Switching to VoIP

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Chapter 5: Enterprise Telephony Applications

Hold Queues

When more people are calling into a system than there are attendants to answer their

calls, those inbound callers must be put on hold until an attendant becomes avail-

able to deal with them. The hold queue is a call-ordering application that keeps peo-

ple waiting in line in the same order in which the phone system originally fielded

their calls. This way, people who called in after you don’t get on the phone with an

attendant before you do. Hold queues are most common in call centers where lots of

people are answering a very high volume of calls simultaneously. If you’ve ever called

the electric company or insurance company to ask a question about your bill, then

you’ve almost certainly made your way through a hold queue.

Directories

A directory application in telephony is the same as a directory in the phone book

sense or in the network object sense. If you’ve ever dealt with LDAP, Novell NDS, or

Microsoft Active Directory, then the concept of an online directory should be famil-

iar. In the case of telephony, the directory provides subscribers and inbound callers

alike with information about how to reach people on the phone system. This infor-

mation is presented either on an endpoint’s display, in a web-based or PC applica- ...