Telephony High Availability / Telephony in a Multi-Facility Environment |
Vocera allows facilities to share a PBX with its associated VSTG.
Each physical location that is large enough to have its own PBX should also typically have its own VSTG unless one of the following situations is true:
The total number of Vocera devices in use at that location is very low.
The total number of device-to-telephone and telephone-to-device calls at that location is very low.
In general, the potential problems that can occur when facilities share a VSTG are similar to the types of problems that occur when locations share a PBX. For example, if the number of calls exceeds the number of available lines, incoming callers will receive a busy signal, and outgoing callers will hear a message telling them to try again later. Carefully consider your call volume if you plan to share a VSTG.
The use of facilities partitions the recognition space and improves speech recognition for large deployments. When multiple facilities share a PBX, you must configure separate hunt numbers to realize those speech recognition benefits for incoming callers.
Because separate hunt numbers require coordination with the PBX administrator and possible user re-training, these speech recognition enhancements for incoming callers come with a certain price. There are no firm rules for determining whether the overhead incurred by multiple hunt numbers outweighs the speech recognition benefits they provide; however, following are some guidelines to consider:
If you are upgrading an existing deployment and the facilities sharing the PBX are relatively small, setting up independent hunt numbers provides relatively minor speech recognition benefits compared to the user retraining that would be necessary.
If you are setting up a new deployment, the user training and PBX administrator coordination required by multiple hunt numbers is essentially the same as that required by a single hunt number, making it relatively easy to take advantage of their speech recognition benefits.