Avaya releases IP Office version 10.1

Today Avaya made the new IP Office version 10.1 generally available. This release comes with a few new options and some minor enhancements.

  • Integrated Contact Recorder
  • Media Manager
  • Simplified Mobile Access
  • Multiple Appearance Directory Number
  • Privacy Override
  • Support of different hypervisors
  • Voicemail Pro Database Access on Linux
  • Enhancements of OneX Desktop applications
  • Equinox Select as a preview
  • New hardware

Integrated Contact Recorder

Integrated Contact Recorder (ICR) can be seen as the new CCR. CCR was a less liked reporting tool for IP Office that had to be installed on a Windows Server together with a Microsoft SQL Server. I remember more problems than effort for those few installations we had. With the release of IPO 9.1 CCR had been dropped and the only replacement option had been the bigger and more expensive IP Office Contact Center. Continue reading

How to backup IP Office servers

The challenge

Did you ever ran into the situation where IP Office hardware died and you had to replace it? And in that situation did you have an actual backup available? For a single site IP500 there are many places to get a backup. If the chassis breaks you will have a backup on the SD card – in the case you will not find a non V2 chassis. If the SD card breaks the running config is stored in the internal flash of the chassis. If you don’t have both of them you will probably have an older config file stored in your Manager folder on your computer.

Considerations for Server Edition solutions

But what about IP Office servers? First of all there is more to save than just the IPO configuration. We have Voicemail Pro and OneX Portal. We probably have contact store and WebLM as well as WebRTC and it’s getting more with every release. Continue reading

Increase hard disk size of virtualized IP Office

Be aware that those information are for OVA deployments on ESXi Server only. Avaya has announced to allow IPO to be virtualized on Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) with the release of R10.1 but that is not covered here.

The challenge

Avaya publishes a deployment guide for virtualized IP Office server for every release containing information about the needed memory and CPU resources. They also tell us what size the hard disk has to have based on the number of users. That is important because the OVA image by default has a disk size of 100GB. If the server has to handle more users you will also need a bigger hard disk. Another reason for increasing the disk size can be to use the IP Office server as backup target for the whole Server Edition solution. The backup task checks that there is enough disk space available to start the backup. Based on Avaya’s documents there has to be 60GB free disk space available if Voicemail Pro is not installed and 120GB if it is installed. If there isn’t enough space the backup will fail.

So you see the issue? The OVA comes with a 100GB disk but needs 120GB free disk space for backups… Continue reading

Many IP Office Manager versions on one computer

The challenge

We all have been in the situation that we had the most actual IP Office Manager on our Laptop but were in the need to manage a system that was running older firmware. Based on what Avaya tells us every Manager should be backwards compatible and able to deal with older systems. But the experience tells another story. Especially 9.1 Manager can cause issues with earlier IPO firmware.

So what is the solution? Rather than just upgrade from release to release we want to have a copy of every Manager release available on our laptop. Continue reading