Frequently Asked Questions

Important Notification
Daylight Savings - November 2007

At 2:00 a.m. on November 4, 2007, most of North America will switch from Standard Time to Daylight Saving Time. The time change is one week later than in previous years.

Some products will update automatically, but others may require manual adjustments or remediation. Many systems were patched prior to the Spring 2007 DST change, many were not. If your system is awaiting a patch, a manual change will be necessary.

Consultedge is available to help you ensure that the time change does not interfere with the performance of your system. We stand ready to work with you in making the necessary adjustments.

Updating the timing of your equipment is not a complex task, but the adjustments must be made before your system automatically changes the time on October 28, 2007 to avoid disruption. The unusual “time change” this year is the result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which extended Daylight Saving Time two weeks every year.

For more detailed system compliance information, click here to check support on your Avaya platform.

For more information, contact your Account Manager or Customer Service at (800) 626-2515 or support@consultedge.com.

What is the difference between IP Telephony and VoIP?

Many in the communications industry will use IP Telephony and VoIP synonymously. Clinical definitions will tell you that VoIP is nothing more than the use of a protocol to deliver a conversation. Consultedge differs dramatically in how we use the terms.

IP Telephony is used by Consultedge and Avaya to describe the much more valuable experience of communicating effectively, reliably, and with quality utilizing the same TCP/IP protocol that enables the Internet. With IP Telephony, VoIP is exploited and is given the user friendly features and productivity enhancing aspects of business communications applications as well as the network management tools that make it an assured enterprise-wide asset.



Can Avaya IP Telephony Solutions work on my Cisco Network? What should I Know?

Yes, Avaya has designed its portfolio of IP Telephony Solutions to be interoperable with most vendor’s voice and data networks, including Cisco. By using open industry standards Avaya infrastructure and software is incredibly flexible when deploying in a mixed vendor environment. Quite often a total enterprise solution requires a mix of components from multiple vendors, which may also optimize your existing investments in network infrastructure.



Why is interoperability and IP Telephony vital to business today?

The promise of IP telephony is that it allows your business to communicate and operate as one highly-effective, integrated entity. Regardless of how many locations or what technology platforms were purchased over time, if they can work together, then users can gain new benefits without having to learn new interfaces. Moving to IP with a number of different vendor applications and equipment supporting voice and data functions can be a challenge, but it is really the norm.

Interoperability is critical to reap the benefits of incremental infrastructure or application investments. As the world leader in enterprise IP telephony, Avaya has designed IP Telephony solutions specifically to work across your existing networks, applications, and devices.



How can IP telephony and VoIP help mobile workers to be more productive?

Mobile users want the convenience of all of the communications tools they use at the office when they are not at their desk. They want an intuitive way to communicate easily on the device of their choice, anywhere they work, and stay connected through one phone number and one message mailbox.

Before the convergence of IP telephony and wireless communications this concept was a pipe dream. The expense of enterprise enabling workers made it impractical to extend communication features beyond a wireline radius of the PBX and impossible to extend them across the PSTN.

How is intelligent communications revolutionizing the customer experience?

Business leaders know they must evolve into true customer-driven enterprises in order to gain customer loyalty and increase profits. However, it is often difficult to achieve this in a cost effective manner and maintain a competitive edge at the same time. Intelligent communications solutions more efficiently and effectively connect customers with the right people and processes, across locations and business functions.

Customers are no longer tied to single-line home telephones. Rather, they have alternative ways of communicating such as instant messaging, emailing, or using the web. At the same time, they are demanding greater responsiveness and expertise in addressing questions and issues when they call the customer service center. As interactions become more multimodal and collaborative, businesses must leverage all of their resources to offer a highly satisfactory experience for their customers.

Consistently meeting and exceeding customer expectations across all touch points and communication media require a thoughtful intelligent communications platform. Such a platform must connect contact center communications applications with other business applications allowing customer care decisions to be driven by information such as the customer's preferences and transaction history.

Consultedge and Avaya offer intelligent communications that help businesses achieve the highest level of customer service while maximizing resources across locations and organizations.



How can a business use outbound communications for relationship building, yet not annoy its customers?

Outbound relationship building is about servicing customers, not annoying them. Over the years, predictive dialing has become associated with those annoying telephone calls we all receive during dinner, asking us for money. However, the customer-centric world we live in today demands that we interact frequently with customers. The way we interact and think about reaching out to our customers is changing. More and more businesses are finding ways to be more proactive about strengthening relationships, like notifying their customers when their flight is delayed, or reminding them of an upcoming appointment, for example. It’s becoming more about reaching out to customers with information they need and value, not reaching out to them with sales pitches they don’t care anything about.



Will Avaya Contact Center solutions run over IP?

Contact Center solutions within the Avaya Customer Interaction Suite are infrastructure agnostic. A strength of an Avaya contact center solution is that it allows you to run IP at the core, IP at the endpoints, and IP for the transport - or any combination thereof! Avaya multi-media contact center applications support multi-vendor platforms, and run over multi-vendor data networks. Whether fully IP or a mix of IP and TDM, Avaya allows you to evolve to IP-based communications where and when it makes sense for your business - truly your path, your pace, your choice.



What can a medium sized business do to create a competitive advantage?

The last decade has seen a growing business consensus on the necessity of using contact centers as a front-line tool for providing differentiated support to end-customers and prospects. It used to be that powerful contact center technology capable of creating competitive advantage was affordable only to larger enterprises. Smaller firms simply couldn’t compete. Avaya has closed that gap. Whether your company requires only a few or many employees, Avaya Contact Center Express is designed to deliver the performance and features your business needs to compete on an even footing – and at a price you can afford.



Who can help me build a business case for Mobility?

Consultedge offers consulting and integration services and expertise to help you build your business case for Mobility and create an integrated communications roadmap aligned with your business strategy. In addition, Avaya can help you design, build, and implement Mobility solutions.

Our consultants provide expertise to help you streamline integration, enhance workflow, and optimize communication applications for greater productivity across your operations. Consultedge consulting and integration services are built on proven interoperability experience and advanced tools for the design, integration, and optimization of your communications across technologies, platforms, and application vendors.

When you need a trusted advisor to help develop strategies and deploy solutions, Consultedge is there. Our know-how includes migrating to next generation solutions, optimizing contact centers, and deploying converged communications. Our consultants are certified and qualified to work in virtually any environment, whether it is composed of only Avaya equipment, another vendor's equipment or a mixture of both.



How can I increase productivity and reduce conferencing expenses?

Avaya Meeting Exchange is a conferencing solution including reservation-less, scheduled/meet-me, attended/event, and web conferencing. With this easy-to-use, in-house solution, you can save money on monthly conferencing expenses and collaborate more effectively to be more productive.



How can I achieve optimum performance of my IP telephony applications?

On the path to Intelligent Communications—the merging of communications applications with business goals to better connect your staff, suppliers, and customers—you can rely on the technology of IP telephony to unite your business. But, new technologies mean changing your usual communications environment. With IP telephony, new factors play a role in daily operations, adding a layer of complexity and risk to supporting your business communications. To assure the best performance and uptime, IP telephony requires support beyond the traditional maintenance you rely on for voice communications.



How can my business gain enterprise class IP telephony without a major investment?

All businesses can benefit from the productivity and customer service enhancements that IP telephony makes possible. Simplify collaboration by integrating email, voice, mobile and video communications. Create a uniform experience for customers, whether they contact you by call, email, or online. There are paths a company of any size can take to migrate to IP telephony. But for many companies, deploying and managing an enterprise level, on-premise system might be daunting due to cost and the need for skilled resources. A hosted solution from Avaya allows businesses with as few as 50 users access to a full-featured, market-leading IP telephony solution, but with extremely low risk.



Are there unique security concerns in a converged network?

Companies face a variety of security concerns in a converged voice and data network. Each application on that network represents an entry point for hackers. Traditional data security policies and procedures must be expanded to include voice, and engineered so that they do not impact IP voice quality. And, there's a growing list of security and privacy regulations that organizations must comply with.

Although security attacks in a converged network aren't new, they can occur through the “gaps” that occur at the convergence of two, formerly separate, networks. Denial of Service, eavesdropping, identity spoofing, and toll fraud are some of the most significant concerns in a VoIP environment.What can be done to secure access to a converged network?

Consultedge can provide protection against unauthorized access to a corporation's computing systems that share a LAN with communication systems. With our Secure Access and Control service, we use secure IP-VPN or Frame Relay connectivity and a secure alarm concentration appliance located behind your firewall to reduce the potential for unauthorized access to your network elements.

This continuous-connection tunnel provides a single point for inbound and outbound access to your converged network and supports monitoring of up to 500 devices. Access permission is managed through a secure single sign on to Avaya online applications.