This week I have been attending the Cisco Networkers Live event in Barcelona. Open Text has a booth focused on the Fax & Document Distribution Group on the Solutions floor and we have had great traffic for the entire show. If you are attending the show, stop by the booth to say hello.
One of the most interesting sessions for me was about coming up with Dial Plans that work. When I cover the comparable feature in Rightfax I do it in one of two ways. Either I go in some detail of a US company and how they can benefit from the feature, or I go into minimal detail about that fictitious company and focus more on the features and options available to you inside dial plans.
This presenter spent 2 hours showing us all of the problems that can come up when you design dial plans for a large company and gave us some strategies for solving those problems. He went deep into the decision process for coming up with a solution when there was significant overlap in digits across the different offices of the company, and emergency services in different countries, and all sorts of other things. What I found most interesting wasn’t the content, but how he presented the content. They were some pretty complicated slides, but I thought they got the message across extremely well.
I think when I get back to Amsterdam on Friday I’ll have to start rethinking how I present that section of the course to cover all the problems I hadn’t thought of before. Plus I learned about an interesting way to get feedback mid-session using a giveaway. And I happened to win it: the incredibly impressive 2010 edition of the Official Cisco Dial Plan Planning Tool Set…Yes, I am still glowing.
Matt Williams
Brad Wittman
Erik Enderson
Bill Bernat
Adam Friedmann
joshuabutcher
Matt,
Congratulations on your big dialplan toolkit win!
We have had great success in helping our customers create and manage cisco dialplans and dialpeers that connect to Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition.
For many companies, dial planning can be just as critical as network planning. Keep up the good work.
Doug
By the way, that impressive dial plan planning kit wasn’t quite as impressive as I made it sound, or as the presenter made it sound. But it is an accurate description. The best tool for planning out the dial plans is nothing more than pen and paper…so all I really got was a simple pen with a Cisco logo.