Switching to VoIP

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

CTI Applications

|

107

standards that more capably deal with presence issues. One such standard is SIM-

PLE, or SIP Instant Messaging Presence Leveraging Exensions.

Bridging

When a call is bridged, it is simultaneously connected to more than one endpoint.

This could mean it is bridged between two users on separate phones or bridged

between two phones on behalf of a single user. Why would a single user ever want to

field the same call on two phones at once? People don’t call themselves, after all.

Well, really, it’s quite useful. Beginning a call on the desk phone, bridging it to a cell

phone, walking out the building and driving away while continuing the call on that

cell phone, then returning to the office and resuming the call on the desk phone, all

without any disconnection or interruption of the call—that’s an obvious “killer app”

for bridging. But there are other uses for it—recording calls, for example, requires

bridging, because both the person talking and the recording device need a connec-

tion to the call. This function is fairly rare among traditional PBX systems, but many

who have it swear by it.

CTI Applications

CTI (computer telephony integration) applications combine the telephony functions

of a PBX with database or personal productivity functions on a personal computer