Switching to VoIP

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Chapter 14: Traditional Apps on the Converged Network

desktops, EyeBeam for Mac OS X and Windows, and iFon for PocketPC. SDP

decides the parameters of the video channel during call setup.

Voice Mail and IVR

Voice mail and interactive voice response systems have always been soft-driven,

because they embody business logic. They need to be customizable in ways that a

traditional phone switch doesn’t. Consequently, voice mail and IVR have been at

home on the microcomputer server for a lot longer than call switching has been.

Early IVR and voice mail software packages ran on Solaris, OS/2, and Windows NT.

The voice mail/IVR server would be connected to the PBX by dedicated trunks, usu-

ally a T1 interface or a handful of FXO/FXS links. The PBX would assign those

trunks special extensions, and when a caller needed voice mail or IVR function, his

station would be bridged with the trunk connected to the voice mail/IVR server. In

some cases, especially on very high-end chassis, the voice mail/IVR and PBX would

be housed in one unit.

Today, the IVR and PBX systems are both soft-driven and can therefore be main-

tained at the same place. Dedicated trunks are no longer needed to link PBX to IVR

as long as you choose a platform that integrates them on the same server, unless you

design it so they’re ...