Enterprise Class Telephony
"Enterprise Class Telephony" becomes a reality for small and medium sized businesses with Active Call Center. This chapter discusses issues to consider when deploying reliable, scalable, fault-tolerant "enterprise-class" telephony systems with Active Call Center. Topics discussed in this chapter should be of interest to anyone trying to design a highly reliable voice telephony solution with Active Call Center.
Please keep in mind that as stated in the End-User License Agreement (EULA), Active Call Center Company does not make any guarantees about the performance of Active Call Center and does not make any guarantees about the quality of its documentation (including this chapter). We encourage all Active Call Center users to read the EULA carefully and consult with knowledgeable professionals before making any decisions.
Learning Objectives
Learning objectives for this chapter are separated by section. After completing this chapter, you should:
Items covered in "Riding the Nines":
- Be able to describe a reliability metric.
- Understand the meaning of "Three Nines", "Four Nines", and "Five Nines".
- Appreciate the meaning of true percent uptime metrics.
Items covered in "Formulating Reliability Targets":
- Understand the concept of the chain being only as strong as its weakest link.
- Learn to estimate reliability metrics for a system based on the reliability metrics of its components.
- Learn to identify factors that put practical caps on reliability metrics due to high cost of improvement.
- Learn an analysis technique that can help identify where budget dollars will provide maximum reliability increases.
- Learn to "scale down" the component based reliability analysis to finer levels of details.
Items covered in "Meeting Reliability Targets with Active Call Center":
- Know some basic suggestions for improving the uptime of a computer system.
- Know some basic suggestions for telephony hardware when reliability is an issue.
- Recognize when to use Windows 2000/NT to maximize reliability and when to use Windows 98.
- Develop an awareness for how applications integrated with Active Call Center can fail.
- Learn to identify a memory leak coming from VBScript Macros and learn several techniques to deal with the memory leak.
- Learn how to remotely monitor an Active Call Center system for availability.
- Learn techniques and tools that can be used to test Active Call Center's reliability.
Items covered in "Scaling Active Call Center Deployments"
- Learn how to scale an Active Call Center system from a single line to dozens of lines.
- Learn that client-server computing methodologies should be applied when scaling Active Call Center deployments.
