Helpful tips we've learned while setting up our BCM

Thanks for the (no doubt very helpful) post.

My own experiences with the Mitel 3300 IP system fortunately do not exactly parallel yours, but yes, there have been a few stumbling blocks along the way. I'm sure the problems we're each experiencing in various degrees are all related to design infancy. However, by claiming "ownership of the finish line" our good friends at Cisco have more or less thrown down the gauntlet. Legacy PBX vendors, in order to maintain market share, find themselves fighting for their lives against a marketing megalopolis with a blue bazillion to throw at advertising. There's no longer -TIME- to fully debug a design or feature set. You're in a dog-eat-dog race to -GET IT OUT THERE- and commission your product support to then make it work. Take comfort in the knowledge that Cisco's IP phone system wouldn't make a pimple on the backside of any system with real PBX features. The problem is the customer's purchase decision is being driven by their IT department who are gloating all over themselves that -FINALLY- they are going to be able to get rid of the phone guys.

So be careful >I don't know if this information is going to help anyone out, but I'm

While I hear what you're saying from an engineering standpoint completely, this statement is the real standout in your post:

"There's no longer -TIME- to fully debug a design or feature set."

This is really sad. To me, Nortel was the be-all-end-all of reliability. The major things I mention in my post reflect exactly what you are saying - Nortel rushed this product to market without fully testing it. However, contrary to what you're saying, this is going to give a world of things to do to the "phone guy" as well as IT. So maybe that's the plan? :)

Are the Cisco systems really that bad?

Our alternate was going to be Avaya. Their system looked pretty good and I've yet to hear of such configuration issues (although it was $15k more).

pyite, I am vendor of Norstar and BCM. I don't usually respond to posts in the newsgroups, but since you have taken the time to post such a detailed review I will comment on a couple of your issues. It looks like you used Qwest as your vendor, or they subbed it out. I don't like disparaging another vendor, but I don't really consider Qwest a Nortel vendor. They are a dial tone provider, that has a few guys who work on Norstar/ BCM. The Qwest sales guys are typically young kids who have never completed a cross-connect, so they have no field experience, which is obviously a hindrance. We have taken over several installations performed by Qwest. What I have found in these situations are users who have been poorly trained in how to use the phones, and administrators who are unaware of the capabilities of Nortel.

Regarding your first con, IC, IC, voice mail. If I am reading your post correctly, there is definitely some misunderstanding between you and the vendor. Let me see if I understand your goal: You have a phone with a DID number. You want two callers to be able to make the phone ring, with the third caller going to the phones mailbox. Correct? This can easily be done, and it has nothing to do with an overflow.

The second glaring inaccuracy is your thought on how hunt groups work in relation to voicemail forward timings. If the hunt group is set up correctly, they do not interfere with a phones forwarding to voice mail at all. I can only assume you have come to this conclusion because of what the vendor has told you. This indicates a vendor who lacks a basic understating of how to set up Nortel hunt groups.

So, If I am reading your post correctly, my recommendation is that you find a new vendor, because these two issues alone are Norstar 101.

The Cisco Call Manager is a decent product, albeit one which is rooted in and based almost entirely on Microsoft Windows and runs on a PC platform. Is that where you want your mission-critical phone system? Not on my watch, but if the -IT- folks have much to say about it "my watch" will be ending before long.

The Cisco phones are rife w/bells and whistles which have little to do with telephony. A WEB phone with a built-in browser, gosh, how did we ever survive without that? Custom and downloadable ring tones, OH MY GOD let's all rush right out and buy it. On the telephony side they ring and you can answer and place calls, but compared to legacy PBX systems the feature set is weak and very problematic.

The Cisco voice mail product, IMO, is junk. Yet another Microsoft Windows-based application running on yet another server.

Avaya is suffering just like the rest of us. Great ideas but not much time for R&D and debugging before the marketing folks begin demanding product. You cannot dare announce what's coming down the road unless you're already in final beta with it.

The VOIP designs from pretty much all the Mfrs, Cisco included, are IMO in their infancy from a stability & reliability standpoint. Lots and lots of bugs, fortunately not many of them "deal-breakers" but nuisances just the same. We'll all -GET THERE- just not on the schedule we'd prefer and definitely not on the schedule the sales forces are implying we will.

Hey there, Thanks for the comment. Yes, I've become painfully aware that Qwest isn't a "real" vendor at all of this equipment. It seems to be an afterthought. Such is life.

Regardless, your comments re: system programming seem to assume I don't know what I'm doing. Let me assure you that I'm far past Norstar

101 at this point. Trust me that the IC, IC, voicemail has been tried and tested in every possible manner I can think of and that this "functionality" is operating as I described (in a flawed manner in my opinion). You are correct that the overflow SHOULD have nothing to do with our desired operation - I SHOULD be able to set 2 appearances of a target line, 2 intercom keys and the forward on busy option (as well as forward on no answer) to the voicemail DN. This SHOULD result in IC ->

IC -> Voicemail, but IT DOES NOT - it results in IC -> Voicemail. I will include screenshots here of this functionality:

Since you've bothered to read my previous post (thanks!) I'll assume you might be interested in reading the above page as well. Maybe you even work for Nortel and can fix this? :-) Wishful thinking... Let me know if I've missed something - that's entirely possible - but a month into this now and neither Qwest's Tier 2 support nor the installer (CSI) nor apparently the folks who reviewed the Qwest ticket at Nortel have a solution to this.

Also, I didn't state the hunt group / voicemail timings issue correctly, as you pointed out. I should have been more specific. Calls that manage to transfer from the voicemail DNs to other sets were what was getting screwed up. The option that was causing problems was Services - Telephony/Services - General Settings - Feature Settings - "Delayed Ring Transfer". When set to 4 or 6 rings, there were unexpected times when the system would answer with voicemail (I assume because a call would bounce back to the voicemail DN after an 'unsuccessful' transfer). One example was an auto-attendant that allowed a caller to transfer to a hunt group (Marketing dept). The hunt group was supposed to ring all phones for 15 seconds and then xfer to another extension. But what would actually happen is the transfer would ring 4 times and then go to voicemail. It turned out the Delayed Ring Transfer was kicking the call back to the "auto attendant" DN i.e. the voicemail system. Setting the delayed ring transfer higher allowed sufficient time for the hunt group to timeout and try it's overflow option, which worked and was what we were looking for. This may be one of those scenarios where our company was trying to do something that would be considered "weird", so that's entirely possible, but it would make more sense to me if all timings were consistent across the boards (seconds or rings, not both).

Hope that clears my post up a bit and answers your post.

pyite- I hope my post did not imply that I thought you were not familiar with Norstar, as that was not my intent. My assumption is that you are an end-user / administrator for this BCM, and it is probably the first Norstar you have dealt with. My comments were related to your vendor, and there lack of experience. When a tech has installed 100 plus Norstars, with PRI's, I would consider them experienced.

The point of my post is that you need a new vendor. I looked at your ..../bcm_issues/ page. After viewing it, and reading your comments written there and above, I know that you would benefit from a new vendor, as the mistake causing your issue is a glaring one, that any qualified vendor will be able to immediately fix. Please know that my comments are not meant to be disparaging towards you. You should not be worrying yourself with rings vs. seconds, DRT, or appearances. These are the purview of your vendor. The vendors job is to ask you how you want the system to work, then program it accordingly. Again, I am assuming you are and end-user, and these are things only an experienced vendor would know. All the required info is not in the manuals, much of it comes from working on the systems everyday, and knowing what works, and what does not.

I know this post will probably aggravate you in that you want answers, but my philosophy is that these type of changes are supposed to be configured by the vendor. If your current vendor missed something so basic, then there is no telling what else they missed that could be causing your list of concerns above. Rest assured your desired configuration is doable. I have set it up myself numerous times.

Hmmm... Would you like to be our vendor? :-) We are surely tired of our current one...

I thought you might find this response from our vendor interesting... Apparently this is now our problem.

"After consulting with 2 of our Qwest Level 2 engineers, other BCM technicians, as well as Nortel ITAS support, here's the scoop on the call forwarding rules:

If you receive 1 call more than you have intercom buttons then the caller will hear a fast busy signal, just as we're hearing. Example, the phone has 2 intercom buttons and a 3rd simultaneous call comes in, it will get a fast busy tone. If you want to receive more than 2 simultaneous calls, then it's recommended to add another intercom key to the phone.

If you define an extension number in the Call Forward Busy field, then the 2nd call will follow that rule instead of ringing the 2nd intercom button. This is a Nortel program engineering design.

If you define an extension number in the Call Forward No Answer field, then after the specified number of rings, it will follow that rule for calls ringing on that phone set.

Here's what Steve XXXXXX at Qwest Tech Support informed me regarding your desire to request changes to the program engineering for the BCM.

'It's considered a feature enhancement, and you would need to take this up with your Qwest account manager, so they could go through their Nortel Account Manager and engineers.'

I was under the wrong impression in regards to the call forwarding behavior, and had never come across this issue in the past. Now granted, I hadn't run a battery of tests on this before, like I did with your phone system yesterday, but I guess the issue never came up before. I spent quite a bit of time thoroughly researching this issue to make sure we got you the most accurate information available, for your benefit. Hopefully this answers your questions about the call forwarding routing/logic.

Let me know if you have any questions about this issue."

Contact Robert Wakefield at QOS telesys. these guys are a small

company but nortel hands them the IMPORTANT deals like walmart

because roberts the best at this.

QOS can be reached at. 714-224-4700

Hey, thanks! I was wondering who won the Walmart account. I recall during the RFP and bids that Walmart had laid down some pretty ridiculous mandates (including establishing a local presence in B.F. Arkansas). They also squeezed every red cent of margin out of the bid, so much so that Mitel finally chose to withdraw, expressing no further interest. If Nortel "won" it IMO they sure didn't win much. Name recognition, bragging rights and volume, perhaps, but I bet they almost had to -give- the equipment to them. Walmart is very tough to do any type of profitable business with. If this Wakefield fellow is getting paid, it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn it's Nortel paying him, not Walmart.

In migrating our voice menus to CP apps, we've found that we have no way to insert a pause after a pager ACOD to wait for the tone. We have a few MS's that one of the options direct dials a pager, so this is a big problem. Surely there is a way?

All 82 apps have been redone, just two outstanding with this issue...any help would be appreciated.

On another note, the CL option no longer exists, so we're forced to listed to the MB number, and I'm sure gonna miss VMBA.

System is 4 node mail converting to 1002rp CP.

Thanks, Mike

Hi everyone,

Just thought I'd post since I ran across this thread a few weeks back

when we ran into this particular brick wall. Specifically, users

with long voicemail messages were timing out remote fax machines

(rending it fairly useless).

Nortel finally has a fix that they (or a technician) can apply to the

lines to skip the greeting. We had it applied last week and NO MORE

PROBLEMS.

We are, however, still having a problem figuring out voicemail port

assignments for faxing (it says 2, and our vendor claims that's the

max... which really doesn't make much sense for a busy office of 70).

If anyone can offer hope on this front, I'd be grateful.

-Matt