to.
In some cases you’ll decide based on number of users. In
some cases it’ll be type of traffic, as you can see in the
chart here.
Basically, in offices with modest network traffic, it’s okay to
run the IP phones on the same network as the computers.
But for companies that have lots of users who transfer lots
of large files or depend on heavy traffic with a central database, it’s best to wire the phones on a separate network.
No two networks are the same, so there is no one-size-fitsall configuration that will work for everyone. To determine
the type of deployment to use, you must know the number
of users, type of traffic and available resources.
Here are some examples of companies whose deployments
should be based on the number of extensions:
• Dentist offices
• Real estate offices
• Law firms
• Retail stores
Here are some examples of companies whose deployments
should be based on the type of traffic:
• Graphic designers
• Engineering firms
• Software development companies
• Production facilities
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Pass-through Network
Deployment
Standard Network
Deployment
This is what we call the pass-through network deployment.
Next up is the standard deployment.
It uses the existing network. This method is quick
and easy, but may slow down the PCs’ connection to
network applications while phones are in use, so it’s not
recommended for heavy computer users who have a
central database, or who send large files.
This is more reliable, since each device has its own network
drop, eliminating conflicts of shared network connections.
By splitting the traffic, it becomes easier to ensure voice
traffic is not as affected by what the data users are doing.
It’s suitable for companies with computer users who
primarily use the network to search the web or send
e-mails.
In this deployment, the FortiVoice system and all of the IP
phones connect to the existing network switch.
The employees’ PCs connect to their phones, sharing the
network drop.
In this case, you have less networking cables and
equipment than the standard deployment, so it’s cheaper
for the end user. You’re piggybacking on the existing
network infrastructure.
The downside is that your phones will take priority, so
network applications will run slower on the PCs.
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It’s still not recommended for heavy network users who
have a central server, or who work on large files on the
network, since the computers and the phones are still
sharing a single switch. Using a managed switch would
help reduce potential problems.
As you can see, the FortiVoice system again connects to
the existing network switch, but in this case, each IP phone
gets a separate network drop.
You don’t need additional network equipment, and this
deployment is easier to troubleshoot, simpler to manage
and makes it easy to move devices.
You will require additional networking cable, though.
Separate Voice Network
Deployment
Finally, for heavy data users, we recommend you set up
a separate voice network, splitting the phones from the
data network. By splitting them, they can’t interfere with
one another, and problems are easier to diagnose. You can
physically separate the networks to identify problems.
So here, the FortiVoice system is connected to its own
switch, as are the phones. You can add an uninterrupted
power supply as well, to cover for power outages.
This is great not just for heavy traffic guys, but also
medium to large deployments for ease of use and less
support overhead. Obviously, you need more cabling and
equipment, but it’s a pretty bullet-proof way to operate.
55
FortiVoice™
Reseller Training
Part Five: Installing and Configuring
FortiVoice SMB Systems
Part Five: Installing and Configuring FortiVoice SMB Systems
Connections
Now, the same holds true for the CO lines, or line jacks.
They’re the grey ones to the right of the extension ports.
These are also two-wire connectors, and so we don’t sense
anything on the outer pair of wires. This becomes extremely
important when connecting the phone lines, as each phone
line must have its own phone cord. Some homes or small
offices are wired with two lines per wall jack. In this case
you would need to split those two lines into two separate
phone cords in order to connect them to the FortiVoice
system.
To the right of the line ports is the RJ-45 network port,
which is used for configuration of the system, VoIP, and
communication between FortiVoice systems on the local
area network.
This module is about installing and configuring the
FortiVoice small and medium business systems. We pride
ourselves in the ease of installation of our products, so
most of you should basically be able to install them with
your eyes closed. Even some end-users choose to install it
themselves, just using the FortiVoice Start Guide and other
documentation provided.
But there are a few things that will help you install the
product smarter and faster. These tips will help you install
FortiVoice with confidence, knowing your customers will
get what they need from the system.
Let’s start with a look at the physical connections on a
system. This particular unit is a FortiVoice FVC-70.
First let’s look at extensions and lines. The eight black RJ-11
extension jacks are where you plug your analog phones, if
you’re using them. They’re numbered E1 to E8.
FVC-40, 70, 100 and 100T systems come with four or eight
analog extension ports, depending upon the system. If we
were looking at an FVC-40, you would only see the bottom
four jacks here. The FVC-40S has no analog ports at all.
All of the ports are two-wire interfaces, so they will only
use the inner pair of pins on a standard phone cord. You
can use a four-wire phone cord or cable, but the system
won’t detect anything on the outer pair of wires.
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The network connection on FortiVoice is a standard
10/100 MB full-duplex port.
The LED lights above the network port are typical lights.
They indicate network connection established, transmitting
data and receiving data.
The music port is a standard stereo 1/8” audio jack for the
connection of a CD player, MP3 player or radio for music
on hold. There’s no volume control from the FortiVoice
software, so you adjust the volume on the device itself.
It supports either a stereo or mono audio cable. You can
also upload music files to the FortiVoice in .wav format if
you don’t want to attach a device.
Next to that, the PA jack also takes a standard stereo 1/8”
audio plug. If you want to test it, an easy way is to plug in
a pair of computer speakers.
To connect to a PA system, ensure the cable is plugged into
the Line In port, which has an amplifier. We get occasional
reports of low audio on the PA system, but it’s usually
because they’re plugged into a non-amplified audio jack.
Note that the FVC-40S is an all-IP system, so it doesn’t have
either of these analog jacks.
System resources
We also limit the voicemail message length. The default
is two minutes, but you can increase it by one-minute
increments up to eight minutes. This is a system-wide
parameter, so it affects all users.
The maximum number of messages that a voice mailbox
can have is 100. After that, inbound callers get a message
saying that voicemail is currently unavailable for this
user and to call again later. With voicemail to e-mail
functionality, it’s pretty rare for users to accumulate that
many messages in the mailbox.
FortiVoice Management
software
That’s it for what you see outside of the box. But inside
there are number of system resources that you should be
aware of when setting up a FortiVoice SMB system.
Each unit comes with 28 hours of memory. Memory is used
for all announcements, auto attendant greetings, music-onhold files, voicemail greetings and messages.
In a multi-unit setup, auto attendants and music-on-hold
files are automatically copied to each unit. It ensures that
if one system goes down, all other units can continue
functioning.
A number of systems out there are billed as 4-port or
6-port voicemail systems, which means that there can only
be four or six callers or users in the voicemail at once.
FortiVoice can answer calls, both PSTN and VoIP, on all its
lines with an auto attendant or send them to voicemail,
and simultaneously allow local extensions to check
voicemail.
There are some limitations to recording lengths within the
system, but they don’t tend to cause issues. For instance,
the maximum recording length for auto attendants and
voicemail greetings is five minutes. You will have trouble
finding customers who need greetings longer than one
minute!
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To configure a FortiVoice SMB system, you use the
FortiVoice software. And to configure the FortiVoice
software, you have to connect your system to a computer
that’s running the software. We do this three different
ways.
First, the RJ-45 network port. When you plug it into the
network with the computer on it, the software on the
computer can detect the system through the IP connection.
And a FortiVoice system will automatically detect any other
FortiVoice system on the local area network.
Second, you can also plug a FortiVoice system directly
into the computer you want to use with a crossover
cable to automatically connect. (For those of you who
aren’t networking hotshots, this uses APIPA, which is a
networking protocol that allows automatic connection
without configuring IP addresses).
Third and last, if you have correctly opened the firewall
ports, you can connect to a customer’s system remotely
using their public IP address or FQDN. This, obviously, is
great for moves, adds and changes to a customer’s system
without having to do a site visit, and lots of our resellers do
this all the time. If you aren’t sure of the local IP address,
you can use a regular phone and dial *56 to get its private
IP address and manually connect from the software.
Telephone lines
Now let’s take a look at some of the configuration elements
in the FortiVoice Management software. This is the
Telephone Lines page. Most of this is self-explanatory, but I
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just want to touch on a few tips and tricks that you might
not be aware of.
Distinctive ring
FortiVoice supports Distinctive ring. Distinctive ring is, of
course, the phone company service, sometimes referred
to as Identi-call, that allows users to give out different
numbers on the same line that ring the line with different
ring patterns.
Each line port supports up to two distinctive ring numbers,
which is to say that the calls can be treated differently, like
being sent to different extensions or auto attendants.
FortiVoice doesn’t care whether these are long or short ring
pulses, but pays attention to the number of ring pulses
contained within the set ring time. In North America, the
standard ring time is six seconds. So two ring pulses within
that window would be treated as distinctive ring 1, and
three ring pulses would be treated as distinctive ring 2.
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Now, if you don’t activate the correct distinctive ring
checkbox here, any ring pattern on that line will be treated
as a call from the main number. If you need to check
which number has which pattern, an easy way is to call the
number and watch the front lights. If the line light flashes
twice, check the box for distinctive ring 1. If the light
flashes three times, check the box for distinctive ring 2.
And note that entering the phone numbers in this section
is strictly for labeling. The phone number fields aren’t
required for the configuration. It’s good to put them in
for future troubleshooting so you have a record of the
customer’s phone numbers, but they won’t affect the
config at all.
Line detected at initialization
Another aspect of the Telephone Lines screen that can
help you with troubleshooting is this Line detected at
initialization indicator at the top right.
This is a key thing to check. The text here will display
either Yes or No. It tells you whether the FortiVoice system
61
detected any on-hook voltage on the line port, which is
useful when trying to troubleshoot line-related problems,
such as inability to seize a line, or inbound calls not being
answered. If the text says No, it could indicate the line is
not connected, dead, or that the line port is faulty.
Phone line services
In the Phone Line Services section here, most of the boxes
are for your reference only. The Transfer and Clear and
3-Way Calling/Conference checkboxes will allow you to use
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the Same Line Connect function of the system, which we’ll
cover later. But make sure that the customer has this as a
service on their lines before activating them.
Line optimization
Here, under Line Optimization, you’ll find a button that
runs a test on the lines to ensure the correct impedance is
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set. This is very important when using IP phones to ensure
the best audio performance.
Call handling
Down here in the Call Handling section is where a lot of the
power of FortiVoice systems lie.
Each line can have unique call handling, with different
routing options. You also have the ability to have different
routing options for your distinctive rings, combined with
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the mode functions, which allow calls to be handled
differently during the day and after hours, and differently
on holidays. It’s a highly flexible set of parameters that will
allow you to tailor the system to your customers’ needs.
You have choices for answering a call in this pulldown
menu, and you control whether to answer immediately
or after a set number of rings. It’s important to know
that if you set a line to ring extensions only, the system
can’t invoke call cascade options. Until the call has been
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answered by an auto attendant or transferred from another
extension, it can’t follow the programmed call cascade
sequence. We’ll look at the particulars of call cascades later.
Here we’re going to select ring extensions from the menu,
and press the Edit button to select our extensions to ring.
Ring sequence
The Edit button opens the Ring Sequence window where
you can set the ring sequence for calls. For example, if
you have a receptionist, you can have her phone ring first,
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and everyone else’s in the office start ringing on the third
ring. So you can see that you have a lot of options for call
handling here.
Configuring PRI
Let’s look at how you configure your PRI service. You need
the latest version of the FortiVoice management software,
7.31.
You go to the IP Configuration page, and if you have a
100T on the network, you’ll get this new box called PRI
Interface Address.
If you’re working with TalkSwitch legacy customers, be
aware that 7.31 isn’t compatible with VS systems and older,
so you can’t network an FVC-100T with a VS or
CVA system.
To optimize the system’s efficiency, PRI traffic has its own
processor, so it needs its own IP address. You configure that
here, and it’s essential that you give it a unique IP address
on your subnet, or your PRI calls won’t work.
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Next, you go to the PRI Numbers page to set up your main
number and your DIDs. You can have up to 100 numbers
in total, and each can have its own call handling. Call
handling options are the same as for PSTN and VoIP lines.
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The first number, at ID 1, is labeled Main Number. The rest
are labeled Number. The main number is also a hidden
fall-through. If a DID is configured incorrectly, the call will
follow the handling for the main number.
There are a couple of other settings under PRI Settings
in the Options menu, and you’ll probably never have to
change these from the defaults. If you do need to change
them, the service provider will tell you what they need to be.
Finally, Line Build Out is a carrier setting that has to do with
the distance between the provider and the customer. The
longer the distance, the more power required to keep the
signal stable.
PRI Channels is just the number of voice channels. These
are also known as B-channels or bearer channels by some
providers, because they bear the traffic. The other channel,
the signalling channel, is the D channel that’s under
Advanced Settings. By default, this is channel 24 in the US
and Canada and 16 everywhere else.
In the US, providers will tell you or your customer what the
correct setting is. If you are in doubt, set it to 0db.
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In Canada, providers give their customers T1 adapters to
use on their premises, so the setting is always short.
Other settings
And there are a couple of other things that you’ll configure.
For configuring line appearance on one of our IP phones,
you go to the extension configuration window, and your
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PRI numbers will appear on the Line Appearance list in the
same way that VoIP numbers do, so you just select them
and they’re good to go.
Line hunt groups also work the same way as for VoIP. On
the Line Hunt Groups page, you just select PRI Lines as your
Line type.
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For the caller ID of your extensions, you can set it to the
main number or a specific DID number. Set this on the
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Local Extensions/Fax page, under the Additional Settings
tab in the Caller ID Settings section.
Signal type
There are three flavors of PRI standards in the US and
Canada, and the 100T supports two. These are modeled
on different sets of standards. National ISDN-2 is the most
common that you’ll run into, called NI-2.
The second is Nortel DMS, which was based on NI-2
standards but had included a bunch of various bells and
whistles from the old Nortel days. The 100T supports full
NI-2 functionality with a Nortel DMS service, so a pure
NI-2 customer and a Nortel DMS customer will work the
same way.
The third, 5ESS, is not supported. It’s a less prevalent
standard designed by AT&T.
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In the rest of the world, everybody uses Net5.
And, in case anybody ever asks about frame format or
line coding we support, here’s the info. And this is in the
hardware spec guide for the device, so you don’t need to
memorize it. The ability to change these is hidden so that
customers can’t mess them up. If a provider tells you that
it needs to be something other than what you see here,
you’ve got to give our TAC guys a call
Auto attendants
FortiVoice SMB systems come with 20 auto attendants.
These are system wide, so it doesn’t matter how many units
you have, there are always 20 auto attendants. Remember
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that each auto attendant has a maximum recording length
of five minutes, but that’s more then ample to give callers
the options or directions they require.
Routing options
Each auto attendant has 6 single-digit routing options,
from 0 to 5, that can be programmed for a range of options. So the auto attendant can tell the caller to press 2,
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for instance, to go to a local extension, ring group, or
another menu.
Possibilities
As you can see, you can even send a caller to another auto
attendant. This is great for cases where you have callers
that require different languages. The main greeting can
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say, “Para Espanol, presione dos”, and they get routed to
another auto attendant that’s in Spanish. You can tree the
callers to multiple levels.
Also, you can see at the end of each single-digit option
there’s a language pulldown menu for setting the language
of the system prompts. English is the default language,
but we also support French and Spanish, which can be
loaded into the system. So you can set the system prompt
language played to the caller after they hit the option. In
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the example of our Spanish auto attendant, any system
prompts, like when the system says, “one moment please”
will be in Spanish. And each of the options can have different languages, so you can set up multilingual systems for
businesses that have multilingual customers.
Fax detection
FortiVoice also has fax detection, so if the system detects a
CNG tone, it can route the call to your fax extension if you
want. You just configure that in this area.
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Action performed after
Once in a while you’ll get a caller who is using an old
rotary phone or didn’t hear the options or got confused
or whatever, and just doesn’t enter any options after the
auto attendant has finished its spiel. If the user doesn’t
make a selection, the system has the ability to route the call
anyway, and you set that right here. Typically you’d send
this call to the receptionist or your sales ring group, but
you have several options here. By default, this is configured
to hang up, so it is advisable to configure this for your
customer.
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You can choose to play the auto attendant again to the
caller, but if it’s a caller with an old rotary phone, you’ll trap
them in a loop.
If you do set it to play the auto attendant again, the system
will only play the auto attendant a maximum of 10 times
before it disconnects the line, so you can’t have a line
engaged indefinitely in the event of failing to receive a
disconnect/clear from the local telco. And really, after the
10th time, the caller should have been able to make a
selection.
Loading greetings
The Load Greeting button is where you can load
professionally-recorded greetings into the system. The file
must be in an 8 kHz, 8 bit, mono, u-law wav format.
Other options
While listening to an auto attendant, the caller can enter
a local extension, remote extension or ring group if they
know the number. So it’s not just the options listed here on
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the configuration page. They can also dial directly if they
know who they’re looking for.
We do not allow 6, 7, 8 or 9 as one-touch options, as
they’re reserved for advanced functions. The call back
menu is 6, whereas 7 is for PBX transfer and 8 and 9 are
for call bridge. You can learn more about those functions in
the FortiVoice User Guide.
Transfer preferences
Finally, for some reason, some customers don’t want callers
hearing the “one moment please” prompt played when
callers are routed from the auto attendant. It’s easy to turn
it off. In the software, go to Options > Transfer Preferences.
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In the popup window, click on the From Auto Attendant
tab. Under Auto Attendant Transfer Prompts, check the box
to disable the playing of this prompt.
User privileges
User privileges control the lines and features an extension
can use. You can set different profiles to apply to management and staff, for example, or for different departments.
You can also route or block calls to specific numbers. Each
extension must have a user privilege profile. This is also
known as class of service.
Outgoing Access
The Outgoing Access area controls the hunt groups an
extension can use. If a user dials a hunt group without
access, a PIN code will be required to gain access. By
default, Profile 1 has access to all hunt groups.
Remote Extensions — Allows users to call remote
extensions.
Ring Groups — Allows users to call or transfer calls to Ring
Groups.
Speed Dial — Allows users to dial system speed dials.
Command Mode — Allows users to enter command mode
to make changes to the system.
Paging — Allows users to page other extensions or use the
overhead paging system.
Global Dial Plan — Allows users to call or transfer calls to
other locations.
Call Bridge (DISA) Access — Call bridge access allows the user
to call into the system and seize an outbound line for calls.
Log in/out of Ring Groups — Allows users to join or leave
ring groups.
Feature Access
Call Barge — Allows a user to join another user’s call. This
feature is restricted to calls connected via PSTN telephone
line to an outside party.
Check the features that you wish this profile to have
access to.
Intercom Calls — Allows users to call another extension.
Typically, courtesy phones aren’t allowed to call other
extensions.
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Additional settings
Personal Identification Numbers
If your user profiles have access to call bridge or require a
PIN code to get outbound access, you must assign PIN codes
to the users. PIN codes must be 4 to 8 digits. PINs can be
assigned a different user privilege profile to supersede the
current active profile to provide additional access if required.
Routing and blocking
The routing and blocking rules control the numbers that
can be dialed by users from the system and the lines they
access. Each rule can be applied to any of the user privilege
profiles to control which extensions are allowed to dial long
distance or international calls.
Routing handles outgoing calls depending on the leading
digits. It can also prefix phone numbers with certain carrier
codes depending on the leading digits and time of day so
calls can use specific telephone lines, alternative carriers, or
VoIP lines for least-cost routing. For example, you can route
international calls to a VoIP service provider and local calls
to a carrier offering discounted rates.
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If the user dials a hunt group number, routing and blocking
rules can override the selection and use a different hunt
group depending on the leading digits.
The leading digits are the first numbers dialed when placing
a telephone call. For example, “1900” are the leading
digits of 1-900-555-1234.
Calls with leading digits that do not match the routing and
blocking rules will be routed to the hunt group originally
dialed by the caller.
Routing and blocking acts on the longest leading digits
entry matching the dialed number. For example, an entry in
the routing and blocking rules blocks numbers with leading
digit “1” to prevent long-distance calls. However a second
entry routes numbers with leading digits “1800” through a
hunt group because they are toll-free. Because the second
entry (1800) is longer than the first entry (1), the second
entry has precedence.
Therefore a call with leading digits “1800” is routed, even
though leading digit “1” would otherwise cause it to be
blocked. This reduces the number of rules required and can
restrict calls to all but specific area codes or countries.
• Leading digits can be 1–11 numbers in length.
• The leading digits exclude the hunt group number dialed
by the user.
Carrier codes
A carrier code is prefixed to the phone number dialed by
the user. It tells the telephone company to route the call to
an alternative carrier. For example, the carrier code could
be a calling card number and PIN number. You can set the
system to use different carrier codes based on the leading
digits and the time of day.
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• Carrier codes can be up to 1–24 characters in length.
• Carrier codes can include numbers, *, #, “,” (comma
for 2-second pause), and w (for wait-for-dial-tone). A
2-second pause is automatically added after dialing a
carrier code.
Each entry in the routing and blocking table can have one
or two carrier codes. Carrier code 1 is either used all day, or
from Start time 1 until Start time 2. Carrier code 2 is used
from Start time 2 until Start time 1.
Use of Carrier Selection Prefix and Carrier Codes may require a subscription to a carrier’s discount calling plan. This
service may not be available in some countries and on some
telephone companies’ telephone lines. Carrier Selection
Prefix may not be required if a “Pre-Selection” service is
provided by the telephone company.
Local extension configuration
Each FortiVoice SMB system has capacity for analog and
IP phones. You set the extension type when you add the
extension here on the Local Extensions/Fax page. The limit
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of the number of analog phones is based, of course, on
the number of analog extension ports on the back of the
system. You can’t have an analog phone attached to the
system without an analog port to plug it in to!
When you click Add to configure an extension, you can
just fill in the screens that come up, and then you’ll have
this extension area available to see or edit your choices. I
just want to draw your attention to a couple of fields here.
First, the fields for the extension user’s names are important, because they’ll be displayed on the phone for internal
calls and used by the dial-by-name directory. If the name
fields aren’t filled in, the user won’t be in the dial-by-name
directory.
The next field is the Phone type.
When you add an extension, you need to assign it a number.
You can use a 3, 4 or 5-digit plan for extensions, ring
groups, mailboxes and speed dials in your system. The
default is 3 digits. You can change it on the Administration
page. This selection is system-wide; you can’t have a mix,
for example, of 3 and 5-digit extension numbers.
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The available numbers are:
3-digit numbers: 100 to 899
Regardless of the number of digits used, a block of 50
numbers is allocated to VoIP speed dials. By default, the
VoIP speed dials are 350 to 400.
You can also set the language for each extension. This
is the language of the prompts for this user when they
check their voicemail or enter commands. This is set for
each extension individually, so if you have both English and
Spanish speaking staff, for instance, their phones can work
in the language that’s right for them. You can also set the
languages via the user privileges page.
Analog vs. IP?
Disadvantages? The biggest issue with analog phones
is lack of line appearance. If your customer wants line
appearance, and in our experience many of them do,
you’re going to have to sell them IP phones, because
analog phones don’t support line appearance.
There’s also the need for separate phone wiring. Now, the
wiring may already be present in the office, especially if
you’re replacing another phone system with FortiVoice. But
if not, you’ll need phone wiring, whereas IP phones don’t.
IP phone advantages? First, IP phones can be placed
anywhere on the network, so if someone moves, they
simply plug their phone to another network drop. You
don’t need to move wires in the wiring closet.
A lot of resellers and customers ask us which phones are
better, analog or IP? The answer is, it depends! Based on
the customer, one may be a better fit than the other. Or
sometimes you’ll suggest a mix of the two.
Let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of each.
For analog phones, the advantages are; use any off-the-shelf
phone. If you have a phone that you love, simply plug it
in and use it as an extension. Any analog phone will work
with the system.
Analog phones are also quick and easy to install. You just
plug them in and go.
Troubleshooting is easy. You can plug in a working phone,
and if you don’t get dial tone, you know there is a wiring
problem.
Analog phones are less expensive, typically.
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There’s less cabling to do if you use the pass-through port
of the phone. And network drops are easy to test for
network connectivity. You just use a PC.
One disadvantage is that IP phones are more complicated.
You have to be aware of network topologies and
infrastructure to ensure that they work well.
The selection is limited compared to analog phones. IP
phones have to be tested to ensure they work with the
system, unlike analog phones, so we only support the
use of phones that we’ve tested and approved. If you use
other phones, you have to configure them manually, and
that could greatly increase the cost of support for you in
troubleshooting.
Finally, IP phones are typically more expensive than their
analog counterparts.
Call handling
Each extension has its own unique Call Handling section,
and I won’t get into too much detail about this, as all of
the options are covered in the user guide.
There are just a couple of key elements that I want to
mention. First, each extension can have unique handling
for two modes, typically during and after hours. We do not
offer Holiday mode on extensions, since it’s most commonly
handled the same at the extension level as the handling of
Mode 2. Each local extension can have unique handling for
if the phone is busy, or if it’s not answered after a number
of rings that you set, or if it’s on do not disturb. This is also
where you set up call screening, on the Answered tab.
That’s where you prompt the caller to state their name,
and, if you choose not to answer the call, how it gets
routed.
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Each of those four call scenarios have up to three levels
for configuration, so a call could get routed to your cell
phone if you don’t answer, then out to the receptionist,
and finally, if the receptionist is busy, to your voicemail. You
specify what you want for each extension, and during each
mode, so there’s great flexibility for the users.
One thing that’s important to understand is that a call will
stay in the call handling for the duration of the call, unless
it is answered and transferred to another extension or
routed through an auto attendant. So for example, if you
set your Busy option to go to your remote extension and
the remote does not answer, the call will follow the Local
Extensions Busy option, and not the Remote Extension No
Answer option.
These are the call handling options available for local
extensions, and once again, this is fully covered within the
user guide. But to quickly cover this, you can send calls to a
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voice mailbox, another local extension, a remote extension,
a ring group, an auto attendant to play more options or
even to another FortiVoice system via a VoIP number.
There are two options that are unique to Local Extensions.
First, Invoke Call Waiting. If you are on a call and you have
configured this option for your Busy cascade, you will get a
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tone indicating another call and the caller ID of that caller.
You can answer that call or allow it to continue following
the Busy call handling.
Second, you can queue at extension — when configured,
the caller is put on hold at your extension, until either you
answer the caller or the caller selects the option offered
by the prompt to go to your voicemail. The caller will get
prompted every 90 seconds to see if they wish to continue
holding or bail. This is configurable, so you can change it if
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you want. The biggest difference compared to call waiting, is that they can stay on hold longer, but you don’t get
the CID information about that caller. You get a hold tone
every 90 seconds indicating a caller is there, and you can
choose to retrieve that caller at any time. You can refer to
the phone’s user guide for retrieving queued calls.
Remote extensions
Each FortiVoice SMB system comes with capacity for half as
many remote extensions as there are local extensions. So
if you have an FVC-100, for instance, you get 50 remote
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extensions. Remotes are extensions that are located offpremise, and can be someone’s cell phone, a home phone,
local or long-distance number or whatever.
Let’s look at the config. When you click Add to configure
a remote, a window pops up. Each remote extension has
a First and Last name field so that the user can be part
of the dial-by-name directory. Now, if a user has both a
local and remote extension, and this is likely to be very
common, I would advise not entering the name into the
remote extension page, or callers can find the way to reach
them directly on their cell phone, which may not be what
you want. Of course, it’s fine if you’re using the remote
extension for a teleworker and you want people to access
them from the dial-by-name directory. Just remember that
any name you put here can be accessed by anyone who
uses the directory.
The Remote phone number field itself is the number that
FortiVoice is going to dial when someone enters the remote
extension’s number, or when a call gets sent to that remote
extension via a cascade. Once again, this can be a local or
long-distance number, but it must be entered exactly as you
would dial it on a PSTN line if you were just making a call.
So if, for instance, you are in an area that requires 10-digit
dialing, enter all 10 digits.
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Finally, you can set the hunt group to use when calling this
number. By default, the FortiVoice system will use a second
line when calling a remote extension, and you can specify
which hunt group to use when calling. Now, if you have
3-way calling on your phone line, you can enable the Use
same line connect option to forward the call back out over
the same line.
Same or second line?
So, how do you decide whether to use a second line or
the same line for a remote extension call? That’s a good
question, and a lot of people ask it. There are benefits
to both, depending upon the configuration or how the
customer wishes to use the system.
By using two lines, you get one of the most powerful
features of the system: the ability to transfer a call back to
the system.
All you do from the remote extension is dial **, which
places the call on hold. The remote is still connected to
the system, and can dial a local extension, ring group or
another remote. This is a great feature. For instance, if I get
a remote extension call to my cell and the caller needs to
speak to their account manager, I hit ** and dial the account manager’s extension. The call is transferred without
the caller having to hang up and call again.
Another advantage to the second line is that when a call
is redirected to a remote, the caller is kept on hold at the
FortiVoice system, listening to music the whole time. The
caller is completely unaware that the call is being bounced
around attempting to get a hold of me, nor that the call is
going to my cellphone.
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However, when calls are sent to the remote using a second
line, both lines are engaged for the duration of the call.
One line has the caller called in to the system, and one
has you connected from your cellphone. Those lines can’t
be used by anyone else, so depending upon the number
of lines you have, or depending on whether you like long
calls, people back at the office might not be able to call
out, or customers might not be able to call in. So this is
a phone usage thing that you need to discuss with the
customer.
Same line connect, on the other hand, uses only one line.
You get the maximum phone usage with the minimum line
usage, and so the minimum cost.
You need to have Transfer and Clear or 3-Way Calling
activated on a line to use same line connect. 3-Way calling
is an additional service on residential lines, and although it’s
traditionally already on business lines, some telcos charge
extra for it.
Transfer and Clear
Using same line connect also blocks the ability to transfer
calls back to FortiVoice. You’re now connected directly to
the caller from your cell, so there’s no way to send the call
back to the system.
There is also no music on hold when transferring. In order
to use this feature, the calling party is put on hold at the
local telco, and they typically don’t play music on hold.
Some customers don’t like this, as they think people will
hang up if they hear silence. The system prompts the caller,
indicating that their call is being transferred and they will
hear silence, but some customers won’t want that.
My rule of thumb? I recommend same line connect to
anyone with two lines, and anyone with more then six
lines I recommend using a second line. In between, I simply
provide them the options and let them decide.
If you have Transfer and Clear as a service of your phone
line, FortiVoice can transfer the call to the remote extension
and then disconnect the line, which frees it for more
inbound calls. This is a great way of handling calls with the
fewest lines possible.
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Same line connect
If you want to configure FortiVoice for same line connect,
it’s a simple process. First ensure that under Lines and
Greetings > Telephone Lines that you check any phone line
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that has 3-Way calling. This is in the Phone Line Services
section.
Next, on the Remote Extensions page below the pulldown
menu for Connect using you will see a checkbox for Use
same line connect. Simply check the box. If the box is
greyed out, go back and make sure you have 3-way calling
configured on at least one line, and make sure that line
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is in the remote extension’s hunt group you’ve set in the
Connect using pulldown menu of hunt groups. If the
service is not available on the line, then it will forward the
call out over a second phone line from the hunt group.
Remote call handling
Each remote extension also has its own Call Handling
section. It’s almost identical to the local extensions options,
except that we don’t offer do not disturb for remotes.
That’s because there is no way to notify a cell or remote
user that DND is enabled.
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As with the local extensions, you can configure the call
handling based on modes.
You have all the same functionality for busy, and no answer
scenarios, each up to three levels deep.
Now, you can see that under the Answered tab you
have three options: If you set this to stay connected, you
answer the call at the remote extension and the caller gets
connected. Setting this to play accept/reject prompt keeps
the caller on hold while the system plays you a prompt
asking if you wish to accept the call. If you don’t respond,
the call will do what you have configured rejected calls to
do right here.
Now, with cell phones it’s always best to set it to play
accept/reject prompt, because some cell phone providers
play messages to the caller if the cellphone user is
unavailable. If that happens, the call can no longer follow
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the extension’s call handling. Also this ensures that calls
are directed to the FortiVoice voicemail, instead of the cell
phone voicemail.
The third option, play caller’s name first, is similar to the
play accept/reject prompt, except that it prompts the caller
for their name first and plays it to you so you can decide
whether to accept the call.
As with local extensions, any call will stay in the call
handling unless it is answered and transferred to another
extension or routed through an auto attendant.
So here is the list of options available within the call
handling for remote extensions, and once again, this is
fully covered within the User guide.
You can send calls to a voice mailbox, another local
extension, a remote extension, a ring group, an auto
attendant to play more options or even to another
FortiVoice system via a VoIP number.
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The main difference between remote call handling and
local call handling is that here we don’t have queueing or
call waiting. Typically, your cell phone itself will offer call
waiting, so the system will simply send a second call to the
phone, and handle it as specified in the config here, based
on whether it returns a busy signal, or x number of rings
or whatever.
Ring and page groups
Every FortiVoice SMB system has capacity for 10 ring or
page groups. That’s system wide, so if you have more than
one unit networked in one location, there will still be 10
ring groups. Remote extensions can’t be in ring groups, but
external IP extensions can.
You add new ring groups in much the same way you
configure extensions. First, you give your group a name and
assign a number. You can set a ring pattern for each group,
which consists of the regular ring for the region as well as
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five alternative ring patterns. You can make ring group calls
instantly identifiable, so your sales guy at his desk can tell if
the incoming call is directly aimed at him, or if it’s come in
through the sales ring group.
You can label your group here. As with extensions, you
click Add to configure a ring group. You put the name in
here, but note that ring groups aren’t part of the dial-byname directory.
At the bottom of the page you have the Caller ID Options
area. Here you can set whether you wish the ring group
number or name be inserted into the Caller ID string sent
to the phone. This shows on your phone’s screen the
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selection the caller made from the auto attendant. So it’ll
give you the ring group number in front of the caller ID info
if you check the first option, or say Sales for the sales ring
group, for example, if you pick the second option.
Each Ring Group also has its own Call Handling section,
which, again, is almost identical to the local extension
handling, except that we don’t offer do not disturb for ring
groups either.
Once again, we have the controls for handling calls based
on the modes, and the Busy, No Answer and Answered at
tabs, similar to the local and remote extensions pages.
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Each call scenario has up to three levels.
As with local extensions, a call will stay in the call handling
unless it’s answered and transferred to another extension or
routed through an auto attendant.
And here’s the list of options available for call handling for
ring groups, and once again, this is fully covered within the
user guide. So you can send calls to a voice mailbox, a local
extension, a remote extension, another ring group, an auto
attendant to play more options or to another FortiVoice
system via a VoIP number.
The big difference here is queue at ring group. This option
allows calls to get queued to the whole group. It’s like UCD,
or Unified Call Distribution. If all of the extensions in a
group are busy, a new call goes into the queue. When one
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of the extensions hangs up, that extension starts ringing
10 seconds later with the queued call. The 10-second gap
gives the extension user a chance to flip on do not disturb
if they have to leave their desk for whatever reason.
The great thing is that with our IP phones, you can monitor
queues, so you can see how many calls are getting queued.
People in the queue get the option to exit and return back
to the menu that they came from, if they no longer want to
keep holding.
Voicemail
FortiVoice systems come with built-in voicemail, and you set
that up here. There’s one mailbox for each of the local extensions, one for each of the 16 remote extensions, and 10
general boxes, which are typically used with ring groups.
Any voice mailbox can be converted to an announcement,
which basically plays the message and then disconnects.
You would use those in the event of listing hours of
operations or directions.
There are a few commands that you may not know about.
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During the voicemail greeting, you can press # to skip the
outbound message and just start recording your message.
If you press * it will return you to the Auto Attendant
from which you came. Pressing 8 will let you listen to your
messages menu.
While recording a message on voicemail, if the user hits any
digits on their phone, they will go to the voicemail menu,
and they’ll get the option to record their message again,
back up to make other selections or hang up.
Here’s the Voicemail Preferences page. On this page you
can configure parameters, all of which are system wide, so
they affect all mailboxes within the system.
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In the Mailbox Setting section, you can set the order in
which messages play: the newest message first or oldest
message first.
Here, you set pager or remote phone notification. You
choose whether to notify on the first message left, or every
message left. The idea here with first message left is that
when you check in on your phone, the system only tells you
that there’s something there for you, rather than indicating
every time a new message arrives.
Maximum recording length is the time the callers have to
leave messages. The default is two minutes, and the range
is one to eight minutes, in one-minute increments.
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The Blank Message Setting section helps deal with hangups. If you check Remove blank messages and hang-up
automatically, you specify the length a message must be to
be considered valid. The highest parameter is five seconds.
Any less than what you specify will be erased to avoid
getting messages that just contain the click of someone
hanging up. Some customers don’t want this activated,
because they like to get the CID information from the call.
It comes down to your customer’s preferences.
You can also configure a 0 dial out option or, in some
countries, it’s 9. With this, if the caller presses 0 during
your outgoing voicemail message, the call redirects to your
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remote extension, receptionist or a ring group. These parameters are mode dependant, so you can set up different
routing during and after hours.
The pulldown choices are just like any other cascade
option, so it can send the call to a local extension, remote
extension, ring group, auto attendant, announcement and
so on.
This is so that, for instance, if a sales member is on
vacation, they can leave an outgoing message saying
they’re out of the office, but to reach anyone else in
sales press 0, which can be configured to go to the sales
ring group.
Also, just because you configure this option it doesn’t mean
that you have to tell people in the greeting that they can
dial this option. For instance you may wish family members
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be able to reach you at any time, but you don’t want all
of the calls to your local extension to be able to reach you
at your cell phone. Simply configure the 0 option to go to
your remote extension, and then tell them about it without
mentioning it in the recorded greeting. If your customers
want to use this, make sure you tell them to give the caller
time to react. They have to press 0 during the outgoing
voicemail message. If they press 0 after the message is
finished, when the system is trying to record them leaving
their message, it doesn’t work. It’ll just boot them back to
the voicemail options.
Voicemail notification
There are multiple methods of notifying users when
messages have been left in their voicemail.
On the Message Waiting Light tab you can specify which
extensions should flash their message waiting light when
a message is left. Now, typically you would do this for
general voice mailboxes, but it can be applied to any
mailbox. If the user is notified of multiple mailboxes,
when they hit their voicemail button they’ll get a prompt
indicating which mailboxes have messages and to choose
one. For instance, you’d hear, “you have two new messages
in voicemail 111, three new messages in voicemail 411.”
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You can also set cell phone and pager notification. With
either one, FortiVoice will call to notify that a voicemail
has been delivered. With cell notification, the FortiVoice
system will call your cell. When you answer, you will hear
the prompt indicating that you have new voicemail. If you
accept the call, you will be taken into your voice mailbox.
Keep in mind the phone number must be entered exactly
as you would dial it normally.
FortiVoice can also be configured to send you e-mail
notification of voicemail, either to simply notify you, or with
the recording attached to the e-mail for you to listen to on
your PC. You set that right here.
Music on hold
On the On-Hold / Ringback page in the software, you can
set when music is played to the caller. You have a choice of
playing music or a “double beep” hold tone when calls are
placed on hold. When calls are ringing extensions or ring
groups, the caller can hear music or ring back.
If you choose music to be played on transfer, callers won’t
hear the ‘one moment please’ when calls are sent from
one local extension to another in a call handling, they will
simply hear continuous music.
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As for the music source, you have two choices: one to play
music via the music input jack. You just plug in a radio, CD
player or mp3 player. Or you can load a .wav file into the
system right here. When loading the file into memory, you
will have the ability to adjust the volume in the pulldown
box. I recommend you call and listen to ensure that it’s
properly set compared to your auto attendant recordings.
FortiVoice™
Reseller Training
Part Six: FortiVoice SMB Systems and VoIP
Converting voice to data
for VoIP
So VoIP requires a high-speed broadband connection even
for the most compressed call. The bandwidth requirements
are very important in determining call capacity, as we will
see shortly.
Choosing a codec
VoIP all starts with a Codec.
A codec converts analog sound into a digital format,
usually with some compression. The amount of
compression presents a trade-off. Less compression means
better voice quality, but it requires more bandwidth.
These are the codecs FortiVoice uses, with their bandwidth
requirements:
• G.711 (100 kbps in each direction)
• G.729 (25 kbps in each direction)
To give you an idea of the quality of different codecs, a call
will sound as good as or better than a regular phone call
with G.711 compression. A call encoded with G.729 will
sound better than a cell phone call.
While G.711 provides excellent quality, it can cause delays
due to the larger packet size, and some connections may
not provide enough upstream bandwidth to accommodate
the required number of simultaneous VoIP calls.
You can use higher quality calls if your customer has a
private WAN or a VPN between locations. Those kinds
of dedicated networks can reduce or eliminate the delay
associated with routing packets over the Internet.
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To choose the correct codec, it’s important to consider the
upload speed of the connection and the desired number of
VoIP calls. Typically, the upload speed is one third or less of
the download speed. You should check with your service
provider to ensure you have an accurate upload speed.
The best way to determine the number of calls a location
can handle is to use the following calculation:
# of calls =
Upload speed ÷ 2
CODEC requirement
Firewalls and ports
Your customers will, of course, have a firewall between
their internet connection and their private network. You
need to have certain ports open in the firewall for VoIP calls.
First up is port 5060, which needs to be open for SIP
traffic. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, and it’s
the information that establishes the connection between
one VoIP device and another for communication. We’ll talk
more about SIP a little later. You’ll also see in my chart here
that each port includes a protocol, either UDP or TCP. 5060
is UDP.
Then we need a bunch of ports open for RTP traffic. RTP
stands for Realtime Transport Protocol, and RTP packets
are the ones that actually have your voice in them. So SIP
establishes the connection, and RTP traffic is the sound data.
The example I’m showing here is for a FortiVoice VoIP
system with 4 8-port units, which is the biggest FortiVoice
VoIP system you could install.
A port is a little metaphorical doorway that allows specific
traffic through the firewall. If you don’t have the ports
open, the calls can’t get past.
So these are the ports that need to be open. I’m going to
show you a bunch of numbers and acronyms here, but I’ll
define the acronyms as I go along for those of you who
aren’t completely up on these terms.
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6100-6114
(UDP) RTP for unit 1
6200-6214
6300-6314
6400-6414
And you need to open 8484 (TCP) for HTTP traffic, and
that’s for IP phone information.
And port 69 (UDP) for TFTP traffic, which is configuration
information for external IP phones.
Firewall settings
So, are the ports open? Here’s how you find out.
In the FortiVoice Management software, on the bottom of
the IP Configuration page, you’ll find the Firewall Settings
section.
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And here’s the LAN IP address of the gateway. If you click
on it, it’ll open a web browser where you can configure the
device’s firewall if you need to.
Beside Firewall Settings, you’ll find one of two possible
messages.
If it says Automatic (UPnP Enabled), you’re in luck. This is
what you’re looking for! It means that FortiVoice opened
all the ports in the firewall for VoIP, and everything should
be good to go.
However, if it says Manual port mapping required, you’re
going to have to manually open the ports in the firewall.
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The most important thing on this page is the Check Firewall
button. It checks if the ports are open and ready to rock.
If your automatic UPnP is showing, you should test the
firewall now. If you have to do manual port mapping, you
should check the firewall as soon as you’re done. If you
change anything anywhere you should check the firewall.
If you even think about changing something you should
check the firewall. Check the firewall every Tuesday if you
like. But check the firewall! Check the firewall! Check the
firewall!
UPnP
So let’s go look at what’s going on with the ports. If the
page indicates Automatic (UPnP Enabled), and you click on
the link, this window pops up, displaying all of the ports.
And there they are: SIP, RTP, HTTP and TFTP. You see the
port and the IP address that its traffic is being directed to.
The last column shows the status. It will either be a checkmark or an exclamation mark. If you see an exclamation
mark on one of the ports, it means the firewall didn’t allow
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that port to open. There could be a conflict or another port
forwarding rule or a device on the network already using
that port.
FortiVoice will attempt to open the ports and check that
the open ports are still open every five minutes. If you
reboot the router, within minutes FortiVoice will request
that the ports open up again.
Manual port mapping
If the software says Manual port mapping required, you
can click on that link and the system will show you a list of
the ports that need to be mapped.
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Port mapping example
Here’s an example of how you map ports on a Linksys
firewall. You click on the device link to open a browser for
the device, and you navigate to where you can change
the port forwarding rules. To set up a rule name for SIP,
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set the starting and ending port number to 5060, select
the protocol as UDP and enter the IP address of the
FortiVoice system.
Firewall test
Earlier I mentioned the all-important firewall test, which
checks whether the ports are open. It takes less than
15 seconds. When you run it, one of our servers sends
packets to the ports. As the system gets the packets, it’ll
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indicate the port passed in the FortiVoice Management
software. Failure to receive a packet results in a warning
next to the offending port, which looks like this.
The Troubleshooting Help link here will open another
window that looks like this. It explains what’s wrong and
gives some helpful suggestions to rectify the problem.
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I cannot stress to you enough that it’s extremely important
to run this test, especially when working with external IP
extensions. It will save you a lot of grief later on. Run the
Firewall Test!
What is a SIP Proxy and Registrar?
I mentioned SIP earlier, but let’s talk about it a little more.
SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, and it’s the
standard that connects VoIP entities to one another for
communication.
It’s helpful to understand that SIP’s basic architecture is
client/server in nature. So for a VoIP network, there’s a
server that acts as the registrar, and then all the phones or
other systems attached to it are the clients of that server.
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FortiVoice VoIP systems have the SIP Server built in, so
it’s easy. One FortiVoice system acts as the SIP proxy and
registrar. The other SIP end-points, which might be other
FortiVoice systems or IP phones in other locations, will
register with this FortiVoice unit.
And the good news is that all of this handled automatically,
so you don’t need to do much to enable these components.
IP Configuration
Okay, so now you’ve got your ports open and you’ve run
your firewall test and you understand SIP, so you’re ready to
configure the system settings. First, the IP address.
When the system powers up, it will attempt to obtain a
dynamic IP address from a DHCP server. If none is available,
it will use 192.168.1.200 for box 1.
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You can make the IP address static if you want, by selecting
Use configured IP and DNS information in the pulldown
menu.
Configuring WAN
If you’re connecting directly to the public internet or
working on a dedicated private network using a VPN, set
the WAN IP address to the same IP address as the FortiVoice
unit that’s acting as the local proxy.
You can also enter a FQDN that points to your public IP
address. You need this if you’re using a dynamic IP address
and external IP extensions, so that the phones can find the
FortiVoice system, even though its IP address changes.
By default, the system is configured for a dynamic IP address.
The FortiVoice system will check its IP address every five
minutes. If the unit can’t communicate with the server, the
public IP address will show as 0.0.0.0. This could indicate a
problem with Internet access or a DNS server issue.
When setting up a FQDN, it’s always best to ping the
FQDN name and compare it to the IP address detected by
FortiVoice to ensure they match.
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VoIP Profile
Now let’s look at configuring for a VoIP service provider.
Nothing to it. You just go to the VoIP Configuration
page. You choose the provider and click on the Update
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Configuration button. All corresponding fields are updated.
It’s that easy.
You can also manually configure a profile. Enter the
FQDN or IP address of the server into the Proxy, Registrar,
Outbound Proxy and Realm fields. If the provider is using
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something other then 5060, you can specify the port for
the server by entering a colon and the port number at the
end of the addresses.
WAN IP Address
Some service providers prefer to register with the private IP
address rather than the public IP address so they can detect
when devices are behind firewalls.
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Click the Additional Settings button.
If you check the Disable public IP address substitution box,
FortiVoice will send registration requests with its private
IP address.
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Codecs
You can specify which codecs a profile uses. Any codecs
that are not supported by a particular provider will be
disabled here, but you can customize this as you see fit.
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For instance, you might have a VoIP service provider that
prefers to use G.711, but you want to use G.729. You can
set that here. Note that it’s per profile, so you can make
one provider G.711 and another G.729.
VoIP Reservation
By default, FortiVoice shares its VoIP line capacity. But if
you want to guarantee the availability of a VoIP line for a
specific service, you can reserve lines.
So for instance, let’s say you have a teleworker with an
external IP extension and you want to make sure she has
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constant access to a line, you can reserve a line for those
calls.
You configure that here, in the Line Reservation section.
Click the Reserve VoIP Lines button.
Use the pulldowns to reserve the number of lines you need
for each service.
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When you reserve a line, it’ll always be available for that
service, but of course, it won’t be available for any other
use. And you’ll see, at the bottom of this window, the tally
shows the total number of available VoIP lines and how
many of them are shared and how many are reserved.
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If you’ve reserved more lines than you have services, a big
fat red warning will appear here to remind you that you
haven’t got any lines available for some services.
VoIP Numbers
Okay, so let’s look at the VoIP Numbers page. A system
can have up to 24 VoIP numbers. For service provider VoIP
phone numbers, depending upon the provider, you enter
the Country code, Area code and Number. Pay careful
attention to the format of the numbers that your ITSP
sends you. The number of digits and the way they want
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you to enter them varies widely from provider to provider.
If in doubt, check the service configuration guide from our
support site. We have one for each provider that has all
the up-to-date details. Each number with a service provider
will usually have a unique username and password. The
username is typically the VoIP number.
VoIP Call Handling
You set the call handling down here. VoIP lines can be
configured to handle incoming calls like regular telephone
lines, which provide nice consistency and familiarity
across all lines for both you and your customers. Routing
options include answering with an auto attendant, going
to voicemail and ringing extensions. Extensions can be
configured to ring in any sequence.
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Each line can be configured to perform unique actions
if required.
And, like regular telephone lines, VoIP lines can have
different routing options based on time-of-day and
holiday modes.
Line Hunt Groups
There are a total of 9 line hunt groups for controlling
outbound line selection. By default, hunt group 87 includes
VoIP lines for placing VoIP calls. If you are using VoIP as
your primary line type, you can change the line type of
hunt group 9 to a VoIP profile here.
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You can’t mix regular phone lines with VoIP lines in one
hunt group.
You can label your hunt groups to simplify the
configuration process.
VoIP Registration
It’s a good idea to check your VoIP registration at this
point. It can save a lot of time and frustration. Under
VoIP Numbers or VoIP Configuration, click on View All
Registrations. Beside your VoIP numbers you’ll see one of
the following messages:
1. Server not reachable
2. Invalid Username/Password
3. User Not Found (403/404)
4.Registered
In almost all cases where something is wrong and you
get one of the first three messages, it’s just a typo in the
information that’s in the configuration. Nothing more to it.
Let’s look at some of the reasons you may encounter these
messages, and how you can troubleshoot them.
Server Not Reachable — So, your FortiVoice system sends
out a request to a server to get things rolling, but the
warning comes back saying the server is not reachable.
What happened?
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This usually indicates one of two things are wrong. The IP
address for the registrar could be entered incorrectly, in
which case your attempt to register is going to the wrong
place. It’s zooming off into space somewhere. Check the
info you have to make sure it’s accurate.
The other common problem is that port 5060 is closed or
incorrectly configured at your location. So your message
made it to the server, and the server sent you a reply, but
your firewall blocked it. Doublecheck your port to make
sure it’s open. And note that this would not have happened
to you if you had run the firewall test like I told you to!
Invalid Username/Password — indicates that your
authentication credentials are incorrect. In this case, your
message reached the server okay, and the server returned
a message, which sailed through port 5060 just like it
was supposed to. But that message is a challenge from
the server requesting your username and password. Your
system sent that, but the server rejected it.
So now you need to verify the usernames and passwords
for the accounts that you are using.
User Not Found (403/404) — In this case, your port is
good, but a 40x message such as 403 or 404 implies that
the phone number you’re trying to register with is not a
recognized number. Check that the number is entered
correctly and make sure the account has been activated.
You’ll only see this in a service provider setup.
Registered — indicates that communication between the
client and server occurred just fine. The set-up is complete
and the systems should be able to make calls back and
forth.
SIP call
Okay, so once you’ve viewed the Registration Status, you
can start making VoIP calls. It’s pretty easy to troubleshoot
a setup. Based on where a call fails, you can determine
if there’s a configuration issue or a problem with the
customer’s firewall/router.
The service provider’s server will respond and the person
who placed the call should hear ringing in their handset.
When the far end answers the call, the audio starts to flow
using the RTP ports. Now, if the FortiVoice is successfully
registered, calls should always get to this stage without
problems.
If a call has problems, it’s usually one of two issues.
In a VoIP call, the FortiVoice system sends an invite message
to the number it wishes to contact.
If the party who made the call can’t hear the far-end party,
the RTP ports aren’t open. Run the firewall test to ensure all
port mappings are correct.
If the far-end cannot hear the client, the problem is most
likely with the service provider, and you should contact them.
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IP extension codecs
If it’s another FortiVoice unit or IP phone, the problem is
usually a firewall issue at that end.
Okay, so that’s basically it for setting up VoIP. Not so bad.
But now I’m going to return to codecs for a moment, and
talk a little bit about IP phones.
A lot of resellers ask about the codecs we use for our IP
phones. Well, here’s the skinny on that.
Internal IP extensions will always use G.711u for voicemail
or calls out on PSTN lines.
Internal IP extensions will use the negotiated codec for VoIP
calls through a service provider. They may end up using
G.729 if this is the preferred codec of the service provider.
External IP extensions will use the preferred codec listed
under the Troubleshooting menu, under Extensions > IP
extensions.
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IP phone registration
While we’re talking about IP phones, I just want to
explain to you how IP phones register. It’s a little different
depending on whether they’re in the office or outside of
the office.
When configuring an internal IP extension, you simply need
to ensure the extension is set up within the software, then
reboot the phone. The phone sends a request looking for
FortiVoice, and then requests its configuration file. After
downloading the files, the phone will register.
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To configure an external IP extension, it’s almost the
same story, except you enter the public IP address of the
FortiVoice unit in the phone itself and reboot. On bootup,
the phone then sends the request to FortiVoice for its
configuration file and to register.
Now, there is nothing you need to configure in the firewall
where the phone is located in order to get through the
firewall. FortiVoice will make the phone register every
30 seconds in order to keep communication up.
IP phone status
FortiVoice IP phones tell you their status on the screen.
There are three different states.
First, if it shows the default date and time only, the phone
was not able to pull down its configuration file. There’s
probably no file for the phone’s MAC address. Ensure the
MAC address is entered correctly in the Local Extensions/
Fax page of the FortiVoice Management software. If it’s an
external extension, ensure port 69 is open, and then run
the firewall test again.
Second, if the phone is showing the date and time but the
screen says No Service or the top two lights are flashing on
a FortiFone, the phone has pulled down the configuration
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file, but couldn’t register for some reason. In this case, you
want to ensure that the extension is configured as external,
ensure port 5060 is open and run the firewall test again.
And finally, if it shows the date and time and the extension
number, the phone has pulled down it’s configuration file
and successfully registered and everything is fine.
IP phone useful facts
And I have a couple of miscellaneous notes about IP
phones that are important to know. Internal IP extensions
do not use any VoIP ports on the system.
External IP extensions require a VoIP port for all calls,
including the user checking their voicemail.
Calls coming in from a VoIP service provider that get
redirected to an external IP extension, will use one VoIP
port for the duration of the call.
The only time a second port would be engaged is if the
extension transfers the call to another extension. Once the
call is transferred, the second port is released.
All traffic will be relayed through FortiVoice for an external
IP extension, including SIP and RTP traffic. This allows the
extension to place calls on hold and have the caller hear
music.
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VoIP CID
Calls from local extensions can have a particular VoIP caller
ID number for each of the service provider profiles. You set
that here on the Local Extensions/Fax page, by clicking the
Additional Settings button. Go to the Caller ID Settings tab
and this is what you’ll see.
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If you leave these fields at Default, the system will choose
the first available VoIP number in the list.
If you’re setting up a VoIP DID number for a customer, it’s
important to set the extension to use the right outbound
phone number.
IP extensions timers
And I just want to mention a couple of timers that are
configured within the system. Now, you shouldn’t have
to change these under ordinary circumstances. In rare
circumstances, you might be directed by our technical
support crew.
Internal IP extensions will, by default, re-register every
five minutes.
External IP extensions will register every 30 seconds by
default. This helps tunnel through firewalls and keep
ports open.
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If you do get directed to change these, they’re under the
Troubleshooting menu, under Extensions > IP Extensions.
Changing of the external IP registration intervals may result
in problems with calls getting made to those extensions,
due to firewall port binding timers. So again, you really
shouldn’t change this unless directly specified by our
support guys.
FortiVoice™
Reseller Training
Part Seven: Troubleshooting FortiVoice
SMB Systems
Part Seven: Troubleshooting FortiVoice SMB Systems
Front lights
Right light is off, left light is flashing red
There’s an IP address conflict, so the system’s network IP
address is the same as some other device’s on the network.
If the IP address of the system was automatically assigned
by a DHCP server, like your router, reboot the FortiVoice
unit so it can get a new IP address. If the system was
assigned a fixed IP address without using DHCP, you need
to provide it with an available IP address.
From your PC command window, send a ping command to
a candidate IP address. For example, 192.168.1.200. If the
ping is responded to, the address is assigned, and therefore
unavailable. If the response is a timeout, the IP address
should be available.
There are a lot of different flashing sequences that have
different meanings. The full list is in the user guide, so if
you see a light flashing and you don’t know what it means,
you can look it up. The following are the most common
indicators you’ll run into.
Both of the lights flash yellow together
The unit is identifying itself. This is a response to the
Identify feature in the Management software About
window, and it’s useful if you have a multi-unit system and
you need to know which box is which.
Both lights flash yellow alternately.
The system needs to be rebooted.
Left light is solid red, right light flashing yellow
The system prompts are incompatible or not loaded. Update
the firmware to latest version available for your region.
How do you do that? From the management software,
choose Tools > Update Firmware and follow the
instructions. That will fix your prompts.
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Assign it to the system on the IP Configuration page of the
software. Enter the IP address for the FortiVoice unit in the
appropriate Unit IP address box. For more information see
IP Configuration in the FortiVoice User Guide.
About page
On the About page of the FortiVoice Management
software, you will find a number of important things in the
System Information area. It tells you the current time of
the system and the current mode. Also, it will show all of
the system units detected on the network, as well as the
number of voicemail messages. One of the most important
things is the Last config change, as this is the last time a
configuration file was saved to the unit.
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This is useful when a customer reports a problem to
you. You can check the last time a configuration file was
changed. If it’s after the last time you were there, you know
they made changes, so you can ask what they modified to
give you a clue as to what the problem is.
System Information pop-up
On the About page of the FortiVoice Management
software, if you click on My system, a pop-up window
appears with the MAC address of each FortiVoice unit on
the network, with the current IP address, firmware version
and the up time of each unit. There is also an Identify
button in this window which, when you click it, will make
the line lights flash on the selected unit. This will allow you
to easily identify which is unit 1 and which is unit 2 and so
on.
Whenever reporting a problem to support, it is imperative
to note the firmware version, including the build number,
as hot fix releases could be available.
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Also, the up time can help you determine where problems
occurred. If the customer reports dropped calls, check
the up time. If it’s only a few minutes, the system was
rebooted. Was there a power outage? Did someone
accidentally reboot the system? If the unit has been up
since before the problems, it indicates a problem on the
phone line, not the system, and we would need to look at
the system logs to help determine why.
Enable Logging
You can easily enable logging on the system. Under the
Troubleshooting menu, go to Support Tools and select
Enable Logging. A pop-up window will appear with links to
enable logging of the system.
So these are the links to the two main logging components.
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SIP Trace Capturing traces all SIP messages sent and
received by FortiVoice. You’ll use this when you’re troubleshooting issues with an IP extension or VoIP Provider.
CP Logging is an extensive log that outputs all data for the
system. You’ll want this enabled when troubleshooting
firmware related problems.
When you click on one of these links, a new window will
appear. You enable the logging and enter the IP address of
the PC to which you wish the data sent and the port that
you wish it sent to. The port can be any open port. I use
1010 just to make things easy to remember.
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If you’re going to log issues, it’s a good idea to speak to us
in Technical Support first regarding the problem to ensure
the correct logs are generated.
UDP Logger
So, now you’re outputting the logs, but you need to
capture them.
The UDP Logger is a little app that captures the logs that
FortiVoice sends out and writes them to a text file.
This program is in the FortiVoice folder on your computer:
C:\Program Files\FortiVoice\FortiVoice Configuration and
then the number of the software; for example, 7.30\Utilities
The configuration is simple. Here you select the IP address.
If you’re on a desktop computer, you’ll probably only have
one IP address, so that’s easy. If you’re on a laptop, you
might have two; one for the wireless network and one
for the wired network. What you want to select is the IP
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address for the computer you are on that is registered on
the same network as the FortiVoice unit. And then you
select the port that is receiving the packets for calls. Click
the Start button to start capturing. When finished, click
Stop and the Save button.
Whenever reporting problems to support, it is extremely
important to note the time of the reported problem, the
extension that was engaged at the time, and, if you have it,
the number or reference to the type of call it was. The log
files can grow very large, so the more detail provided, the
quicker the support team can review the information and
provide feedback.
You can also access a direct web interface with a FortiVoice
system if you don’t have remote access to that system’s
software. This can happen if your customer didn’t give
you access or if you don’t know which computer of theirs
has the config software on it. You can still do a number of
helpful diagnostics.
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To access the web interface, enter the IP number of the
FortiVoice unit you want to work with into a browser, for
instance, http://192.168.1.200:8484
On the left hand side, you will see a number of links to
status pages. I’ll go through these right now to show you
what’s what here.
RTP Status
First, RTP Status. This opens the RTP Status page, which
shows currently connected calls. There are a number of
important components listed for each call; destination IP
address, negotiated codec, number of packets sent and
received.
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When you’re dealing with a VoIP issue, knowing the type of
codec that was used on a call can help a lot. If a customer
has limited bandwidth but uses G.711, they could get a lot
of dropped packets. If you’re working with an ITSP and you
get calls without audio or dropped calls, the IP address of
their gateway from these traces can help them figure out
which server to investigate.
RegServer Trace
Next, click on the Trace info and Regserver is in the list
there.
The RegServer Trace will display all registration attempts
and failures of the system. This can help if IP phones drop
off the network. You’ll see when a phone registered the
first time, and if it failed to re-register.
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Typically, you won’t have to worry about this with local
extensions. If an external IP extension has registration
trouble, the phone’s display will say No Service, or the
extension lights will flash.
RTP Trace
You can do an RTP Trace also, on the same page as the
RegServer Trace. The RTP Trace displays events related to
the RTP streams on VoIP calls, both for VoIP trunks and IP
extensions.
You can assess the quality of calls a customer is
experiencing looking at this information. You can also
choose Save Target As… under the File menu and save the
log as a text file.
You’ll see the logs are divided into critical, major, minor
and trace. Under the major logs, you can see the number
of sent and received packets, number of lost packets, jitter
buffer depth and the number of discarded packets.
The RTP Trace will only help you study PSTN calls with IP
phones or VoIP calls with analog phones, because when an
IP phone speaks to a VoIP trunk, FortiVoice simply relays the
RTP packets between the devices without tracking them.
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In this example, at the end of the second line and the
second last line, you see S N D / R C V, which indicates
the number of packets sent and received for the call. Lost
indicates whether there were any dropped or lost packets.
If more than 3% of your packets get dropped, users will
notice a problem. Anything greater then 5% dropped will
result in calls that are basically unintelligible.
TFTP Trace
You can also do a TFTP Trace, again on the same page.
The TFTP Trace will display all events related to downloading
configuration files for IP phones. This information can help
determine if users have correctly opened port 69 in their
firewall for external IP extensions, or if they have incorrectly
entered a MAC address. If you have problems with external
155
IP phones pulling down configuration files, you can use
this trace to see if the requests are coming in and if the
FortiVoice system provided a file. A lot of time we see
requests with MAC addresses for phones that don’t exist
because of typos.
Connection Status page
One of the best capabilities within the web interface is the
ability to see the analog connections in the system. From
the web page, you can see the current CO connections to
the extensions, and whether they are ringing, on hold or
In this first example, the web page displays a call coming in
on line 1 of unit 1 and ringing extension 111.
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parked. This allows you to determine what calls are going
through the system easily, even remotely. In a web browser,
go to http://192.168.1.200:8484/status/conn to view the
current calls.
When the web page is refreshed, the second example
shows the status of the call has changed and the caller is
recording a voicemail message.
There are many more states for calls that you’ll see on the
connection page, and most of them are pretty intuitive.
You can use this page before you reboot the system to see
who is on the phone, or for troubleshooting purposes to
157
see whether the calls are being handled the way you think
you set the software to handle them. So for instance, if you
set up a sales ring group with three extensions, you can call
in, dial the ring group and watch this page to make sure
that all three ring.
Don’t forget, though, you have to refresh the page to see
the up-to-date status.
Terminal Window
So that’s it for the web interface. There’s another tool for
troubleshooting that allows you to make some advanced
changes to a FortiVoice system, and that’s the terminal
window. Go under Tools to Terminal Window (CLI).
158
Once you’re in, you can use advanced terminal or (AT)
commands to set the unit back to its defaults, clear the
flash memory and for error diagnosis.
Clearing Flash Memory
In some cases, you may need to clear the flash memory of
all recordings, including auto attendants, voicemail messages
and recordings, as well as the configuration. This can be
accomplished by sending a single AT command, AT !ZFC.
This command will erase everything.
Once you get an OK message, the system memory has
been erased. There is no recovery process for this, so I
recommend attempting this only if required.
You can also pull up some advanced diagnostics in the
event that the system detects a file system error or voicemail rebooting. Normally, the system will quickly resolve the
problem, but if not, further diagnosis is required.
AT !ZF4 during an error light sequence will display a
message indicating the error number and the files that
might be affected. FortiVoice Technical Support can use
that information to offer further information about the root
cause and how to prevent the problem from happening
again.
159
Troubleshooting flowcharts
Another tool you have is the Reseller Troubleshooting
Flowcharts document. This document gives you easy access
to the best practices for troubleshooting the most common
issues with extensions, telephone lines and VoIP trunks.
This flowchart covers troubleshooting analog extensions.
You can zip through here and troubleshoot most problems
160
within four steps as long as you know where to start. In
this scenario, pick up the handset and listen. What do you
hear? Busy signal, dead air, system prompt, or dial tone?
Once you start there, you can follow the flowchart to
determine whether this is a configuration or a hardware
problem.
This flowchart troubleshoots getting IP phones registered
and set up. It shows you how to easily determine what the
problem is with an internal 360i phone. As we discussed
in the previous training presentation, looking at the screen
161
of the phone will provide you the details to help determine
where the problem is, and from there, within a few steps,
you’ll know where the root cause of the issue lies.
This flowchart will help with the registration of VoIP
numbers.
162
Voicemail Manager
There’s another tool that you might need from time to time
called the Voicemail Manager. It’s also found under the
Tools menu of the FortiVoice Management software.
163
The Voicemail Manager allows you to check the status of
mailboxes and announcements, reset mailboxes to the
default settings and delete passwords.
This utility is useful in troubleshooting voicemail issues. You
can see the capacity used by each mailbox, and by clicking
You can also delete mailbox passwords. For example,
if an employee forgets his password, you can reset the
passwords. Select the mailbox number and click OK.
164
on the label, you can delete or download all the messages
in a mailbox. This is great if you need to archive voicemails.
You can also reset a mailbox back to the defaults. This will
delete all voicemail messages, the voicemail greeting and
voicemail password. So a mailbox can be reset to be used
165
for a new employee. You can also delete the recorded
name used for the company directory.
You can also check the memory usage of all units on the
network. From the Troubleshooting pull-down menu, select
System Information and Diagnostics. Select the Memory
Usage tab.
This shows you stats of the total memory usage. That
includes the auto attendant recordings, voicemail
messages, music on hold, call back prompt and dialby-name directory recordings. It’ll also tell you the total
memory time remaining on the system.
166
Incidentally, when a system has less than 10 percent
memory left, a prompt will play indicating that voicemail
is near maximum capacity. When there’s less than two
minutes of memory, no new messages can be left. So it’s
important to check this from time to time.
The System Information and Diagnostics window is also
useful for a number of other troubleshooting purposes.
It gives you a complete overview of your system, local
extensions, VoIP numbers and your network, in addition to
the Memory Usage tab.
Thank You

FortiVoice Reseller Training

Transcription

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