SARK UCS/MVP Installation

overview

SARK UCS/MVP is a big system and it can be daunting if you are coming to it for the first time. However, setting up a basic system is not hard and you can migrate to the more advanced topics as you gain familiarity and confidence.

Basic Telephony set-up sequence.

Globals Panel

Your first visit should be to the "Globals" panel. Once set-up you will rarely visit this panel, however it defines most of the base settings for your telephone system. Read through DocChapter06 and familiarize yourself with the settings. You can leave most to default, particularly if you aren't bothered about what extension numbers SARK UCS/MVP will allocate.

Your first Extension

Next, you should set up your first extension. For many users this may well involve a soft phone running on a PC, rather than a physical IP unit. The SJphone and X-Ten are both good candidates for this exercise (see DocChapter23 for a full discussion of softphones and DocChapter10 to set-up an extension). Once set-up, your first call should be *56*, this will cause SARK UCS/MVP to read-back the extension number of the unit. If this is successful then you are good to go.

Set up at least one more extension and test calling back and forth between extensions. You can also familiarise yourself with many of the preset keypad functions such as call-forward and voicemail. DocChapter27 covers all of the available telephone keypad operations.

Testing your Analogue lines

If you have any Digium TDM or X100P? Telephony boards fitted to your system, then you should define them now. SARK will sense and configure your boards automatically and you can learn how in DocChapter222. Once defined, you should test an inbound call to the board. Initially, this will ring at the first extension you defined because this will be the default "operator" extension. You can change this behaviour in the Trunks panel to do more interesting things such as running IVR scripts and so forth later.

Choosing and defining a VOIP Carrier

If you wish to make and receive VOIP calls you will need to purchase a subscription from a VOIP carrier. There are lots to choose from and many are already pre-defined for you within SARK UCS/MVP . When you subscribe you will receive a VOIP number which callers can use to call you from a conventional telephone system. You will need to set-up a trunk so that SARK UCS/MVP knows about your carrier (see DocChapter09). This will allow you to receive inbound calls from your VOIP Carrier. In order to make outbound calls you must also set-up at least one route using the Routes panel (see DocChapter11).

What's Next?

If you've followed the sequence so far, you should now have a working, though simple, VOIP telephone system. You might want to add some more trunks to handle more VOIP numbers and you may want to specify some with other suppliers. Perhaps you want to add some physical IP phones to your system. For this, you may wish to turn on the SARK UCS/MVP tftp/http provisioning servers so that the phones can be automatically programmed for you by SARK UCS/MVP (see DocChapter254). After that, you'll probably want to set up some speed-dials and ring/hunt groups (DocChapter12), IVR (Interactive Voice Response) Menus (DocChapter15), opening/closed hours (DocChapter17) and maybe create queues (DocChapter13) for some of your inbound call trunks.