Music On Hold

[CWings]

Originally Posted by travisbconley

how about having the switches store the MOH media on them... if an ipod can be as small as it is and hold a couple of gigs of data, why not incorporate a music device in each switch, and have the ability to push a media stream to it once from the "master" and then that site would use the local copy, the hardware cost could not be more than a couple of hundred dollars if you put the nicest hardware availailble in the switch.

Good idea going forward for new installs, but all of us existing users with multiple locations/sites, each having their own PRI, would have to get new switches.

That would suck.

[CWings]

Originally Posted by gberkemeyer

I completely agree that MOH handling is a major shortcoming of ShoreTel; however, I am going to put in a shameless plug for a product that we've found that works nicely with our ShoreTel system.

www.onholdworx.com installed NET 7000 MOH devices at all 11 of our sites a few months ago, and it has been working flawlessly. Now our Marketing department manages the MOH all by themselves, and can change the message every 5 minutes if they want to via a simple to use web interface. They can create their own recordings, have them professinally recorded, or pull from a library of canned recordings. They can even change the background music as often as they want, and it is overlaid behind the voice on-the-fly.

gberkemeyer, what is the cost per device? That's a cool option that sure beats setting up a junker PC to stream from a media server or something stupid like that!

[gberkemeyer]

Originally Posted by CWings

gberkemeyer, what is the cost per device? That's a cool option that sure beats setting up a junker PC to stream from a media server or something stupid like that!

I don't know the cost of the NET 7000 unit itself. Those were installed by onholdworx and are included as part of our monthly fee. I hate to put pricing on here because that can probably vary depending on number of sites and length of term. But I will say that it was only slightly more than what we were paying (a major wel-known vendor) for a service that gave us quarterly updates, and it was half the cost of another service we had that allowed unlimited updates.

[bdepue]

ITS Telecom

I use 2 of these MusicTel-Net + units at my two PRI sites. They are remotely managed via a small piece of software. You can adjust the volume level output as well as running multiple mp3's. They work great and I have had zero problems with them. Very reliable.

Of course, it would be ideal if I only had to run 1 of these, but 2 isn't bad. For us, we have all 13 of our sites accessing the PRI trunks at the two sites, so it works. If each site had it's own trunks, that would be a different story.

[Neiby]

My company is currently looking at new VoIP solutions including ShoreTel. If all ShoreTel users were as "helpful" as jlorenz, I think I would definitely look elsewhere. One of the things I really didn't like about ShoreTel last time we looked at them was their handling of MoH. It appears that this has not been fixed in the past two major releases. Multicast MoH from a primary source is easily doable. I don't understand why ShoreTel makes things so complicated.

In our case, a single MoH source at our headquarters would suffice for our entire network, but ShoreTel's architecture doesn't allow that. This can be frustrating, and I don't see why some people try to trivialize this point by acting as if it isn't a real issue.

[phoneguy]

That will work in your case if all of your calls are coming from a PRI or analog lines at your headquarters location.

[Neiby]

Originally Posted by phoneguy

That will work in your case if all of your calls are coming from a PRI or analog lines at your headquarters location.

That's the problem. Our primary site does have a couple PRIs, but many other sites also have their own incoming CO trunks. That means that each of those sites would have to have their own MoH source. I'd much rather have a single multicast MoH source at the headquarters that the remote switches listen to. That's super easy to do. I don't know why ShoreTel doesn't implement it.