Archive for the ‘Podcasts’ Category

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:12 — 6.3MB)

Learn more about InformaCast Director, what is is and how it works, by listening to this short podcast with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Development from Singlewire Software.

Podcast

Transcript of the interview

Brad Parkel: Ken, do you want to talk about what InformaCast Director is?

Ken Bywaters: Sure. Most commonly, people think of Director as a command console or a management interface for any collection, one to many, collection of InformaCast servers that are out on the network.

Brad Parkel: And this is for InformaCast and InformaCast CK.

Ken Bywaters: Right. Both product families. Both InformaCast for a Cisco phone environment, and InformaCast CK for non-Cisco phone environments.

Brad Parkel: What will this product do?

Ken Bywaters: It is really actually fairly simple, but at the same time we’re not aware of anyone else doing this right now so it is new but the idea is you put the Director some location on your network and you can make all of your InformaCast servers visible to it. So there are a couple of ways people might use this. Number one, is a single organization that has InformaCast servers spread out across their network in a distributed manor. InformaCast Director can sit in the middle, see all of those servers, and the Director will communicate with any and all of them at any one time.

Brad Parkel: What would be an example of this? A school? Or a retail chain? Something like that?

Ken Bywaters: Both are very good examples. A school, retail, or even healthcare. We have a healthcare customer with over one hundred sites and they’re deploying InformaCast at each site. Individually, they have a very large network, but they want to keep the InformaCast traffic and control local to each site. So,they may be installing [InformaCast] on a server, they might be installing on a virtual machine, on an existing server, or a blade, an AXP blade from Cisco. Then in the middle, they’re putting Director so that they can make these [InformaCast servers] visible throughout the organization. For example, let’s say the health clinic in one city can do all of the routine paging within that facility. The central administration can talk to that facility running InformaCast Director can talk to that one facility and all the other facilities in the Western US, let’s say. All from InformaCast Director. And that has the advantage from a management perspective, but also, they don’t need to pass multicast over their wide area network (WAN). It’s a simple, very small, unicast message out to each server, and then each InformCast server takes it and converts it and it’s multicast from there. So the multicast traffic stays on the LAN, but it’s very clean from a WAN perspective.

Brad Parkel: So, what we’re talking about here is a regional notification, or a company-wide notification, where InformaCast servers are spread out.

Ken Bywaters: We do that today in a centralized model. People put InformaCast servers centrally and then send to all locations from there. But with Director, it allows people to do it, to deploy in a distributed architecture, but tie everything centrally with Director. So that’s exactly right within a single company, a single organization allowing the Director to tie together a distributed architecture into a centralized one.

Brad Parkel: Now this would also have a regional impact if there were InformaCast servers within a community, at a hospital, at a school, with a public safety director or a county government or city government. One button could send out the message across all of those agencies.

Ken Bywaters: Yes. Exactly. This has the potential to be revolutionary in the way notification is done. Because you could take that same concept for notifying everyone within a single organization to notifying an entire region. Just as you said. Let’s use an example of a UASI, a local or a regional security center. They could run the [InformaCast] Director and then talk to all the InformaCast servers in that region. And that can be hospitals, schools, businesses, anything. Let’s just take Honolulu for an example. We’ve got somewhere around 20 different customers in Honolulu. There’s a collection of banks, defense facilities, schools, hospitals, all kinds of things. Now, if they had a need to send out a regional notification, which there are, even though Honolulu is paradise, there are things they need to know about. Whether it’s volcanic activity or tsunami or anything like that. So there might be a need to notify all those organizations. So, the Director allows a third party to send out a message to all those InformaCast customers on the island and notify them of something. So that really regionalizes the notification. That same concept could be applied to any region anywhere you would need to get a regional notification to existing [overhead] paging systems. And that’s not what’s being done today. Because in a traditional analog notification, there are no means to get that message out to that system, let alone organize it regionally.

Brad Parkel: And we should stress here, this is an on-network notification, so you’re hitting inside the organization and then also have the ability to go outside to email, sms, that sort of thing.

Ken Bywaters: Right. Exactly. There are some regional notification methods that are off-network; outbound dialer, sms, things like that, but still, those are centralized to one product. Where as this is everything is done on the network and activating existing on-network notification systems and InformaCast and carrying it out from there.

Brad Parkel: Ok. To this point where have you seen the interest coming from? Has it been public safety? Has it been organizations or a combination of the two?

Ken Bywaters: It’s been a combination of the two, but more [interest] from a single organization, because that’s what people are used to. So, the cases we’ve mentioned, schools, healthcare, retail, and then county government. Those are the ones that are most interested because those are the ones that are deploying InformaCast in a distributed model today. So, they have an immediate need for Director, but we are talking to the people that control the regional notification, or a community notification network. So, I think that will be the next phase of interest.

Brad Parkel: Now, if someone is listening to this, how is this implemented is probably the common question people are going to ask? How do I know who’s around us that may be able to take advantage of this.

Ken Bywaters: Well, the Director is just software, so you can install it the same way you install InformaCast, whether it’s on your own server or in a virtual machine in something like that. If you are your own organization, you already know where those InformaCast servers are. If you’re a regional center, most of them have a way to communicate with businesses under their control anyway, and we also bring those people together. I was at a meeting last week with a county government. They brought in other companies and agencies and things like that into the meeting, because those people want to know what’s going on in the county anyway. What technologies, etc. In a lot of locations the local government operates very closely with the population of the region, businesses, so it’s kind of a natural fit. And in that case the county would run [InformaCast] Director, and any business in the county may want to participate in those county-wide alerts. It is up to them, but the county can run the Director and then the others can subscribe to the notifications.

Brad Parkel: And there’s some set-up involved with the InformaCast server to say which messages could be distributed. Isn’t that the case?

Ken Bywaters: Yes. You have complete control of that. You can limit the Director’s access to certain messages or certain groups, things like that. Just like you could if you were using InformaCast stand alone. So you can limit that access, you’re not giving the Director control to do anything they want, you may just tell it “only send this particular emergency message, only to this group” if you’d like. It’s as granular as you’d like.

Brad Parkel: So, severe weather, that sort of thing might be a candidate for opening it up, whereas another type of alert would be restricted.

Ken Bywaters: Right. And the Director does not only do pre-recorded messages, but also LIVE messages. It can be audio and/or text.

Brad Parkel: Explain that real quick. If there’s an event, someone could log into Director, record something, and then send that out?

Ken Bywaters: Right. Audio and/or text. And then send it out to all the InformaCast servers on the network that they’re subscribed to.

Brad Parkel: If you’re interested in learning more about InformaCast Director, you can visit us at www.singlewire.com/director. On the site, we’ve got a one minute overview video, downloadable documentation about the product and a form where you can request additional information or order the product.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:04 — 2.1MB)

Learn more about how Singlewire’s Profesional Services Division can help your organization with implementation of InformaCast.

Transcript
INTERVIEWER: We’re talking with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management about Singlewire’s new Professional Services Division. Ken, can you tell us what kind of services this division offers?

KEN: Yeah. We’re very excited about this first of all, because we can do a lot of things. What we found is that over time, people are using our products for more and more things. People find very innovative and creative uses for our software products. And what we want to be able to do is 1, Help them do those things but also do them for ourselves so we can offer them to out larger customer base. So we do things everything that runs the gamut from simple, I’ll say simple installation and training configuration of our system.

We get a lot of training requests both in user training for people who use it day to day as well as technical training.
So we can offer that as a complete package, but then also things like customization or integration projects. Those are very common to see as well.

For example, let’s just use higher education for an example, because  people in higher ed often have not just one notification system but they got 4 or 5 of them and for each one they have to access separately, so if they have an emergency it’s good that they have 4 or 5 notification systems but it’s bad that they have to go to 4 or 5 different places and initiate a message in 4 or 5 different ways. So we’re working with several institutions to bring all of that together under a single interface, so we do all the work to glue all those things together so there’s a single access point so if safety and security or the police chief need to get the message out, they don’t have to go to all those places.

They can just pick up the phone or hit a button or however they want to do it and we’ll take that message and hand it off to all those different systems to kind of unify or converge, to use an over used term, their notification system. Other people want to just integrate systems that they have whether it’s physical security or building systems control, they want a motion detector to initiate a message if someone is walking around after hours. We end up doing a lot of that, those types of things as well.

INTERVIEWER:  How can interested clients find out more about this new program?

KEN:  Well probably the best thing is to contact your Singlewire sales person. They have all the information. You can also talk to our professional service engineers about a project. I think the best thing is if you have something you want to do but aren’t sure about what steps to take, just give us a call and we can help with that.

Learn about how InformaCast can be used to address NFPA 72 requirements.

Transcript

We’re talking here with Ken ByWaters about NFPA 72.

NFPA 72 requirements include being able to send a pre-recorded audio message or tone during an emergency with options to send a voice message.

Ken can you talk about how InformaCast adresses these requirements?

Certainly, and this is something I have been having a lot of discussions with customers about already, with NFPA 72 being passed.

Recently, just about anyone out there has some type of security system or fire system in place, but almost all of those systems don’t have any audio announcement associated with them.

They’re straight notification things that’s maybe just to send a tone or a strobe or things like that.

And for years we’ve had people, with the permission of their local fire marshall, connecting InformaCast to their systems to provide, to augment their systems by providing some type of human voice along with that notification.

So, the alarm goes off, it’s not only a tone or strobe you get audio directions on what to do and what the situation is and things like that.

So when this code was passed it’s a very natural step for InformaCast or ControlKom to play to augment an existing fire security system.

And I have to say that in and of itself we don’t follow these codes it’s very very important to talk to your fire marshall or police chief or things like that to get approval of whatever you’re doing with your fire system.

Not just InformaCast but any time you touch it you really ought to get a clearance from them.

Ok, and this is something that has really been a feature that’s been inside of InformaCast since almost day one.

Isn’t that the case?

Right, we work hard with InformaCast not just to make it just a stand-alone product but something that could integrate with other systems.

We accept dynamic messages, we are built on open standards, we work on things like contact closures which are very common in safety and security.

So it’s a very natural and easy fit into a system like that to associate text and audio messages with your existing safety system.

So, if I’m a facilities manager and am looking or needing to implement NFPA 72 within my organization, what should be the next steps I should be thinking about?

I mean, hearing about InformaCast as an option, what are the next steps that would allow me to learn if this is even an option.

Well probably the best step is to contact your Singlewire sales person and talk to them about it.

If you’re not familiar with the products that’s a good place to find out more about it, we also have some great videos.

And then get us on the phone and we’re having these discussions all the time. And we can talk to your safety and security vendor, your fire vendor, security vendor whomever and find the best way to integrate.

A lot of these things are very standard integration so.

But definitely the first step is to find what you want to do.

Learn more about the new features in the upcoming release of InformaCast 7.1 from Singlewire Software.

Transcript

We are talking with Ken Bywaters Executive Vice President of Product Management with singlewire. I want to quickly ask about InformaCast 7.1 which has a release date coming up here in the next month or two we are looking at May-June  timeline.

Yes

You want to talk about what’s going to be in that release?

Yes there’s going to be a handful of things. Predominantly, I think a lot of people will want to know is if it fully supports CallManager 8.0 as well a whole new suite of phones Cisco has developed. There’s some additions and some improvements in how we access a group as well as direct dial numbers including those in a group.

And also we are  paving the way for similar products in this release that are going to be very very important. With 7.1 we are going to support dynamic audio. So, that means is you can hand audio from another source off to an InformaCast server and we will send it out for you. You no longer have to have a pre recorded message or a live message you can pull it in from somewhere else. That’s going to set the stage for product we are going to announce over the summer which will take advantage of this.

Is there another example that you can give now of how that would work as for as audio coming in and being played.

Yes, a good one would be probably an audio alert from the National Weather Service which is a common one in certain parts of the country. They will issue a tornado warning or something like that. We could take the audio from that warning and send it out automatically to whatever InformaCast group which you like.

And you mentioned got CallManager 8.0 thats been out now and is just coming out with now from Cisco

Yes we had actually had it in house for quite a while in testing against it. We’ve gone through rigorous testing cycle with Cisco that not only tests against 8.0 but does regression testing through previous versions. I should also mention that with that we are following Cisco’s sunset cycle and with InformaCast 7.1 we will no longer be supporting CallManager 4 in this release.  So customers that have CallManager 4 should certainly be aware of that.

Ok giving this if you are current on maintenance that’s the best way.

That is the best way. And if you lapsed in maintenance that’s ok. we renew people as well

Very good. We can look to this arriving in the May-June timeline?

Yeah, May 2010

Ok very soon, right. Thank’s again

Thank you

Learn how you can use the dynamic text functionality in InformaCast to send mass notification and emergency communications.

Transcript

We are talking with Ken Bywaters Executive Vice President of Product Management. Can you tell us more about what dynamic text is and how it works with InformaCast?
Dynamic text in InformaCast or for that matter dynamic audio is really combined so that other systems can pass a message to InformaCast and have InformaCast send it out.

We have a lot of customers that have messages generated by another system or somewhere else some on the Internet perhaps and they still want that message to go out to phones, desktops, and speakers but all the grouping information is already in InformaCast. So dynamic text or dynamic audio components allow you to do just that. They take messages from one place pass messages into InformaCast, use the grouping and all the infrastructure we provide to send that message out to your phones, desktops and speakers.

What would be an example of that?

Well, a straight forward example of that would what people do with weather alerts from the National Weather Service.
If a tornado alert is issued or some other type of severe weather alert, that text is already generated from the National Weather Service.  You just want to get it out to your Cisco phones and all the other devices on your network. We can watch for that text to be generated and then pass it through our system and send it out.

The same might be true for amber alerts, or community messages, or anything like that, or even messages generated on your network, security notifications, anything like that, that might be anything our customer systems might generate.

Now is that something that requires a human to push a button to allow that o pass through or can that be setup to remotely or automatically to watch an audio feed or text feed?

No, that automatically happens.  So the dynamically part of it means that the person does not have to do anything he has set it up to watch for the content and send it out as soon as we get it.

Ok, now if someone is interested in this how do they get this?  Is this the latest version of InformaCast? Where does that if in?

Dynamic text is built into InformaCast starting in version 7.0 and dynamic audio is built into 7.1 which is generally available in May 2010 and it’s all in the documentation. If people have any questions they can always contact our technical support team or their sales person.

Very Good, that you Ken

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:31 — 5.2MB)

Learn how the Legacy Paging Interface or LPI from Singlewire Software can be used to connect InformaCast to legacy analog paging systems.

Transcript

INTERVIEWER: We’re talking with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management. Ken, can you talk to us about the LPI or Legacy Paging Interface?  What is this and what does it do?

KEN: Sure, so the LPI, you know, maybe we didn’t name it that, all that glamorous but this is what it does.  For people with an existing paging system, an analog paging system, but that also have Cisco phones and desktops we’re using InformaCast to talk to those things, you want to be able to talk to your existing speakers as well.  And there’s several ways to do this, but a fairly recent one, at least starting in Fall 2009 was the LPI.  And the LPI is software.  It’s separate from InformaCast and it allows you to connect InformaCast or ControlKom, for that matter to your existing paging system through software

And the key differences are, it’s a very clean set-up.  So you can set up the LPI and have it connect to your existing paging system through an fxo or fxs port on your router.  Any analog connection from CallManager to your paging system, we can take advantage of.

And beyond that we can also send zone information to that paging system.  So a lot of the existing paging systems are zoned, I think they’re four zones or eight zones, and you use keys on your phone, DTMF maps to select which zone you’re talking to.

Within the LPI you can set all of that up.  So we mimic all the zones so that you can just say, “Well, Zone 1 is this and Zone 2 is this.  You know, East Wing, West Wing”, whatever.  And then within InformaCast it all shows up as, you name it.  East Wing of Building 1, West Wing of Building 1, things like that.  And this way you don’t have to go to your phone and hit pound-1 to talk to that zone.  You can send an InformaCast message, we connect to that zone and that paging system as well as send the message out to Cisco phones and desk tops and high beam speakers like we’ve always done.

And the way we’ve done it is, it’s synchronous so you don’t, it’s not two separate messages.  We actually place a phone call to that existing paging system and stream the audio to it at the same time we stream the audio out to all of the devices on the IP network.

INTERVIEWER: This sounds like a great solution for an organization, a school, or a business that may be in an older facility but yet, want some of the modern conveniences or abilities of InformaCast.  Is that where you’re seeing this go into?

KEN: Yeah, it’s going into almost every market that we serve but your example of schools is a good one.  So a K-12 district, let’s just take a typical one.  Let’s say they have 20 schools in the district.  It’s a good bet that they’ve got multiple manufacturers of analog paging systems in those 20 schools.   They might have three or four different manufacturers  scattered around those 20 schools.

And no way to centrally manage their bell schedules, no way to get a message out, district-wide, or anything like that.  With InformaCast and the LPI, you can bring all of those 20 schools online on the IP network using the LPI and then you centrally use InformaCast to manage all of your bell schedules or do a district-wide announcement.

So, for not very much money per school, you can immediately get district-wide notification and central bell management without any hardware or architectural changes.  And that’s what’s difficult for schools.  To change an existing paging system usually means changing the rack of equipment that was built many years ago or slopping other things in or running new cable.  You don’t have to do any of those things.  You can just do it all on software and get all the benefits that you would, if you built all new schools with all new cabling and IP speakers.  Just use your existing infrastructure to get those benefits.

INTERVIEWER: So I’m assuming then, too, once a new facility would come online or be built, it’s just as easy then to wire that with Cat-5 and have a regular network-type installation and keep the functionality all in place.  Is that the case?

KEN: Yep.  People mix and match all the time.  And it’s obviously completely cost-driven.  In a new building, the cost of running copper wire through conduits and putting power supplies and amplifiers all in that network for dedicated analog paging system can actually end up being a lot more than just running simple Cat-5 to IP speakers.

So if you do have new construction mixed in with your existing buildings, your existing paging system, it’s easy to mix and match.  And InformaCast doesn’t care.  It looks all the same, to us.

INTERVIEWER: Now if I’m a school administrator or a building facility manager listening to this, what do I need to know?  I mean, is this a proven technology?  Is this something that can work and is working in existing buildings now?

KEN: Oh yeah, it’s working at many, many places.  So, if you’re a facility manager, most people in that role are burdened with making changes to the system, knowing lots of different systems.  You can have it, in K-12 in particular, if you have a, let’s say, a two hour delay, having to go to that school and make the change to that system, that can be very time consuming and burdensome.

So, again with this, with InformaCast and the LPI, you can centrally manage all of that.  And it’s a very clean and very simple way to connect to your existing paging system.  So you don’t have to do it, or what’s very common, you don’t have to pay another company to drive out and do it.

I’ve had a lot of customers who’ve said before we put this in, any time we made a change to our analog paging system, it cost us a minimum of $600, for every change.

So, with the LPI it was very clean and simple and now they can zone things or make broadcasts or do anything they want themselves.  And it’s very simple to do.

INTERVIEWER: Now we have some materials on our website.  What is, what’s a typical route for one to learn more about this solution?

KEN: Probably the best route is to contact your Singlewire salesperson.  Or contact Singlewire sales in general.  We can get you all the information, any documentation, including the product to try out.   Most of the time people have questions about the specific paging system they have, but the way we’ve implemented it, it doesn’t matter to us what kind of system you have.  We just add a very simple analog connection to it, so a lot of choices.

INTERVIEWER: Very good.  Thank you, Ken, for your time.

KEN: Thank you.

Learn more about text-to-speech functionality in InformaCast can be used to send mass notification and emergency communication in your organization.

Transcript
INTERVIEWER: We’re talking to Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management.  Ken, can you talk to us about text to speech, and how that works in connection with informed guests?

KEN BYWATERS: Certainly.  So text to speech is a pretty familiar concept for most people, I think. Well the way our approach to text to speech is not to bundle in the text to speech engine ourselves, because there’s lots of varieties, lots of choices out there and our consumers want to be able to choose which one they like best.  So what we’ve done is allow for a hook that you can insert any text to speech engine, take the text of an InformaCast message and convert it to speech, audio, and send it out to any of your Cisco phones, or desktops, or speakers, in the form of audio.  So it’s very convenient, very flexible, allows people, to make their own choice.

INTERVIEWER: So there’s an engine that will plug in that will generate this, is that how that works?

KEN: Yeah, Microsoft, for one, bundles one in with their operating system, but I’ve found that people like different ones.  I’m from Texas, text to speech engines might sound a little differently from someone else in different parts of the country. So people have pretty strong feelings for which one to use, for instance.  If you don’t like the one Microsoft provides for free, there’s plenty of other ones to choose from, whether they are for free or for purchase.

INTERVIEWER: And have you seen many installations of this, and what would be an example of how someone’s using this?

KEN: Well I’ve seen people start to use it in transportation, in particular, where you know, they, they want to announce the arrival of a train, or a gate change, or something like that.  The message is extremely predictable, that they’re not going to have to record live, but, the people seeing or getting the message aren’t going to be near a display.  So what they do is they’ll take that, convert it to text to speech and pump it out the loud speakers.  That way the person sending the message doesn’t have to do much to create the message and it just goes out and then they send it.  Another nice thing is you can customize any message, any InformaCast message right before it goes out.  You can put up the framework of what you’re going to say in text, maybe write a paragraph of what you’re going to say, but then you change it a little bit to give it specifics to the message.  Uh you know, ‘now boarding rows thirty-one and higher’.  You might type in ‘now boarding rows blank’, and then type in ‘thirty-one or higher’ yourself, and then the text to speech engine takes it and sends it out, from there. Those are the, the most common uses I’ve seen of it, so far.

INTERVIEWER: Is it difficult to implement this with InformaCast?

KEN: No, it’s actually quite easy.  It’s documented in our installation guide, and really, it’s no different than sending any other message out.  There’s only one part of the message where you just attach a script, which is a text to speech script, and it sends the text to the message and it’ll automatically be converted before it’s sent out.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, and if your organization is interested in this, and they have InformaCast currently, what’s the version that they would need to run this?

KEN: 6.1 was the first version to have this, but then that, that came out in 2009, so it’s, it’s been out for awhile.

INTERVIEWER: OK.  Well very good Ken, thank you for your time today.

KEN: Thank you.

(MUSIC)

Learn more about what Relicast is and how it works with Singlewire InformaCast.

Transcript

Singlewire: We’re talking with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management. Ken, can you tell us a little bit about ReliCast?

KEN BYWATERS: ReliCast is really a feature. It’s a feature that’s been around our paging systems for quite a while.  Initially we built it as an add-on product for InformaCast, which provides file access to the paging system. For people that might be familiar with doing something as simple as hitting “pound-5″ to reach a paging group, that’s what ReliCast provides.

Now, I should say that, it’s an add-on product now, but in InformaCast 8.0, throughout later in 2010, it’s going to actually be built into InformaCast itself.

Singlewire: And where and how would users get it now, before that 8.0 comes out?

KEN BYWATERS: Ah, they can contact their salesperson for it. We also,  make it available if you contact support.
They can tell you about it, and get you the download information.  It’s a very simple installation.
It’s just a download link. You download it, install it, and issue a license key.

Singlewire: Excellent. Thank you, Ken.

KEN BYWATERS: Sure. Thank you.

Walkie-Talkie and Intercom Together

Singlewire Software’s PushToTalk is a walkie-talkie and/or intercom application designed to facilitate quick, easy, and immediate communication between multiple parties or on a one-to-one basis. The walkie-talkie functionality was designed mainly for the Cisco 7921 and 7925 phones, but also works with most Cisco IP desk phones. Simply press the PushToTalk side button to begin your PushToTalk session.

“Since we just travel over the network, the message can go wherever the network goes. So much more efficient, much more productive use of technology.”

- Ken Bywaters – Executive Vice President of Product Management at Singlewire Software

Transcript
SINGLEWIRE: We are talking with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management,

SINGLEWIRE: Ken, could you give us some background information on the application PushToTalk?

KEN BYWATERS: Certainly. Our PushToTalk product has been out for a number of years and it was initially developed as, for lack of better term, a walkie-talkie product for wireless phones. That way it was used primarily with Cisco wireless phones.

Now, the deal is, you push the button and talk to a group and than when you let the button go and someone else gets the chance to talk. Fairly traditional push to talk functionality in that regard. But we have seen people using them in a number of different ways. For one thing, it works not only with Cisco phones, Cisco wireless phones, it works with pretty much all Cisco phones, whether they’re wired or wireless. So we saw a lot of people using it, maybe initiated form a desk phone to talk to PushToTalk groups that might include other desk phones and people walking around, those types of instances.

And then the other thing. We have just released a new version which includes a little different twist on it, which is intercom functionality.

Intercom functionality being more the one to one communication, very commonly used in K 12 for instance, with the principal wanting to talk to a teacher in the classroom The principal can hit the intercom button on the desk phone, it is prompted for DN, phone number, type that in. That DN is immediately placed in a one to one intercom session, handsfree, without having to do anything. It is full duplex communication and simply built in with PushToTalk, it offers some additional advantages of being able to change the volume of the other phone, the teachers phone. So, if the teacher turns the phone way down, when the intercom session starts, it is at a normal audible volume.

You can also have a pre-tone, to announce that an intercom session is starting. And that is a configurable tone. You can put it to anything you like. So, that way, when a particular tone comes accross the phone the teacher or whomever is on the intercom session knows that a session is starting and can talk handsfree.

And then the last part of it is, you don’t have to do anything special to the Cisco phone. You don’t require a shared line or a any configuation or CallManager to allow for this, so it’s very clean, very efficient, and you not only get intercom, you get all the push to talk walky-talky functionality, all in one product. So this has been a big, big hit with our customers as we’ve released this product.

SINGLEWIRE: Ken, you mentioned seeing customers use the application in different ways. Could you mention some of the different ways different industries are using this application?

KEN BYWATERS: Sure, the regular PushToTalk from one to many is used primarily in retail situations or health care or manufacturing. That is where we see it primarily.

Retail is a good example, because everyone has been through it. You are in the store, you’re looking for an item, you can’t find it and you ask someone at the store if they have this item in stock. First thing the person in the store does is grabs usually is a hand held radio and starts a PushToTalk session and talks to other people in the store to find out if they have it. But what our PushToTalk and a Cisco wireless phone, that store employee doesn’t have to carry two devices, he doesn’t have to carry a phone and a radio, he can carry a single handheld phone, a Cisco wireless phone, and not only start a push to talk session with other employees, they could start a session with other employees in other stores. Since we just travel over the network, the message can go wherever the network goes.
So much more efficient, much more productive use of technology.

SINGLEWIRE: Ken, how would someone who is interested obtain and install this application?

KEN BYWATERS: Well, the application is downloadable, and the best way to get it is to contact your salesperson, or contact us directly at Singlewire and we can send you the application and the documentation and a license key for trial. We are also happy to do web demos or talk to other customers that are using it.

SINGLEWIRE: Thank you for your time.

Singlewire CallAware can monitor numbers dialed within your organization and then send an InformaCast notification. Learn about how to design and configure your Singlewire InformaCast CallAware implementation so that it can scale across multiple locations.

Whiteboard – Design Considerations for a Scalable Implementation of Singlewire CallAware

Transcript

Hello, I’m Peter Lord, part of the Professional Services division here at Singlewire software.

Today, it’s my pleasure to talk about our CallAware application and how it can fit in and add value to your existing Cisco unified communications environment.

Our CallAware application will monitor for dialed digits and that works in conjunction with our InformaCast application to send text and audio broadcast to groups of Cisco IP phones, IP speakers, analog paging systems as well as desktops.

CallAware was really designed to work with emergency situations of dialed numbers, such as 911 in the United States.

Because we’re working with these emergency telephone numbers, it’s really important that you have a firm grasp of call metric fundamentals dial play design and call routing in the call manager before undertaking this sort of deployment.

If you need assistance with this type “skill set” you can contact one of the many Cisco partners who are skilled in this area.

What we’re gonna show you today is one way to create a flexible, scalable, and easy to administer deployment of our CallAware application.

The goal behind this is to set up your CallManager in such a way that this can scale from one, two to hundreds to a thousand locations and thousands of IP phones across the enterprise.

The process starts when a user at a particular site picks up the phone and use it to make an emergency call, they dial the phone to 911, the phone that the user is at will have a device called search base the search base will have a site specific  911 partition.

Within that partition will be a translation pattern for 911.

That translation pattern will turn the 911 call the dial string into a unique number for the site.

We’re gonna do this based on the DID range.

So our site has the country code 1, the area code 608 and the prefix 555. The 911 at the end is to represent the string that was dialed, and the 0 is a representation of a alert number, a logical alert number.

So actually to change this number from 911 into this new number, we need to route the call to a CTI route point.

CallAware uses the CTI route point within CallManager-Communications Manager to monitor when the 911 call is made and then take action based on that. So your CallAware has been alerted that a unique number has been dialed for our site 1. CallAware then will contact Singlewire InformaCast to send out a broadcast to alert the onsite security and first responders that the emergency call has been dialed. InformaCast then sends a text and audio broadcast out to all of the pre-chosen devices to alert that security and first responder group. At the same time though, that 911 call needs to make it out to the telephone network to get to the 911 PSAP. CallAware forwards the call and resends it to a route pattern. The route pattern then will be set up to strip all of the preceding digits before the 911. Now, when the route pattern is going to forward, it forwards to the site specific route list or the local route group containing the gateway for that site. Now the calls at the gateway, makes it to the PSTN and the rials at the local PSAP and speaks to the 911 operator.

So what we just described happens instantaneously. When the 911 number is dialed, the InformaCast broadcast is made and the first responders are alerted and the 911 operator gets the call instantaneously. This isn’t much different from normal call routing for other types of calls from the same CallManager. The only difference really being the CTI route points specific to CallAware. For more information about our CallAware products or other Singlewire products, please visit our website at www.singlewire.com.