Jeff Smith
Telephony used to be the domain of large service-oriented firms, such as those in the banking and insurance industries. Smaller companies generally could not justify the significant investment for proprietary systems that was required to implement telephony. However, that has recently changed.
Standards such as TAPI (telephony API) and TSAPI (telephony services API), and a growing number of third-party development products that support these standards, are helping to put Notes-based telephony within the reach of any organization that is large enough to justify a groupware installation. Some of the applications include help-desk support, fax-back services, "hot lines" for company i
nformation, and data-gathering systems. In the future, we may see telephony systems "reading" E-mail messages to business travelers or capturing and manipulating voice recordings as objects in a Notes document.
Speaking with One Voice
The combination of Phone Notes, from Lotus, and Remark, from Big Sky Technologies, is one example of how
developers can integrate
voice recordings and sound objects into Notes. Phone Notes provides an interactive voice-response scripting environment that the Remark server uses as source code for telephony applications. Remark PhoneClient lets end users access these applications from any telephone.
The Remark Voice server is an OS/2-based process that connects to an existing telephone switch via analog phone lines. Each phone line represents one concurrent recording or playback session. Therefore, the size of the Remark server and the number of lines required are directly proportional to the expected number
of concurrent users of the application during peak periods. A 16-line system will support hundreds of calls during business hours.
A voice-processing card, purchased separately from such vendors as Natural Microsystems or Dialogic, acts as the interface between the Remark server and the telephone switch. The Remark server can compress voice files down to approximately 180 KB per minute. This can become particularly important in applications where conversations or messages are recorded and stored for future use. If you're willing to sacrifice some quality, you can choose to compress the recordings to 90 KB per minute.
Using OLE, voice files can be stored on the Remark server and linked back to a Notes document or embedded in the Notes document. This can be important if you store a large number of voice files or if they are lengthy. Storing files on the Remark server overcomes the Notes 1-GB file size limit. However, if these voice recordings need to be routed to users that do not have access to t
he initiating Remark server, embedding the files in Notes documents may be the only option.
Phone Notes applications require little Notes applications development expertise. To create a Phone Notes command, developers need only to understand the logical flow of the desired application, not a lot of cryptic function calls. More difficult tasks are designing and developing the underlying Notes applicatiozzn that will be the repository or source of information for the telephony application.
Phone Notes has some limitations. Call management is one difficult area. Predictive dialing and load balancing work to some degree in small-volume applications, but Phone Notes falls short in these areas when you try to launch them on a large scale. The problem is that the Remark server's interface to the PBX is via analog lines only, and it cannot determine if an internal extension is busy without dialing it. Therefore, it cannot accurately determine when an extension is available for the next call.
In a
ddition, any function that requires a high degree of integration with the telephone switch is difficult at best with Phone Notes. All communication between the user on the phone and the Remark server happens via Touch-Tones. This is effective when only one person is accessing the application. However, if two people are on a conference call, both parties hear the Touch-Tones, which quickly becomes annoying for the person who's not pushing the buttons, particularly if that person happens to be a customer.
Although some technical problems need to be ironed out, voice-based groupware applications are a reality today. As telephony standards evolve, audio as a data type may play an even more common and important role in how companies do business.
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PHONE NOTES
provides an interactive voice-response scripting language that the Remark server uses as source code for telephony applications.
A VOICE-PROCESSING CARD
provides the interface between the Remark server and the telephone switch.
THE REMARK SERVER:
An OS/2-based process. The server can compress numerous or large voice files down to approximately 180 KB per minute or less. Using OLE, voice files can be stored on the Remark server and linked back to a Notes document or embedded in the Notes document.
Jeff Smith is a product manager for workgroup applications at U.S. Technologies (Tampa, FL) and a designer of telephony systems. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at
editors@bix.com
.
Telephony's Wake-Up Call
