Posts Tagged ‘CallAware’

Take one minute and watch this video to learn more about CallAware. Interested and want to learn more?  Click here or visit www.singlewire.com/talkwithus.

White Paper from Singlewire Software

Click to Download White Paper – Flexible and Scalable Design Considerations for CallAware – PDF

With the release of Singlewire Software’s CallAware™ application, it is now possible to alert people to a specific number being dialed. CallAware works in conjunction with Singlewire’s InformaCast application to broadcast a message to groups of devices when a particular number or numbers are dialed. For example, if a user dials an emergency number, such as 911, CallAware can send an InformaCast broadcast to alert onsite security personnel and first responder teams.

This document is for reference only. Use your best judgment on how CallAware will fit into your organization. The examples in this document provide ideas on how CallAware might fit into your existing or upcoming deployment of Cisco Communications Manager.

Intended Audience

Because the configuration of CallAware is primarily done within the Cisco Unified Communications Manager, the intended audience for this document is a Cisco Voice Engineer. Advanced knowledge of Communications Manager, call routing, and dial plan design are a must. The actual configurations for InformaCast and CallAware are minimal.

Click to Download White Paper – Flexible and Scalable Design Considerations for CallAware – PDF

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.

Learn more about InformaCast^® CallAware™ by listening to this interview with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Development with Singlewire Software.

Transcript from Interview

We’re talking with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management at Singlewire. Welcome Ken.

Thank you, Good to be here.

Hoping you can talk a little bit about CallAware a new — something that’s new to InformaCast. Do you want to just explain what that is.

Yeah we’ve had a lot of requests from customers in the past about having the ability to monitor some type of out bound call, most commonly it’s 911 but in other countries it might be a different dial-string and do something with it. Frequently people even don’t know that 911 is being dialed in their organization until maybe the next month when the police or fire gives them the list of erroneous 911 calls.

So what Call Alert does is it sits passively and watches the CallManager system to see 911 or whatever phone number you want to watch is dialed and when that happens it can send a message out to whatever group of devices that you want. Any device on the network that is a CISCO phone, IP speaker, desktop, analog paging system can receive this notification in text and audio just like you would any other InformaCast broadcast.

Can you put that to an example if your in a large building and lets say something happens on a floor and someone dials 911 what would what could be a typical scenario for that playing out then?

Actually a good example is we have a we are working with an organization in Europe that has eight thousand phones deployed on a very large campus, hundreds of buildings separate locations they have no idea if someone’s dialing an emergency number or not. With this is a very scalable product so they can have CallAware we can watch all eight thousand phones to see if 911 is dialed with minimal load to the voice system and when that happens the security office elsewhere on campus is notified this phone, this user at this phone dialed 911 at this time.

So much more efficient they don’t have to wait see what happened maybe they want to do something else as a result of that call and since InformaCast can trigger other systems it they now have the ability as does everybody now to trigger other systems and be notified when 911 is called.

So today someone would dial 911 and that’s going to the police or fire the dispatch is bringing trucks to the building and the security staff internally might not know that anythings going on at all.

Yeah I worked with another customer who said that the only way they know 911 is called is every month they get a report from the city saying here are the number erroneous 911 calls you’ve made here’s you fine so they had people accidentally dialing 911 police come help they never even know what happens because it’s a large organization spread across majority of the state. So they don’t even know that’s happening until they have to pay the fine. So they look at this as not only an improved communication but actually saves them money very directly.

Do you want to talk about the impact to the network and is this a solution that will scale across large organizations you mentioned this one organization is that typical?

Yes in fact we waited until there is a good method to build this so that we can scale to very large organizations. We do have customers that have tens and thousands of phones and we didn’t want to introduce something that could only be used on five hundred phones lets say. So it is very scalable we do it in such a way that we don’t have to actually watch each phone and that allows us to scale very very well.

I see do you want to talk a about when this will be available and how people can get this if they are interested or learn more?

It’s available in February 2010 and you can just contact your local sales rep if you’re interested in using this or you can always send an email to http://www.singlewire.com/talkwithus

OK easy enough.

InformaCast^® CallAware™ is Singlewire’s newest software offering. It allows you to monitor your Cisco Unified Communications Manager for specific calls and send out an InformaCast broadcast when the monitored call occurs. Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management, explains, “We’ve had a lot of requests from customers about having the ability to monitor some type of outbound call, most commonly it’s 911, and do something with that. Frequently, people don’t even know if 911 has been dialed in their organization until the next month when the police or fire department gives them the list of erroneous 911 calls.” 911 hangups can be costly to your organization, and many companies want to know immediately if a legitimate 911 call has occurred, where it occurred, and when. No one wants to be surprised by the police or fire trucks showing up at their place of business.

CallAware was designed with these needs in mind. It sits passively on your network, monitoring the calls that come into your Communications Manager, with minimal load on your network. When a call occurs that CallAware has been configured to monitor, it will trigger an InformaCast broadcast. Any supported InformaCast device: IP phones, speakers (both analog and IP), desktops, etc. can receive a text and/or audio message whenever a monitored call is dialed. And, with InformaCast’s integration with other Singlewire applications, follow-up events can occur through devices equipped with contact closures. As an example, Mr. Bywaters says, “We’re working with an organization in Europe that has 8,000 phones deployed on a very large campus–hundreds of buildings, separate locations–and they have no idea if someone is dialing an emergency number. With [CallAware], it’s a very scalable product, so they can have [it] watch all 8,000 phones to see if 911 is dialed with minimal load to the voice system. And, when that happens, the security office, which is elsewhere on campus, is notified, “This user at this phone dialed 911 at this time.” It’s much more efficient. They don’t have to wait to see what happened. Maybe they want to do something else as a result of that call. Since InformaCast can trigger other systems, they now have that ability.”

Singlewire’s CallAware takes notification to the next level: monitor call occurrences, notify staff that a call has occurred (who dialed it, where, and when), and trigger follow-up events such as locked doors, photo evidence, or intercom sessions.

CallAware is coming in February, 2010. Contact your Singlewire salesperson now for more information.