Unity 4.2 ports questions

jhitt-limited · ‎11-02-2010

I have two questions regarding the use of Unity ports. 1) If I do a tranfer to a phone number from within a call handler, does that temporarily use an outbound port? 2) If I change some of the ports from being inbound only, to being inbound and outbound, can that change be done while there is production traffic on the system (as long as there is no traffic on the ports I'm changing)?

We're running into a problem where the call handler that transfers a call to a number after playing a greeting is getting a lot of traffic. And when this happens, we're experiencing people hearing the greeting twice. The thought is that we have more calls coming into that call handler than we have outbound ports available for the call transfer. Could that possibly cause the call handler greeting to be played again?

Bradford Magnani · ‎11-02-2010

Hi,

1.) Yes, if you're transferring to the phone system, it will use an outbound port.

2.) The change can be done however in older versions of Unity it's going to say that the Unity application needs to be restarted after changing port assignments. You'll probably need to do that off hours.

Hearing a greeting twice.... Has it always happened or did it just start? Is it always with the same call handler or does it happen for others? User greetings as well? Depending on what the issue is, it may be mitigated with checking the configuration on the call handler under the "Greetings" configuration. Check "Reprompt the user after this many seconds of silence" setting and compare it to others. It's possible that the call is getting presented to Unity before the end user actually hears the call connect, and Unity is sitting there waiting for input and hears nothing so it re-prompts. To test this, try opening the Port Status Monitor in the Tools Depot and make a call in. Observe if you see Unity playing out a prompt before you actually hear it as a caller. Usually call setup delays can be the cause of this.

Maybe someone in the field who's seen this before can share their experience with this behavior, rather than from my troubleshooting standpoint.

Hope that helps,

Brad

jhitt-limited · ‎11-02-2010

Any idea why the port usage analyzer wouldn't show these outbound ports being used? We had a situation yesterday where we received over 2000 calls an hour to this call handler. The Call Handler report shows that, but the port usage analyzer shows an increase on the inbound port usage, but only MWI, notification and TRAP (and very few notification and TRAP) on the outbound ports.

I wouldn't think repeat on silence would be in effect since the after greeting action is to go to another call handler that transfers to the call manager. Still confused on the repeated message. But I am sure that if an outbound port is used, then we would have run out during the peak yesterday. Thanks!

lindborg · ‎11-02-2010

Clarification here -

1. when Unity does a transfer it uses a soft-hold mechanism - it does not use a second outbound port to make the call - it puts the caller on soft hold, dials the extension in question and releases the call (depending on your call transfer options - it may wait till the target picks up or the like). Either way, another port is not involved.

2. Outbound ports are used only for calls that originate with Unity. MWI dialouts, notification dialouts for phone devices and TRAP calls - AMIS calls if you have that hooked up, etc...

3. Make sure you don't have the setting to repeat the greeting turned on - if repeat greeting on the greetings page in the SA is set to 1 that means to repeat it once, not play it once - so you would indeed hear the greeting a 2nd time if you didn't hit any options.

-J

Bradford Magnani · ‎11-02-2010

I may have misunderstood your initial question. If a call comes into port 1, which is configured for inbound only and the call gets transfered to the phone system, it will transfer out on that same port. The "outbound" designation in the UTIM configuration is referring to TRAP, MWI, Notifications specifically. Sorry for the confusion.