Our Story So Far
I am not an expert in traditional telephony. I am at peace with this, but there are times where I need to step up to the plate and take one for the team. I've been managing and maintaining our Mitel 3300 ICP for a while now, and I am constantly struck as to how difficult it can be. For a large number of years, telephony of the traditional type, has been full of terms and concepts that may not be quite comprehensible to someone who is not well steeped in the lore of the big Bells.
Earlier today, I was working at my desk and I was asked if I could page some people to help move some equipment from the office across the hall. I'll admit that I was actually stumped. This was something that I had never thought about, and I had no idea how to go about it. With all of the phone systems that I had worked with, previously, there was normally a button on the phone that would page everyone else with a phone. This worked well in a small office where people were often not at their desks. Since just pushing the button seemed to work (and I was not responsible for the PBX), I washed it from my mind. Now that I am in charge of making our PBX sing, it's a bit of a different matter. Delving into the (meager) documentation that I have on the 3300, I found what seemed to be the thing to do. There was already a paging group set up.
I added myself to the group (there were a few members in it, but none since we took over the PBX from our vendor), and then looked to see how to add a button to my phone. Navigating to the Multiline Set Key Assignment, finding my set than then finding an open button, I was presented with a large number of options. I selected the "Paging" option, saved and preceded to fail at paging people.
Looking into the help files, I was only able to find information on Loudspeaker Paging, which I was to find out, is very different from paging directly to the phones. After much searching around and digging, I found a refrence to a concept called "Direct Paging." I didn't see it when I was searching the help files (I actually found it in a 3300 User Guide, under the Advanced Features). I tried the steps contained in the instructions, but it looked like they weren't working.
Thinking that this might be a problem with how I set up my buttons, I looked back through my key settings and, lo and behold, I found an actual option to assign a button the "Direct Page" function.
With everything saved, I was able to pick up the handset, hit my new page button, dial the Page Group number, and send my shining voice out to the masses.
Back to the Good Stuff
It looks like in the telephony industry, there is a big difference in using the phone to send a message to an actual paging system and just sending a message to all the phones lying around in the company.
It looks like there are quite a number of parallels between the two, however. The way the Loudspeaker Paging works is through an actual port or card that connects to a loudspeaker system. Depending on the level of complexity of the system, the 3300 can support up to 16 zones (well, it can really support 15 zones with one [00] reserved for the dreaded "Page All Zones" type of function). On the Direct Page side of the fence, the administrator has the option of setting up multiple Page Groups and all management and pages are handled by the 3300, instead of outside hardware. I'm not sure of the maximum number of Page Groups, but it seems like it is probably quite a few.
I don't want to spend a lot of time becoming an expert on Mitel. There are people who work with the hardware much more than I do, and I would rather focus on the specifics of integrating it with OCS 2007. Now, having said that, for the record, I love learning the little ins and outs of these systems. It's quite interesting and I've learned a lot about how PBXes work, and that's help me understand the link between the telephony world and VoIP.
Well, back to the phone closet!