ENCS provides Voice Service with a wide array of features and functionality allowing faculty and staff to easily communicate with others. Voice service features include local and long distance calling, voice mail, single digit menus and automatic call distribution (ACD).
- ENCS offers telephone instruments and infrastructure to support communications between users as well as connection to the public telephone network for subscribers of Penn States Enterprise Telephony service. Through this service, callers are able to place and receive telephone calls.
- ENCS offers ACD service to colleges or departments that choose to have ITS/ENCS design, implement, support and maintain VoIP service. The service is available to subscribers of Penn States Enterprise (VoIP) Telephony Service.
- ENCS offers a wide variety of long distance services and toll-free service products. Through these services/products, authorized users can initiate and receive domestic and international long distance telephone calls.
- ENCS offers two distinct solutions for voice mail for subscribers of Penn States Enterprise Telephony service. The VoIP and non-VoIP Voice Mail Services provide call coverage via recording messages when the associated telephone is not answered.
- ENCS offers the Single Digit Menu service to subscribers of Penn States Enterprise (VoIP) Telephony Service to allow callers to reach announcement boards, local non-toll and toll free phone numbers, voice mailboxes, or a combination of these offerings.
- ITS offers Audio conferencing solutions.
- ITS offers Cellular information.
- Telephony is the technology associated with the electronic transmission of voice, fax, or other information between distant parties using systems historically associated with the telephone.
- ACD service provides call processing via the following:
- Call delivery to dedicated extension numbers by individual telephony instrumentation
- Queuing based on resource group
- Queue management via the following:
- Real time queue and agent reporting
- Historical queue and agent reporting
- Customized recorded prompts based on business requirements
- Long Distance refers to domestic (US continent, Alaska, Hawaii) and international voice communications.
- Voice Mail iis the technology associated with the recording of electronic transmission of voice between distant parties for storage and playback.
- Single Digital Menu is the technology associated with the routing of inbound voice calls via customer input via keypad.
- Audio Conferencing refers to the ability to connect 3 or more participants on a single call.
- Cellular refers to the cellular service and equipment from cellular carriers that have contractual involvement with PSU.
- Customer refers to the Department or College funding the service; user refers to faculty, staff, students and guests who use the service.
- Design, installation, maintenance, support of customer Voice service
- Meet service response times
- Provide access to reports as requested to include: uptime/availability, number of incidents, response times
- Notification of planned outages at least 72 hrs in advance via ITS-Alerts website/listserv
- Notification of significant unplanned service interruptions/outages via ITS-Alerts website/listserv.
- Maintain a supply of replacement equipment on the UP campus in case of hardware failure
- Utilize the OC for reporting of service issues
- Attend Telephony training and utilize the system properly
- Contact ENCS via Inquiry to ask questions or modify service
- Maintenance is defined as the upgrade or replacement of hardware and\or software. The available maintenance window is weekdays from 5AM – 7AM. Exceptions to this window can be made if coordinated with the customer and approved by the ITS CAB (Change Advisory Board).
- All changes implemented by ENCS will be communicated to the customer so that they are aware of production changes. If replacement of equipment is required due to a problem and depending on the priority, the equipment may be replaced outside of the maintenance window hours.
The performance objective of ENCS provided voice services is 99.9% or better to the building location.
Daily performance/availability reports to ENCS include:
- Total incidents, response time to incidents (by priority)
- Resolution of tickets (based on ticket system)
- Outage metrics - uptime/availability (per year, month, week) and planned vs unplanned and associated root causes
- Change management metric - ratio of unplanned outages caused by failed changes to total outages
Monitoring:
- ENCS will actively monitor the Voice Mail infrastructure for events affecting the service. Monitoring includes, and is not limited to, up\down status, interface errors and utilization. ENCS will create cases (incidents) as required to track and resolve the events.
- A Service Request is defined as a request for information about or a change to the existing service. A problem with the service should be submitted via Incident management (see below). For requests to add, change or terminate this service, contact ENCS at 814-865-1696 or submit a request through the Service Inquiry/Request Form
. - Any changes required by to expand or maintain the viability of the service will be discussed with the customer if the service as described will change due to the modifications.
The OC provides support for trouble calls related to the University's telecommunications services. The staff monitors the University's voice, data, and video networks to ensure that problems are identified and resolved quickly. Incident numbers are assigned for all reported troubles. The person reporting the trouble will receive an email acknowledgement when the incident is opened, as well as when it has been resolved.
The initial ticket will be in the OC queue. OC staff will review the ticket, attempt to confirm the reported incident, and assess escalation for ENCS staff. Direct collaboration between staff and the customer will occur exclusive of OC notifications as required.
The OC hours are: 24 X 7
Voice Service Issues:
(e.g. no user is able to connect to the Single Digit Menu service)
To report problems with the Voice service, contact the OC via:
- Web: https://noc.psu.edu
- Phone: 814-865-4662
- Email: noc@psu.edu
In the event of a significant outage, please contact the OC via phone.
After hours, the OC phone lines are transferred to an answering service. If the event occurs outside of OC hours and can’t wait until the next business day, the answering service will page on-call staff to respond to the outage.
- Core Hours: Monday – Friday, 8:00am – 5:00pm
- OC Hours: See above (Incident Management)
- Response Time: The time elapsed from when ENCS receives notice of a problem until ENCS staff is actively involved in trying to correct the problem.
- Resolution Time: The time from when ENCS staff become actively involved in trying to correct a problem until it is resolved. If ENCS is actively working on resolving a critical issue, staff will continue working on the issue past core hours until service is restored unless restricted by vendor support or resource availability. Resolution time does not take into account travel time if dispatch to non-University locations are required.
- After Hours Response and Resolution Times: During non-core hours, personnel are on-call and are dispatched by the OC and the answering service, if required. Response and resolution times will vary due to this. In some cases, a problem may be able to be resolved remotely, however, if staff are required to dispatch outside of core hours, resolution times may increase.
At any time, problems can be escalated by requesting the OC escalate the incident (email: noc@psu.edu, office phone: 814-865-4662).
- Power
- Backbone/Network Connection/University Enterprise Network
- Hardware (switches, VoIP server infrastructure)
- Vendor provided telecommunications connectivity
- Authentication Services (locally within the VoIP infrastructure)
- ITS/Telecommunications & Networking Services
- Penn State ACD Customers and Users
- General Public
In the event that the Customer finds the service is no longer relevant, the customer may terminate the service by contacting TNS at (814) 865-1696 or by submitting a request through theService Inquiry/Request Form .