Technical terms

Acces­si­ble soft­ware

Acces­si­ble soft­ware is designed to enable any employee of a com­pany or gov­ern­ment agency to do the same work, receive calls at a call cen­tre and resolve busi­ness trans­ac­tions. It doesn’t mat­ter what the bar­rier is. Typ­i­cal bar­ri­ers are caused by phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties such as impaired vision, hear­ing or motor func­tion. Here, for exam­ple, eye con­trol and mouth mouse or screen reader and refre­sh­able braille dis­play can be a solu­tion.

ACD (Auto­matic Call Dis­tri­b­u­tion)

Auto­matic call dis­tri­b­u­tion (ACD) ana­lyzes and iden­ti­fies the caller’s num­ber and the ser­vice num­ber that was called and then trans­fers the call to a spe­cific agent depend­ing on the ser­vice num­ber, region/​sales ter­ri­tory, sub­ject or pri­or­ity (e.g. VIP cus­tomer, key account, retail cus­tomer, new cus­tomer etc.). Callers who can­not be assigned to a par­tic­u­lar agent or depart­ment are con­nected to the next avail­able agent for that ser­vice num­ber. ACD allows your cus­tomers to enjoy fast ser­vice with­out long queues even dur­ing high-​volume peri­ods.

AD (Active Direc­tory)

Active Direc­tory (AD) or Active Direc­tory Ser­vice (ADS) is a direc­tory ser­vice devel­oped by Microsoft that offers cen­tral­ized and stan­dard­ized man­age­ment of users, com­put­ers, print­ers and other net­work resources and net­work ser­vices at your orga­ni­za­tion. Active Direc­tory allows secure user authen­ti­ca­tion for sin­gle sign-​on on devices and access per­mis­sions for (web) appli­ca­tions. Other fea­tures include policy-​based man­age­ment and DNS inte­gra­tion.

ADFS (Active Direc­tory Fed­er­a­tion Ser­vice)

Active Direc­tory Fed­er­a­tion Ser­vice (ADFS) allows secure user authen­ti­ca­tion for sin­gle sign-​on to exter­nal ser­vices and appli­ca­tions. The fed­er­a­tion ser­vice allows users to sign in to appli­ca­tions such as Office 365 using their cor­po­rate user account that is authen­ti­cated against their organization’s Active Direc­tory. The organization’s Active Direc­tory is used by the Active Direc­tory Fed­er­a­tion Ser­vice but can­not be accessed over the inter­net.

Agent-​Based Rout­ing

Agent-​based rout­ing with calls dis­trib­uted to spe­cific agents based on the Last Agent, Least Occu­pied Agent, Longest Idle or Pre­ferred Agent algo­rithms. Agent-​based rout­ing opti­mally dis­trib­utes cus­tomer inquiries in your orga­ni­za­tion (calls, chats, e-​mails etc.) and improves cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion because rout­ing reduces wait times or directs calls to the last agent or to a pre­ferred agent.

AI (arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence)

Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) is under­stood the automa­tion of intel­li­gent behav­iour and machine learn­ing. AI makes it pos­si­ble for machines to per­form tasks for which human-​like intel­li­gence is a pre­req­ui­site. The basic idea is to use machines to approx­i­mate impor­tant func­tions of the human brain. Machines are enabled to learn, judge and solve prob­lems through var­i­ous meth­ods such as Machine Learn­ing, NLP (Nat­ural Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing) and Deep Learn­ing.

All IP (All over Inter­net Pro­to­col)

All IP means that all tech­ni­cal ter­mi­nals, servers and tele­phones com­mu­ni­cate via the Inter­net Pro­to­col (IP). All IP is the buzz­word that describes the switch from legacy tele­phone tech­nolo­gies to Inter­net tele­phony. By ensur­ing that all com­po­nents com­mu­ni­cate on a uni­form basis, you can save on mul­ti­ple interim solu­tions and addi­tional servers, increase avail­abil­ity and improve staff flex­i­bil­ity as employ­ees can tele­phone from any­where using their lap­top and head­set. We will briefly explain how it all works based on the exam­ple of “All IP with inno­va­phone PBX”: The VoIP gate­way is pur­chased to replace the tele­phone sys­tem. Addi­tional appli­ca­tions such as report­ing or fax are oper­ated on the VoIP gate­ways where required. This saves costs and admin­is­tra­tive work­load and makes the inno­va­phone PBX the com­mu­ni­ca­tions head­quar­ters for large com­pa­nies, start-​ups or SMEs. A broad range of dif­fer­ent IP tele­phones cov­ers almost every appli­ca­tion.

ANI (Auto­matic Num­ber Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion)

Auto­matic num­ber identification/​calling line iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (ANI/​CLI) are fea­tures to iden­tify the orig­i­na­tion phone num­ber (ANI) and to trans­mit the caller’s num­ber to the called party’s equip­ment (CLI). This infor­ma­tion is used to route calls selec­tively.

Auto­matic speech recog­ni­tion, or advanced speech recog­ni­tion, as it is also known, allows the recog­ni­tion, analy­sis and auto­matic inter­pre­ta­tion of spo­ken lan­guage dur­ing calls. Callers can pro­vide the rea­son for their call by talk­ing instead of push­ing but­tons on their phone. The recog­ni­tion of the lan­guage, key words and sen­tences and their mean­ing allows the call to be clas­si­fied fur­ther in order to iden­tify the right agent.

Atten­dant Pro

Atten­dant Pro is an atten­dant client for Skype for Busi­ness that offers pow­er­ful call man­age­ment. Its intu­itive user inter­face allows you to eas­ily take and trans­fer calls with a click of the mouse or using the key­board. The client’s stan­dard call rout­ing fea­tures include blind trans­fer, safe trans­fer and con­sult trans­fer, and it gives you a quick overview of incom­ing, out­go­ing, parked and trans­ferred calls.

Avaya Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Man­ager (ACM)

Avaya Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Man­ager (ACM) is the core com­po­nent of an Avaya PBX. Avaya media gate­ways and con­nected lines are cen­trally man­aged and admin­is­tered through the ACM. ACM offers a host of voice and video func­tions and pro­vides a sta­ble, decen­tral­ized net­work of media gate­ways and ana­log, dig­i­tal and IP-​based com­mu­ni­ca­tion devices. In addi­tion, Avaya Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Man­ager impresses with robust telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions func­tions, high reli­a­bil­ity, secu­rity and multi-​protocol Sup­port.

Blind Trans­fer

Accept and trans­fer a call: You take the call and route the caller to another party with­out prior announce­ment. The caller is routed and the call may or may not be answered. For SfB: The party to whom the call is routed sees the fol­low­ing mes­sage: “Call for­warded from…”. If the called party does not answer, the caller is trans­ferred accord­ing to the called party’s set­tings (voice mail, mobile), or the caller hangs up and the call is dis­con­nected.

BOR (Busi­ness Object Rout­ing)

Busi­ness Object Rout­ing (BOR) allows for all types of objects to be dis­trib­uted directly to the right agent through a cen­tral rout­ing engine. Regard­less of input chan­nel — e.g., chat, Face­book, Twit­ter, doc­u­ments, process results, busi­ness appli­ca­tions or events from data­bases — con­tent is acquired, ana­lyzed, pri­or­i­tized and dis­trib­uted to the right agent with the nec­es­sary skills and abil­i­ties through the rout­ing engine.

Call Flow

A call flow is a road map to how calls are han­dled from the moment they enter the phone sys­tem to the end of the call. Calls are selec­tively routed using dif­fer­ent meth­ods and cri­te­ria, e.g. based on open­ing hours or dialed ser­vice num­ber. Announce­ments or an IVR menu may require the caller to take actions dur­ing the call.

Chat­bot

Chat­bots are dia­logue sys­tems with nat­ural lan­guage capa­bil­i­ties based on text. In other words, they are intel­li­gent soft­ware that can com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple in a nat­ural way. Chat­bots are usu­ally used — some­times in con­junc­tion with avatars — on web­sites or in instant mes­sag­ing sys­tems. This enables them to explain or pro­mote their operator’s prod­ucts and ser­vices and to respond inde­pen­dently to cus­tomer enquiries.

Cit­rix

Cit­rix is a terminal/​server solu­tion where Win­dows appli­ca­tions and com­put­ing resources are cen­trally man­aged and pro­vided by a secure data cen­ter (XenApp and Xen­Desk­top). A Cit­rix envi­ron­ment located on-​premises or in Azure with Cit­rix HDX tech­nol­ogy pro­vides full device func­tion­al­ity (Win­dows, Linux and Mac OS), enabling employ­ees to access their work­space from any­where in the world. The work­space is avail­able across device plat­forms so users can, for exam­ple, stop work­ing on one device and con­tinue work­ing on another one. Cit­rix pro­vides a reli­able IT infra­struc­ture and tele­phony envi­ron­ment with the Cit­rix HDX Real Time Opti­miza­tion Pack for Skype for Busi­ness.

Cit­rix HDX Real­time Opti­miza­tion Pack

Allows the inte­gra­tion of Skype for Busi­ness for full device func­tion­al­ity (Win­dows, Linux and Mac OS) in a Cit­rix envi­ron­ment and opti­mizes data stream sep­a­ra­tion (audio/​video) in a cen­tral terminal/​server infra­struc­ture. Other fea­tures include call con­trol (hold, put through, hang up etc.), pres­ence, sup­port for most web­cams (inte­grated web­cams on Win­dows devices and inte­grated web­cams (Face­time cam­eras) on Mac devices), loca­tion detec­tion and dis­play, SfB Fed­er­a­tion B2C and report­ing.

Co-​Browsing

Co-​browsing sup­ports agents and cus­tomer care rep­re­sen­ta­tives by allow­ing two or more peo­ple to simul­ta­ne­ously nav­i­gate a web­site in order to, say, help cus­tomers find a cer­tain page, make a pur­chase or con­clude a con­tract. This boosts your online sales and reduces the num­ber of cus­tomers who abort con­tracts or aban­don shop­ping carts. Co-​browsing ensures that the cus­tomer and agent always see the same browser win­dow (con­tent and mouse pointer) regard­less of their choice of browser, even if they have dif­fer­ent screen res­o­lu­tions. While co-​browsing, your employee can answer the customer’s ques­tions and offer prod­uct assis­tance on the phone.

Con­sult Trans­fer

Trans­fer a call after prior con­sul­ta­tion: You take the call and route the caller to another party after announc­ing the caller. In other words, before you trans­fer the call, you call the per­son to whom you will be trans­fer­ring the call. The call is then trans­ferred and answered. For SfB: The party to whom the call is routed sees the fol­low­ing mes­sage: “Call for­warded from…”.

Con­tact Cen­ter

A con­tact cen­ter is an orga­ni­za­tional unit in a com­pany that includes all incom­ing (inbound) and out­go­ing (out­bound) com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels in direct cus­tomer con­tact. A con­tact cen­ter makes it pos­si­ble to respond to incom­ing inquiries via var­i­ous chan­nels (Omnichan­nel). This makes the con­tact cen­ter an effec­tive instru­ment for the dia­logue between a com­pany and its cus­tomers and part of the over­all Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM). In gen­eral, a dis­tinc­tion is made between locally installed sys­tems (On Premises) and cloud-​based solu­tions.

CRM (Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment)

Cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment soft­ware is a solu­tion used to sys­tem­at­i­cally cap­ture, admin­is­ter and man­age cus­tomer rela­tion­ships in a per­son­al­ized fash­ion. All con­tact infor­ma­tion, doc­u­ments and events regard­ing sales and ser­vice cus­tomers and part­ners are entered in the CRM soft­ware. Addi­tional infor­ma­tion, call memos or next steps can be entered cen­trally dur­ing a phone call in order to main­tain a com­plete his­tory of cus­tomer inter­ac­tions. Fur­ther­more, CRM enables you to eas­ily and quickly gen­er­ate leads and fore­casts of upcom­ing events at the push of a but­ton. Main­tain­ing your cus­tomer rela­tion­ships sys­tem­at­i­cally will build cus­tomer loy­alty and boost your company’s suc­cess.

CTI (Com­puter Tele­phony Inte­gra­tion)

Com­puter tele­phony inte­gra­tion (CTI) is a com­mon name for any tech­nol­ogy that allows inter­ac­tions on a tele­phone and a com­puter to be inte­grated or coor­di­nated using installed soft­ware. Using CTI, you can con­trol phone fea­tures such as: auto­matic dial­ing, answer­ing and end­ing phone calls, set­ting up con­fer­ence calls, send­ing and receiv­ing faxes, direc­tory ser­vices and call for­ward­ing. CTI soft­ware is installed on each work­sta­tion (client) and on a cen­tral server (CTI server).

CTI Server

The CTI server is con­nected to the PBX or Skype for Busi­ness. It mon­i­tors all reg­is­tered exten­sions and pro­vides each client with CTI infor­ma­tion for its exten­sions (busy, ring­ing or caller and phone num­ber infor­ma­tion). It also serves as the cen­tral link between other sys­tem com­po­nents.

DaaS (Data­base as a Ser­vice)

SQL Data­base online con­sists of scal­able data­bases with pre­dictable and adjustable per­for­mance, high through­put and guar­an­teed avail­abil­ity thanks to repli­cas and oper­at­ing hours. SQL Data­base offers secu­rity fea­tures that help you meet your organization’s or industry’s com­pli­ance require­ments.

DECT (Dig­i­tal Enhanced Cord­less Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion)

The DECT stan­dard is a solu­tion for cre­at­ing tele­phone sys­tems based on radio ser­vices (DECT trans­mit­ters and cord­less tele­phones). Exist­ing DECT solu­tions can be inte­grated and con­nected to a Skype for Busi­ness envi­ron­ment over cer­ti­fied media gate­ways with the SIP2Lync soft­ware solu­tion. They form the con­nect­ing link between SfB and the DECT tech­nol­ogy, enabling DECT tele­phones to be used as full-​featured Skype for Busi­ness devices.

Desk­top Shar­ing

Desk­top shar­ing gen­er­ally refers to the simul­ta­ne­ous trans­mis­sion of screen con­tent to at least one other com­puter. This can be use­ful in var­i­ous sce­nar­ios. For exam­ple, com­puter users at other loca­tions can watch pre­sen­ta­tions on their mon­i­tors as if they had opened the file or pre­sen­ta­tion them­selves.

Dynamic Atten­dant

Dynamic Atten­dant offers all the fea­tures of an atten­dant in your com­pany and is avail­able in var­i­ous lan­guages. Its fea­tures include a search func­tion, an address book con­nected to var­i­ous data sources (e.g. LDAP, ODBC, CSV), a busy indi­ca­tor and hot key oper­a­tion.

Dynamic Busy

With the Dynamic Busy set­ting, you can define and admin­is­ter how incom­ing calls are han­dled if a user is busy. This set­ting applies to all Skype users system-​wide. You can specif­i­cally con­trol what hap­pens with new incom­ing calls on busy both for inter­nal and exter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions. You can also reject calls with a busy sig­nal when a call is placed on hold or parked. Other Dynamic Busy fea­tures include call for­ward­ing for incom­ing calls on busy, missed-​call noti­fi­ca­tions, syn­chro­niz­ing con­tacts and allow­ing spe­cific incom­ing calls on busy.

Dynamic Pickup

The Dynamic Pickup mod­ule lets you eas­ily pick up calls on a spe­cific co-worker’s phone line. Other fea­tures include e-​mail noti­fi­ca­tion of the orig­i­nal called party about the call pickup, phone num­ber dis­play, direct dial­ing, trans­fer, pres­ence dis­play and change, autho­riza­tions or phone book.

Dynamic Sec­re­tary

Dynamic Deputy lets you cen­trally man­age all cover arrange­ments in your Skype for Busi­ness envi­ron­ment. The device-​agnostic, web-​based real-​time por­tal for PCs, smart­phones and tablets offers intu­itive oper­a­tion and makes it eas­ier for bosses and sec­re­taries to man­age cover arrange­ments. For exam­ple, the “fol­low me” fea­ture can for­ward calls — includ­ing calls made to bosses — to another Skype user with all the per­mis­sions. Dynamic Sec­re­tary also offers cen­tral admin­is­tra­tion of Skype users, per­mis­sion man­age­ment, pres­ence and real-​time dis­play of all call for­ward­ing arrange­ments.

Dynam­ics CRM

Dynam­ics CRM is Microsoft’s cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) solu­tion based on Microsoft​.NET.

Dynam­ics NAV

Dynam­ics NAV is Microsoft’s stan­dard soft­ware for ERP sys­tems.

ERM (E-​Mail Response Man­age­ment)

Incom­ing e-​mails are sent to the con­tact center’s dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem by your organization’s e-​mail server. E-​mail con­tent is ana­lyzed, pri­or­i­tized and routed to the most suit­able agent.

Enter­prise resource plan­ning

Ger­man com­pany that devel­ops uni­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tions and CTI soft­ware

Fat Client

Fat clients are com­put­ers with stan­dard­ized hard­ware that are largely inde­pen­dent of net­works and thus pro­vide rich offline func­tion­al­ity for employ­ees. The oper­at­ing sys­tem and all the appli­ca­tions are installed on the fat client. Only the data is retrieved from the server to which the fat client has an open inter­face. Fat clients are pow­er­ful desk­top com­put­ers with plenty of com­put­ing capac­ity, hard drive space, CD-​ROM dri­ves and high-​performance graph­ics cards, as opposed to thin clients.

HLB (Hard­ware Load Bal­ancer)

A hard­ware load bal­ancer dis­trib­utes the load across sev­eral par­al­lel server com­po­nents.

IaaS (Infra­struc­ture as a Ser­vice)

Infra­struc­ture as a ser­vice essen­tially means pro­vid­ing vir­tual infra­struc­ture com­po­nents as needed on the fly. IaaS offer­ings include phys­i­cal hard­ware, net­works with fire­walls and routers, user-​specific vir­tu­al­ized plat­forms and ser­vice level agree­ments (SLAs). (Exam­ples: file servers, server sys­tems with­out oper­at­ing sys­tems or pre­con­fig­ured VHDs, servers, CPU capac­ity, net­work capac­ity, com­mu­ni­ca­tions devices, mem­ory, archiv­ing and backup sys­tems).

Inno­va­phone PBX (inno­va­phone VoIP gate­way)

The inno­va­phone VoIP gate­way is an IP-​based tele­phone sys­tem from “inno­va­phone AG”. A Ger­man com­pany founded in 1997 with its own devel­op­ment depart­ment, inno­va­phone focuses on the devel­op­ment and man­u­fac­ture of IP tele­phony sys­tems in the fields of IP tele­phony and uni­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tions solu­tions. inno­va­phone VoIP Gate­way offers both all-​in-​one solu­tions for com­pa­nies with up to 5, 10, 50 or 200 employ­ees, and also up to 500 employ­ees with 10 con­fer­ence chan­nels. The inno­va­phone PBX has numer­ous func­tions and a wide range of secu­rity mech­a­nisms for opti­mum pro­tec­tion against sys­tem­atic illicit data access and hacker attacks (TeleTrusT — Bun­desver­band IT-​Sicherheit e.V.). In addi­tion to the qual­ity seal “IT secu­rity made in Ger­many” for inno­va­phone solu­tions, inno­va­phone tele­phones and gate­ways have received a wide range of awards as ITC prod­ucts (in the fields of desk­top tele­phones and con­fer­ence solu­tions, UCC solu­tions and IP/​VoIP TC sys­tems for large com­pa­nies) or the Red Design Award for IP tele­phones.

IP-​DECT/​WLAN

Using IP-​DECT or WLAN tech­nolo­gies and a cen­tral IP tele­phone sys­tem (e.g. inno­va­phone PBX) ensures that employ­ees who move fre­quently within a com­pany (e.g. between dif­fer­ent depart­ments or on the company’s premises) can be reached at all times. Employ­ees can still be reached on their usual phone num­ber, even when away from their desk. The avail­able IP-​DECT and WLAN ter­mi­nals offer the cus­tom­ary com­fort and scope of per­for­mance, irre­spec­tive of the net­work used.

IPD NOW

Rental IT. IPD NOW is an inte­grated com­mu­ni­ca­tions and IT prod­uct offer­ing every­thing from ser­vices and hard­ware to cost-​effective, cus­tomised pack­ages. IPD NOW is not just a prod­uct that has been specif­i­cally devel­oped with the needs of SMEs in mind; it is an all-​round, worry-​free rental pack­age. It includes, for exam­ple, the work­space, IP-​based tele­phony, Office365 and Skype for Busi­ness as well as cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment. The clever rental mod­els avoid high pur­chase costs, even for hard­ware such as lap­tops or tele­phones. And since cus­tomer flex­i­bil­ity is para­mount, IPD NOW allows you to reduce or increase the num­ber of licences at any time.

IVR (Inter­ac­tive Voice Response)

IVR is a voice dia­log sys­tem that takes calls and answers them based on a custom-​programmed call flow. Callers can oper­ate the sys­tem by typ­ing their entries on a DTMF key­pad or speak­ing their choices out loud to a speech recog­ni­tion sys­tem (ASR). The IVR has var­i­ous inter­faces for access­ing a data­base or other con­nec­tors.

Last Agent

Agent-​based rout­ing that routes calls to the last con­tacted agent.

Least Occu­pied Agent

Agent-​based rout­ing that routes calls to the least occu­pied agent.

Longest Idle

Agent-​based rout­ing that routes calls to the agent with the longest idle time.

Media Esca­la­tion

Use an addi­tional media chan­nel (e.g. voice or video) dur­ing an exist­ing con­tact (e.g. chat).

Media Rout­ing

Rout­ing of con­tacts (calls, doc­u­ments, social media etc.) using the same rout­ing engine.

Microsoft Azure

The Microsoft cloud com­put­ing plat­form pro­vides extremely sim­ple, pow­er­ful deploy­ment and admin­is­tra­tion for your IT infra­struc­ture. Microsoft Azure offers high avail­abil­ity and scal­a­bil­ity across sev­eral servers. IT solu­tions can be built by mix­ing and match­ing local soft­ware and servers with cen­tral cloud-​based ser­vices and servers. Microsoft Azure offers solu­tions for servers, ser­vices, appli­ca­tions and data­bases at every level with infra­struc­ture as a ser­vice (IaaS), plat­form as a ser­vice (PaaS), soft­ware as a ser­vice (SaaS) or data­base as a ser­vice (DaaS).

Microsoft SQL Server

A data­base man­age­ment sys­tem from Microsoft. SQL data­base servers are used as a cen­tral data­base for the con­tact cen­ter plat­form, for exam­ple.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is an inno­v­a­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­form and cen­tral point of con­tact for a vir­tual team, quasi a dig­i­tal image of the clas­sic team con­fer­ence room and desk. As a mod­ern chat-​based col­lab­o­ra­tion solu­tion for team­work and com­mu­ni­ca­tion in real time, Microsoft Teams enables mobile work­ing on dif­fer­ent end devices. Microsoft Teams accel­er­ates project work through clar­ity and trans­parency and pro­vides a dig­i­tally more open and fluid envi­ron­ment.

Mon­i­tor Desk­top Host

Unlike stan­dard real-​time mon­i­tor­ing in a web browser, the mon­i­tor desk­top host lets you select and dis­play sev­eral mon­i­tor screens in sep­a­rate win­dows and adjust their posi­tion and size. This selec­tion is saved when you exit the appli­ca­tion and shown again next time you start the appli­ca­tion.

Nagios

Appli­ca­tion for mon­i­tor­ing com­plex IT sys­tem com­po­nents.

Office365

Office365 is a Microsoft sub­scrip­tion ser­vice that includes the stan­dard Office appli­ca­tions (Word, Pow­er­Point, Excel, Out­look, OneNote) and always pro­vides the most recent ver­sion of these pro­grams. Office365 also offers cloud-​based pro­duc­tiv­ity and is opti­mized for use on any device.

Office­Mas­ter

Gate­ways offered by Fer­rari elec­tronic. VoIP gate­ways Office­Mas­ter Gate and Office­Mas­ter Advanced con­nect exist­ing ISDN lines with Skype for Busi­ness Server (also in com­bi­na­tion with Exchange Server for Voice­mail). Office­Mas­ter serves as an intel­li­gent trans­la­tor between the land­line net­work and the SIP pro­to­col used by Microsoft.

On Premises

The organization’s ICT infra­struc­ture is installed in owned or leased facil­i­ties and oper­ated by the organization’s admin­is­tra­tors. On-​premises solu­tions incur acqui­si­tion, oper­at­ing and elec­tric­ity costs that you can elim­i­nate with cloud-​based solu­tions.

PaaS (Plat­form as a Ser­vice)

Plat­form as a ser­vice essen­tially means pro­vid­ing the IT admin­is­tra­tor or devel­oper with a server and oper­at­ing sys­tem as needed. An IT admin­is­tra­tor, for exam­ple, may need a Win­dows server for an Exchange envi­ron­ment. A devel­oper, for exam­ple, may need a server with a Unix oper­at­ing sys­tem for devel­op­ing web-​based solu­tions for a period of 3 months. With PaaS, you get vir­tual servers with an oper­at­ing sys­tem and update/​upgrade ser­vice for the host oper­at­ing sys­tem as well as patch­ing and failover. (Exam­ples: server sys­tems with oper­at­ing sys­tems, web servers, web appli­ca­tions, high-​performance PHP appli­ca­tions)

PBX (Pri­vate Branch Exchange)

Phone sys­tem that pro­vides var­i­ous inter­faces (ISDN, ana­log, SIP/​IP) for con­nect­ing devices (phone, fax, answer­ing machine). Orga­ni­za­tions are increas­ingly replac­ing con­ven­tional PBXs with Skype for Busi­ness in order to use its state-​of-​the-​art fea­tures.

Peer-​To-​Peer

Direct con­nec­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion between devices, users, net­works and nodes or com­put­ers in a net­work.

PoE (Power over Eth­er­net)

Sup­ply­ing devices with elec­tric­ity through the Eth­er­net cable

Pre­ferred Agent

Agent-​based rout­ing that routes calls to a fixed agent (pre­ferred agent). If the pre­ferred agent does not answer, calls can be routed to other avail­able agents after a set period.

Pres­ence

Real-​time user sta­tus dis­play. Also called pres­ence status/​display or avail­abil­ity. Pres­ence states are shown using traf­fic light col­ors and indi­cate whether users are avail­able, busy, not to be dis­turbed or away.

Pres­ence Ser­vice

The pres­ence ser­vice syn­chro­nizes pres­ence states between Skype for Busi­ness, mobile phone, desk­top phones, PBXs etc. so that all the devices and appli­ca­tions show the cur­rent pres­ence sta­tus.

Provider

The provider is the com­pany which books and pays for the Inter­net con­nec­tion (gen­er­ally monthly). The provider enables access to the Inter­net and to the tele­phone net­work. Here, the terms “IP”, “SIP”, “VoIP” and “gate­way” are replac­ing tra­di­tional tele­phone terms such as “ISDN”, “S2M”, “PMX” or “ana­logue”.

PSTN Tele­phony

The tra­di­tional pub­lic switched tele­phone net­work (PSTN) is a circuit-​switched net­work for real-​time voice com­mu­ni­ca­tion (phone net­work). Ana­log sub­scribers that only have one line receive data con­sec­u­tively in ana­log form. That means that only one device can be used at a time — either the phone, fax or answer­ing machine. IDSN sub­scribers receive data in dig­i­tal form. That means sev­eral sig­nals can be sent and received simul­ta­ne­ously. As a result, phone, fax or answer­ing machine can be used simul­ta­ne­ously via two chan­nels.

Push Noti­fi­ca­tion

The push noti­fi­ca­tion ser­vice is designed for mobile devices that do not sup­port run­ning appli­ca­tions in the back­ground. If an appli­ca­tion is inac­tive, the push noti­fi­ca­tion ser­vice is used to send new events – such as a missed call or missed chat invi­ta­tion – to the mobile device.

QoS (Qual­ity of Ser­vice)

Qual­ity of Ser­vice is a tech­nol­ogy that reserves avail­able band­width for cer­tain appli­ca­tions. Dif­fer­ent meth­ods are used to define prop­er­ties for trans­fer­ring data over IP net­works. For exam­ple, active net­work com­po­nents (switches, routers) pri­or­i­tize VoIP data pack­ets over stan­dard data pack­ets. QoS is used to han­dle real-​time data such as Voice over IP or video stream­ing.

RONA (Redi­rec­tion On No Answer)

Con­fig­urable time allowed to accept a call. The caller is redi­rected if no one answers. The non-​responding agent is either flagged as ‘absent’ by the sys­tem or assigned a defined break. The caller is placed back in the queue.

Route­ToA­gent

Agent-​based rout­ing func­tion that routes calls directly to a spe­cific agent (per­sonal con­tact) regard­less of the agent’s avail­abil­ity or skills.

Rout­ing Engine

Cen­tral sys­tem com­po­nent for auto­mat­i­cally direct­ing calls, doc­u­ments, etc. to agents on all com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nels.

SaaS (Soft­ware as a Ser­vice)

Soft­ware as a ser­vice means, in a nut­shell, that you down­load soft­ware from the inter­net on an as-​needed basis. With SaaS, you pro­vide soft­ware to your employ­ees so each one of them is run­ning the same soft­ware ver­sion. The soft­ware and IT infra­struc­ture are pro­vided and oper­ated in Azure, where you (an Azure cus­tomer) use them as a ser­vice. That means your orga­ni­za­tion hands off all IT infra­struc­ture and admin­is­tra­tive tasks so you can focus on your core busi­ness.

Safe Trans­fer

Accept and trans­fer a call (like a blind trans­fer). You take the call and route the caller to another party with­out prior announce­ment. The caller is routed and the call may or may not be answered. If the call is not answered, the caller is trans­ferred back to the orig­i­nal called party (oper­a­tor or indi­vid­ual per­son).

Soft­ware ven­dor that devel­ops ERP solu­tions for var­i­ous busi­ness processes. Users can chat, e-​mail and make phone calls from within the SAP appli­ca­tion (SAP web client) thanks to inter­faces with Skype for Busi­ness and the con­tact cen­ter.

Ser­vice Level-​Based Rout­ing

Rout­ing deci­sions are made based on the cur­rent ser­vice level for a par­tic­u­lar ser­vice, as mea­sured on a second-​by-​second basis.

SfB (Skype for Busi­ness)

Skype for Busi­ness is a client/​server archi­tec­ture that pro­vides an effi­cient uni­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tions solu­tion. Skype for Busi­ness can be used within a sin­gle orga­ni­za­tion, across orga­ni­za­tional bound­aries and with out­side indi­vid­u­als. The client inter­face offers the same look and feel across device plat­forms and pro­vides real-​time pres­ence infor­ma­tion, includ­ing the user’s pic­ture, avail­abil­ity and loca­tion. Pro­fes­sional team­work is sup­ported by com­monly used chan­nels such as calls, audio and video web con­fer­enc­ing, instant mes­sag­ing (IM), file trans­fer, desk­top shar­ing, voice­mail, white­boards and e-​mail.

SfB Pow­er­Shell

Pow­er­Shell is a com­mand shell and script­ing lan­guage for admin­is­ter­ing and man­ag­ing Skype for Busi­ness Server instead of using the GUI-​based Skye for Busi­ness Server Con­trol Panel.

SfB Topol­ogy Builder

Topol­ogy Builder is the instal­la­tion and man­age­ment com­po­nent of Skype for Busi­ness Server. It is used to deploy servers and cre­ate, pub­lish and change server topolo­gies.

Share­Point

Microsoft plat­form that allows employ­ees at your orga­ni­za­tion to work on doc­u­ments simul­ta­ne­ously. Other cen­tral fea­tures include web con­tent man­age­ment, doc­u­ment man­age­ment and secu­rity fea­tures that help you meet your organization’s or industry’s com­pli­ance poli­cies.

Sin­gle Sign-​On

Sin­gle sign-​on (SSO) lets users access mul­ti­ple resources for which they have access per­mis­sions after pre­sent­ing their login cre­den­tials only once. Employee data (pass­words, access per­mis­sions, etc.) is recorded cen­trally in a main direc­tory. All ser­vices and appli­ca­tions access the main direc­tory in order to authen­ti­cate the user.

SIP (Ses­sion Ini­ti­a­tion Pro­to­col)

SIP is a sig­nal­ing and con­trol­ling pro­to­col for IP-​based mul­ti­me­dia and mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices and appli­ca­tions. In VoIP, it is used to set up calls, trans­fer data dur­ing the call and tear down calls (SIP ses­sion). Calls are sig­naled by resolv­ing either a num­ber or a name, such as the SIP address “sip:john.doe@company.com”. SIP trunks are used to con­nect sys­tem com­po­nents to one another in the local net­work, to con­nect to servers in the inter­net and to con­nect to the pub­lic switched tele­phone net­work (PSTN).

SIP Address

SIP addresses (also known as URIs) can be used to con­tact peo­ple with a soft­ware phone (e.g. Skype for Busi­ness client) or a SIP tele­phone. SIP addresses have the same struc­ture as an e-​mail address, except they use the pre­fix “sip:” (e.g. “sip:info@example.com”). If you know your party’s SIP address, you can enter the SIP address instead of a phone num­ber as long as the phone or soft­ware accepts alphanu­meric SIP addresses.

Skill-​Based Rout­ing

Skill-​based rout­ing assigns cus­tomer con­tacts to agents or agent groups with cer­tain skills, qual­i­fi­ca­tions and spe­cial­iza­tions. Skills can include lan­guage pro­fi­ciency, spe­cial­iza­tion in a par­tic­u­lar field, edu­ca­tion or other qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Skill-​based rout­ing requires you to define skills (lan­guage, field, con­tact type), skill lev­els (e.g. 10=specialist and 1=in train­ing) and skill groups (a group of agents that have the same skills). Cus­tomer inquiries (calls, chat mes­sages, e-​mails, etc.) are assigned to appro­pri­ately qual­i­fied agents at your orga­ni­za­tion in order to drive key fac­tors such as cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion.

Stor­Sim­ple

Microsoft hybrid cloud stor­age with data backup, archiv­ing and dis­as­ter recov­ery. Stor­Sim­ple is an on-​premises stor­age solu­tion with a flex­i­ble, scal­able cloud exten­sion. The entry-​level ver­sions begin at 15 to 40 TB in local stor­age and 200 TB in the cloud. Local stor­age gives your orga­ni­za­tion rapid inter­nal access to data. The extended cloud stor­age holds data back­ups and snap­shots as well as inac­tive or cold data spec­i­fied by user-​defined reten­tion poli­cies.

Sys­tem Cen­ter

Sys­tem Cen­ter from Microsoft is an IT admin­is­tra­tion suite of man­age­ment con­soles for dif­fer­ent tasks, plus mul­ti­ple auto­mated man­age­ment tools for deploy­ment, con­fig­u­ra­tion and mon­i­tor­ing in hybrid IT infra­struc­tures (on-​premises/​Azure). Vir­tual Machine Man­ager, for exam­ple, is a pow­er­ful tool for admin­is­ter­ing vir­tu­al­ized data cen­ters. Con­fig­u­ra­tion Man­ager enables the deploy­ment of more effi­cient IT ser­vices, com­pli­ance enforce­ment and pow­er­ful resource man­age­ment for servers, desk­tops, lap­tops and mobile devices. Oper­a­tions Man­ager (SCOM) allows flex­i­ble, cost-​efficient mon­i­tor­ing of your IT infra­struc­ture.

Thin Client

Client work­sta­tion in a Ter­mi­nal Server/​Citrix envi­ron­ment that has no appli­ca­tions of its own installed, but only runs appli­ca­tions pro­vided by the server. Thin clients are com­put­ers with stan­dard­ized hard­ware that access a server over a remote con­nec­tion. All the busi­ness logic runs on the servers. The thin client is only used to dis­play data and cap­ture user input (e.g. stan­dard web client).

UCC (Uni­fied Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Col­lab­o­ra­tion)

UCC com­bines prod­ucts, ser­vice fea­tures and busi­ness processes in a way that unleashes syn­er­gies for your orga­ni­za­tion. “Uni­fied” means not only that dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels and meth­ods are com­bined and con­sol­i­dated into a sin­gle user dash­board, but also that com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­tent is pro­vided across plat­forms on all devices such as SIP phones, smart­phones and tablets (with appli­ca­tion sup­port). “Com­mu­ni­ca­tions” refers to all types of com­mu­ni­ca­tions, includ­ing voice, data and desk­top con­tent for tele­phony, voice­mail, e-​mail, fax, text mes­sage, mul­ti­me­dia mes­sage, reg­u­lar mail, etc. “Col­lab­o­ra­tion” refers to dis­trib­uted, computer-​based work jointly per­formed by teams and groups at dif­fer­ent times and/​or loca­tions and includes e-​mail, cal­en­dars, wikis, blogs, chat, pres­ence infor­ma­tion and man­age­ment, audio/​video con­fer­ences, doc­u­ment and desk­top shar­ing.

Voice­bot

The voice­bot is a vir­tual, dig­i­tal assis­tant based on nat­ural speech recog­ni­tion (NLU = nat­ural lan­guage under­standig). Its com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills are not lim­ited to catch­words, but extend to entire sen­tences and dialects. He can even han­dle com­plex busi­ness trans­ac­tions over the phone fully or par­tially auto­mated. In this way, cus­tomers can describe their con­cerns in their own words in a nor­mal con­ver­sa­tion and receive imme­di­ate help. For greater reach­a­bil­ity, shorter calls and a lower call for­ward­ing rate with 24/​7 ser­vice, we seam­lessly inte­grate voice offer­ings with Skype for Busi­ness and com­mu­ni­ca­tions servers and cus­tomer data­bases.

VoIP (Voice over Inter­net Pro­to­col)

VoIP lets you com­mu­ni­cate by voice, data and video over a local area net­work or the inter­net. It is a low-​cost alter­na­tive to land­line or cel­lu­lar tele­phony for voice and video com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

VoIP gate­way

A VoIP gate­way can be installed as an inde­pen­dent IP-​based tele­phone sys­tem or as an inter-​face sys­tem. As an inter­face sys­tem, a VoIP gate­way con­verts tra­di­tional tele­phony voice sig-​nals into IP data pack­ages. These data pack­ages are sent within the IP-​based net­work. The VoIP gate­way ensures com­pat­i­bil­ity with older tele­phone systems/​connections (ana­logue, ISDN, BRI, E1/​T1 PRI).

Vox­tron Client

Vox­tron Client gives agents a pow­er­ful toolset for effi­ciently and intu­itively serv­ing cus­tomers across all com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nels. Cus­tomers can eas­ily con­tact your orga­ni­za­tion by phone, e-​mail, chat, video, fax, doc­u­ments, busi­ness processes, social media, etc., while your staff can choose from four dif­fer­ent out­bound dial­ing meth­ods. When com­bined with the Skype for Busi­ness client, Vox­tron Client rep­re­sents a flex­i­ble, state-​of-​the-​art com­mu­ni­ca­tions solu­tion. It pro­vides con­tact cen­ter agents with all the fea­tures they need for stream­lined com­mu­ni­ca­tions processes and high pro­duc­tiv­ity.

Vox­tron Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Cen­ter

Vox­tron Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Cen­ter is a soft­ware prod­uct com­pris­ing mul­ti­ple mod­ules. Each mod­ule serves a spe­cific pur­pose. Mod­ules can be added or removed as needed and man­aged on a cen­tral web­site. There are mod­ules for auto­mated dis­tri­b­u­tion of inbound and out­bound calls, inter­ac­tive voice response (IVR) menus, computer-​telephony inte­gra­tion (CTI), web chat, e-​mail and busi­ness object rout­ing, call record­ing, report­ing and real-​time mon­i­tor­ing.

Web client

A web client is a pro­gram inter­face with cer­tain func­tions which is called up in an Inter­net browser via a fixed URL. In con­trast, soft­ware appli­ca­tions gen­er­ally require instal­la­tion and make cer­tain func­tions avail­able. Mod­ern web tech­nolo­gies enable pro­grams to be exe­cuted with the same func­tional scope but with­out any instal­la­tion. All processes are man­aged by the web client (com­mu­ni­ca­tion with a web server). Exam­ples of web clients include the Vox­tron Web­client or Innovaphone’s myPBX.