Clearway Network Management SolutionsClearway Network Management Solutions

OCSExpert

The use of Unified Communications technologies for enterprise collaboration and communication has clear business benefits including reduced costs, improved employee productivity, accelerated business processes, improved user satisfaction, and increased IT efficiency.  Organizations typically achieve significant savings in travel expenses, messaging costs, and telephony and audio conferencing through the use of Microsoft Unified Communications. Organizations deploying Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as their Enterprise Unified Communications platform are counting on it to deliver on the promise of dramatically improved communication and collaboration.

To maximize these benefits, organizations must be able to:

  • Deliver customized Service Level Agreements to the business to allow transparency in cost savings and ROI
  • Monitor real-time performance data across geographic locations, devices, and services
  • Maximize the performance and availability of their OCS services
  • Manage employee satisfaction with proactive alerts and performance metrics
  • Provide comprehensive support that:
    • Allows instant problem identification that may span locations, devices, and services
    • Enables multi-tiered support with an easy-to-use problem resolution knowledge base
    • Automatically resolves problems through continuous learning

Clearway OCS Expert is designed specifically to meet the Unified Communications challenges of Enterprise IT. It is the one tool that allows your front-line support staff to proactively and quickly resolve any OCS issues, ensuring that your users are satisfied with their OCS experience while you lower your support costs. Its reporting tools enable you to quantify OCS benefits, identify bottlenecks, and plan for future expansion.

Enterprise Benefits

Higher Business Satisfaction

  • Faster issue resolution
  • Define customized SLAs for different groups or locations
  • IT has access to rich, interactive dashboards that focus on providing SLA transparency
  • Proactive customer alerts for problem identification and resolution
  • Comprehensive reporting and analysis capabilities

Lower Support Costs

  • Expert technical support knowledge captured in a comprehensive knowledge base
  • Help desk support team requires less training and expertise to resolve complex support issues
  • Reduces the need to hire and build highly specialized support engineering teams
  • The custom knowledge base can be enhanced as enterprise-specific solutions evolve

Features

Real-time synchronization and aggregation of performance metrics from OCS 2007 R2

Built-in rules-based Knowledge Base system

  • Define metrics for measuring performance of the Service Level Agreement promised by IT to the business
  • Assign custom alerts and rules for key metrics
  • Define potential problems and build problem resolution scripts for support teams

Easy-to-use rich, interactive dashboard for support staff

  • Geography Dashboard highlights locations that need attention on a Live Microsoft Bing map
  • Performance Dashboard provides a simple, consolidated view of your key performance metrics at a glance
  • Support Dashboard allows analysis of current issues in your environment
  • Decision trees are displayed to enable the efficient resolution of problems

Details

Clearway OCS Expert Architecture

1. OCS clients communicate with OCS via one or more OCS Front End Servers

2. At the end of each communication (audio or video), performance data is sent to the OCS QoE Monitoring Server

3. Clearway OCS Expert collects performance data via web services and exposes the following information:

  • Session—Get session SIP information from two endpoints
  • Media Line—Conversational MOS information
  • Audio Stream—Performance Details on Audio Call (Jitter, Packet Loss, Burst Density, Packet Utilization, Degradation, Noise Level, and more)
  • Video Stream—(Jitter, Packet Loss, Burst Density, Packet Utilization, Degradation, Noise Level, and more)

4. Once the data is exposed through the web service, it enters into the Clearway OCS Expert system that includes:

Event Gateway

The Event Gateway consumes data from OCS QoE Monitoring Server using web services. Clearway Network Management Solutions has worked with a variety of industry partners to create a hub-and-spoke system where partners can connect to the Event Gateway to add data from other network devices and services to the OCS data.

Event Processing Layer

The event processing layer allows users, metrics, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to be defined and applied. This is where events are analyzed against the defined metrics, metrics are compared to KPIs, and actionable problem events are identified.

ETL

The ETL (extract, transform, and load) layer performs real-time transformation of the input data so that it can be processed by the knowledge base.

Knowledge Base

Problem events are compared to the knowledge base where rules are applied to generate alerts and escalations, but most importantly, to give the Help Desk support team an automated guide for resolving the problem. This automated diagnostic and remedy allows events to be worked by lower-level support staff rather than immediately needing to be escalated to the engineering level for resolution. This provides both a quicker resolution of the problem and a much more cost-effective solution for support staffing. It substantially reduces the cost of problem resolution, while at the same time increasing SLA performance, providing better service to the organization.

Performance Dashboard

An interactive Performance Dashboard is provided to maximize ease of use and efficiency in detecting and resolving OCS issues. The dashboard is targeted primarily to front-line Help Desk staff, providing solutions to technical issues in a format understandable to users who do not have extensive technical training. Clearway OCS Expert also meets the needs of the most demanding technical users.

Scalable High-Performance Platform

Clearway OCS Expert is highly scalable and extensible. It can be quickly deployed and scaled to an expanding OCS environment, incorporating additional OCS servers and higher volumes of OCS traffic. Our commitment to product development will continue to extend the capabilities of Clearway OCS Expert by including features for real-time event probability, risk analysis, advanced analysis of the state of the network, event correlation, pattern recognition, provisioning, and security.


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