With the appropriate equipment, Avaya Aura CM sites can “survive” an outage. An outage, in this context, means that the site lost IP (or TDM shudder) connectivity to both its primary controller and its enterprise survivable server (if there is one). The necessary equipment includes (generally) a media gateway with a local survivable processor, and some form of trunking (if you want calls to be able to leave the gateway).
Alternate title: an exercise in tedium.
About Announcements, in Communication Manager (CM) 5 and 6 at least, are simply specially-crafted wav files, stored on NVRAM/flash on either a port-network VAL board or a media-gateway announcement board, which are played back to callers. Announcements do not involve overhead paging, intercom groups, group-paging, or any other type of public communication.
This document is specifically about Aura Communication Manager announcements; it does not address anything about Modular Messaging, Aura Messaging, or any other voicemail or bulletin board system.
If you read Vectoring - “Intercepts” and forwarding callers to other numbers, you probably realized that following the steps in that post to silently forward callers to a different destination using VDN variables can be made much less complex than what that required. Indeed it is: there’s only one vector step needed: route-to.
In the time I’ve been administering CM, I’ve used Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X – all as my primary desktop operating system. On Windows, I mostly used Avaya Site Admin (ASA), in either interface mode (GEDI or Emulation). That was fine, when I used only Windows, and only ever needed to administer CM from stations where ASA was installed. I fairly quickly tired of using RDP (to connect to a Windows machine that had ASA installed) or a VM (to run a Windows VM that had ASA installed on a desktop without either Windows or ASA).
Once upon a time, there was a PBX migration, and along with it came a massive renumbering effort - every phone number (extension, DID, station, fax – any telephone number) in the organization was to change. “Oh no,” said the business people, “what ever will our outside contacts do?! We can’t get rid of any of our current telephone numbers!” After much debate, a list was made, and it indicated the old telephone number and new telephone number for each and every effected person or device.
