Put an outage update at the start of the call

[James Gladwell]

When users call the help desk, we want to have something that gives the status of outages (or lack thereof) before the user gets the menu for the IT department options.

Something like:

<outage notification>

<Greeting with menu>

How would we change that outage notification during any outages without having to get in and change the script everytime?

[Anthony Holloway]

Put the Play Prompt step in the script where you want it, and reference your filename like normal.  Leave the default setting of "Continue on Prompt Errors" set to true.  This way, when the prompt file does not exist, it just gets skipped, and when it does exist, it plays.

How do you record new prompts or update existing prompts today?

Anthony Holloway

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[James Gladwell]

Today, we record a .wav file and upload it manually through Applications>Prompt Management

[Anthony Holloway]

Perfect.  So then all you have to do is upload your prompt via the web page.  The script will see it and play it.

Does that help?

Anthony Holloway

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[James Gladwell]

I was looking for a way for our on-call analysts to record a message in the middle of the night that would describe an outage without them having access to the UCCX admin page (or without calling me in the middle of the night.)

If this is the only way, then I will just make detailed documentation and come up with a way to reduce the amount of accidentally deleted prompts.

[Anthony Holloway]

That's not the only way.  You hadn't mentioned all of your requirements up front.

You'll need a simple prompt manager script.

The logic is roughly:

1. accept
2. authenticate user
3. recording
4. upload prompt

Tell your on-call personnel that if they wish to turn it off, they simply mute their phone prior to the recording tone, then press # immediately to end the recording.  That will blank it out.

Anthony Holloway

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[James Gladwell]

Gotcha.  Sorry Anthony, I am still new to this, and not totally sure what I need to know before I can begin to understand what all I don't know. 

Where do I setup the authorized users for the authentication step?

I appreciate your help. I am looking at our existing script and will look at where I can put that.  There is a lot of work to be done to get what our new director wants out of this, and I am trying to use the existing script as much as possible so I don't have to reinvent the wheel to get this done.

Thanks again, I'm looking at those steps now. 

[Anthony Holloway]

You wouldn't put that simple prompt manager in an existing script.  I mean, you could and all, but you're probably going to want to grow it into a full featured prompt manager for all of your prompts.

Anyway, your users are End Users from CUCM.  You have a handful of choices for actually authenticating the users, but for testing you may want to just stick to hard coding the password in the script.  Once you figure out how it works, you can then look to prompting the caller for a PIN number.  The PIN is set in CUCM.  The user needs to be an admin in UCCX.  As a trick, you can make up a passcode in the script, ask the user for it, if it matches, you then authenticate a static user account such as crsadmin or uccxadmin, etc.  The down side is the Prompt repository will show that account name instead of the actual person who made the change.  It's basic auditing, but it's something to think about.

Anthony Holloway

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