Avaya Aura Announcements

Understand how to manage, and maintain Avaya Aura Announcements. The hardware needed, voice announcement characteristics, analogy of an announcement, and much more. By the end of this post, you will also learn how they get created, where they get stored, capacities, and tools to manage them.

I have created these three key components to help you understand how all works:

• 1.- Analogy of an Announcement
• 2.- Benefits of managing announcements
• 3.- Accessing the announcements
• *.- Resources
• *.- Quick Tips

1.- Analogy of an Announcement

A voice announcement is no more than a Waveform Audio File (wav) that gets recorded via a telephone device, or transferred into an announcement board, and Media Gateway. They are categorized as delayed announcements, forced, and informational announcements.

Delayed announcement – These announcements play while someone is holding waiting for an available agent to answer, encouraging the caller to keep on waiting.

Forced announcements – These are used to express urgency of an existing problem.

Informational announcements – These messages tell the caller what they want to hear. e.g directions, office hours, etc.

Structure – Announcement Property

Creating new announcements – If the announcement gets recorded via a telephone device, always check the naming convention of the file. Keep in mind that 27 characters is the maximum name length, and please don not include any wild cards when naming the file. Always try to be consistent identifying announcements based on skills or departments.

Types of announcements – When creating a new announcement, you have the option of selecting the type of announcement between “integrated, integ-mus, and integ-rep.

• Integrated – self explanatory
• integ-mus – used for music
• integ-rep – Repeating announcement

Announcement characteristics – These are part of the announcement properties.

Queue Option – by default is set to N. This option will force the announcement to play even though the port is in-use if Y is selected.

Protected – By default is set to Y. This option will allow for Read/Write. Once you have backed up the files you can change this option to N= Read.

Wave file format= CCITT A-Law or CCITT m-Law (mu-Law) companding format (do not use PCM), 8-kHz sample rate, 8-bit resolution (bits per sample), Mono (channels = 1).

Storage – There are two main boards used today. The TN2501 and the ANN-VMM

Overview of the TN2501 – The TN2501 Voice over the LAN (VAL) is an integrated announcement circuit pack that offers up to 1 hour of announcement storage. It requires shorter backup and restore times. Announcements are played over the TDM bus.

Board Capacity – With the Capacity of 33 Ethernet ports. The first port is a dedicated telephone port for recording and play back announcements.

LAN Connectivity – With one physical 10/100 Mb Ethernet interface, allowing announcement and firmware file portability over your LAN (FTP server functions).

Note: Before installing the card, check the licensing under “System Parameters Customer Options” Page 5, TN2501 VAL maximum capacity is set to= Y, and Page 2, Maximum TN2501 VAL boards is set to the number of boards installed, or higher.

Here is a list of legacy TN Packs = TN750, TN750B, and the TN750C.

Overview of the ANN-VMM – This is a logical element part of the Avaya Media Gateways, that when enabled, it will create a directory in the media gateway, accessible through CM and the MG Command Line Interface (CLI).

Board capacity based on Media Gateways

• G700 – Up to 20 minutes of storage with 1,000 current playing announcements
• G250 – Allows for 10 minutes of storage, with 6 playback channels.
• G350 – same as the G250
• G430 – 16 channels for playback; offering up to 1024 files (announcements) with 4 hours of recording storage, and 512 MB of RAM.
• G450 – It offers up to 45 minutes of audio announcements. 63 announcements can play at the same time.

Each type of these media gateways have a capacity of creating up to 256 announcements, except the G430.

 

2.- Benefits of managing announcements

As a system administrator it is important to understand each component of the solution that you are responsible for. From adding, backups, restore, move announcements, to creating a unique dialing plans.

Adding – When adding announcement make sure that names don’t contain spaces or dashes. The system will allow to record these announcements but they won’t work whenever upgrades or transfers to the file are made. Announcements can be added via ASA 6.0/Announcements, transferred via SFTP, SCP, or FTP, for older systems you can also use VAM.

Backups – these jobs can be scheduled to run in the future, or on-demand to run it immediately, using the “run now” command. If the system is configured with the SMTP options, you can send email notifications whenever a backup is performed.

Restore – self explanatory

Moves – Depending on your configuration, you might want to move announcements between MGs. Audio Groups were created to avoid this.

Dialing Plan – By creating a unique dialing plan will allow you for system optimization. As a good practice it’s always good to use the same announcement properties as a template for future announcements .

3.- Accessing Announcements

I suggest using the Announcement module that comes with ASA. If you don’t have a copy of ASA 6.0 or later, then use WinSCP, or any other SCP/SFTP/FTP Client. Keep in mind when using a third party software, that you will need to enable the announcement board, creating a FTP/SFTP/SCP account by enabling the Filexfer file transfer functionality in CM.

Benefits of the ASA Announcement Module – The Announcement module built in ASA will perform the “enable Filexfer” when performing the task, and “disable the Filexfer” when a transferred is completed.

Security – Because these are services running in your customer’s LAN, security is a factor. when finished working with the announcements, disable FileX, don’t leave any undesirable applications running, and try to use secure transfer methods SFTP/SCP.

Firewalls – these can also interrupt any file management. Create policies, or access lists to allow these services to run.

*.- Resources

WinSCP – Use this app to secure copy files

http://winscp.net/eng/download.php

WavePad Sound Editor – Use this app to create, modify announcements with the specs listed above.

http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/

Administering Avaya Aura – Chapter 13

https://downloads.avaya.com/css/P8/documents/100059292

Administering G450s Chapter 15 – Page 347

https://downloads.avaya.com/css/P8/documents/100016244

VAM Troubleshooting Guide

https://downloads.avaya.com/css/P8/documents/100067833

Companding – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding

*.- Quick Tips

CM Commands – To display a list of announcements from CM run this command “list directory board 001v9 /annc“

Media Gateway Commands – 

• show announcements files
• copy announcement-file usb announcement.wav usbdevice0 (this command will transfer the announcement to a USB thumb drive. You can also use ftp or scp instead of usb)

I will ask you – When transferring announcements, which software package do you use? – Leave me a comment below.