Office Manager Use Examples

[chris parkinson]

Does anyone have any examples of users that use Office Manager?

After playing around with it, doesn't look like it does much, and I can't see why anyone would use it?

Thanks

Chris

[David Trad]

Hi Chris,

You are right it doesn't do much, about 40% of what the WEB GUI did, however though it does have it's uses and they do help out when the client asks for a way to do basic things, examples are listed below.

• Turning on/off voice mail for a particular extension
• Turning on/off VPN access to a particular user
• Changing Registered Names (First & Last)
• Changing Passwords, good for when someone requests a password reset
• Setting changes for Single Number Reach (Quite an important one actually)
• Adjusting the Call Forward settings, all three of them
• Blocking the individuals caller ID on outbound calls
• Adjusting Video Calling settings (Some sites have wanted management of this)
• Turning on/off Night Service on a particular phone (Handy for the receptionist to have)
• Settings for Voice Mail Caller Options - This is hugely important, especially when staff go on holidays and receptionist can manage what happens to that EXT voice mail service
• Setting calling permissions, fantastic when you have phones in areas that need management of this
• Very basic management of Call Groups, this is useful for when they want to add/remove users from a particular group, and management of pick-up groups
• Speed Dial management, yet another very important thing that you will find most places require access to it
• Management of schedules, again when given the right training, they have the power to manage their business affairs to a degree with his feature, especially holidays, where in the past this was not so easy for them, the WEB GUI was actually confusing to use on this
• Visuals of Voice Mail accounts, although this not that useful as you do not have any functions you can perform here, it does give them a holistic view, it would be good to be able to delete VM's in this section or at least basic management of an individuals account
• Visual of call routing, somewhat useless as again they can not rectify something if there is something wrong, but I guess it may help them to explain it to the partner to make the right adjustments
• Ability to manage MOH, this feature has become useful on more than one occasion, and a customer will appreciate the ability for them to be able to manage this without having to always contact the partner
• Prompts section... Well I guess another useless section as the cannot do much in here but have a brief look at what potentially is setup, it does not give advice as to what is actually active or in use
• Video Monitoring is awesome though, in one site were we have installed multiple camera, OM picked them up and displayed them in here without having to do any configuration or installation on the server of any software, the PVC-2300 camera work quite well with the system, but you do have limited functionality from what I have seen thus far
• Where the UC-manages all the routing the network section is great for seeing a holistic view on your WAN usage, I like this area, but it could go a little further and give you a basic drill down on a per user basis as well... It needs some refinements but it is still a good feature

I believe the next version of OM will be much more useful, I see no merit in keeping OM in the form that it is now, it needs to advance to a level where there is a basic management level and then an advanced management level, all based on credentials we may set at time of install, but still lacking the real higher up advanced settings that we may carry out in CCA.

There are some issues with Adobe Air on certain PC's and notably Windows XP, and it can use up quite a bit of resources, not as much as CCA as I have seen CCA use up to 630MB of RAM when I am configuring a system, which on a low specked machine CCA has the ability to crash it in spectacular fashion, OM may slow the machine down but I have not seen it crash one yet in a bad way.

OM has its place, but it still needs some maturity to it, to better suit the market. I currently have it installed in 15 locations since the latest version was release 1.2 (Although in about it says version 1.12 ???)

That's my take on it

Cheers,

David.

[mcasimirc63]

It all depends on how much control you want to give to your clients.  Its mainly used as a leave behind tool for the office administrator to make changes to the phone system, when the partner is not there.  Some partners don't want to be called every time a user wants a change in the hunt group or if users want their speed dials changed.  Another group of partners may see this as an opportunity to make money.