FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif., February 10, 2010 – Communications solutions innovator Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) today announced that CallXpress^® 8 was selected by Sharp HealthCare (Sharp), San Diego’s largest and most comprehensive healthcare organization, to centralize its infrastructure.  Sharp selected CallXpress due to its ability to centralize three standalone Octel voicemail systems onto a single system, while offering dual survivable call servers to protect against critical network failures.

Sharp is a not-for-profit integrated regional health care leader with more than 12 facilities including seven hospitals, two medical groups, medical clinics, urgent care centers, skilled nursing facilities as well as a variety of other community health education programs and related services.  Sharp serves more than three million people, operates 1,870 beds and has approximately 2,600 physicians on medical staffs, more than 1,000 physicians in affiliated medical groups and more than 14,000 employees.

Sharp needed to replace three Octel voicemail systems that were announced ‘end of life.’ The main objective was to identify a solution that offered centralization, thereby eliminating the required maintenance for those Octel systems, and the risk of end users being without voicemail service in the event of a critical system failure.  Sharp conducted an extensive review process with a Technical Review Committee tasked with identifying the right solution.  AVST’s CallXpress was selected in large part for its high availability and the ability to support its mixed TDM/hybrid switches and IP PBXs.

Sharp took great care to ensure the transition from Octel to CallXpress was a smooth process for end users and cites the ease of use in CallXpress as instrumental in the process. “The migration from Octel to CallXpress was one of our biggest implementations and the transition was virtually unnoticeable to our users.  They didn’t need much training since the CallXpress system mimicked the command structure of the Octel telephone user interface (TUI). On the day of the CallXpress cutover, our support staff team members were waiting for help desk calls that never came,” said Steve Cates, Sharp HealthCare Telecommunications Manager.

Today, the Sharp network has three major hub PBXs that are fully redundant and CallXpress supports nearly 4,000 voicemail users and handles approximately 495,000 calls per month.  Outside callers utilize more than 70 system-wide automated attendant menus in CallXpress that efficiently route them to the physician, hospital, department or employee they’re trying to reach.

With call volumes of this magnitude, and with physicians and hospitals relying on uninterrupted communications, CallXpress provides the high availability that Sharp demanded. Sharp now achieves high availability by utilizing a system server and two call servers. In this configuration, if either of the call servers fails, the other is able to answer and process calls, as well as record messages, without the loss of CallXpress application functionality.

Cates added, “Before CallXpress, system maintenance was a real challenge.  We had three separate systems that had to be maintained and everything had to be done after hours to ensure that physicians, staff and other essential personnel had access to voicemail during business hours.  If one system went down, we had a critical situation on our hands with no backup in place and thousands of messages that could be lost.  The CallXpress multiple call server architecture has brought us peace of mind.”

In addition to centralization, CallXpress offered Sharp HealthCare a robust platform with features that make users more accessible and mobile.  CallXpress comes with multiple mobility features, including unified messaging, personal assistant, message notification, single number, and speech recognition for hands-free communications.

Sharp worked closely with Advanced Call Processing (ACP), a trusted partner and AVST reseller, to identify the right solution.   “We have a great deal of experience with CallXpress and understand the needs of the Sharp team,” said Rob Simpson, President of ACP.  “CallXpress is a robust solution that can support, with ease, a high call volume, centralized network like Sharp’s.  The Sharp team needed a solution that offered the next level of reliability and CallXpress was a perfect fit.”

“CallXpress was designed to support the exact scenario that the Sharp network presented,” said Denny Michael, AVST Vice President of Marketing.  “They needed a seamless replacement of their legacy voicemail system, centralization to provide cost savings and high availability for application resiliency. We look forward to supporting Sharp HealthCare as they expand their network and deploy some of the additional functionality available in CallXpress.”

CallXpress 8 delivers a powerful suite of Unified Communications applications including advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities to help businesses become more productive.  For more information about AVST’s products visit the company’s website at www.avst.com.

About Sharp HealthCare
Sharp HealthCare is San Diego’s most comprehensive health care delivery system. It is recognized for clinical excellence for services in cardiac, cancer and multiorgan transplantation, as well as orthopaedics, rehabilitation, behavioral health and women’s health. Sharp HealthCare has been widely acclaimed for its commitment to transform the health care experience for patients, physicians and staff through an organization-wide performance improvement initiative called The Sharp Experience. The Sharp system includes four acute-care hospitals, three specialty hospitals, two affiliated medical groups and a health plan. To learn more about Sharp, visit www.sharp.com.

About Advanced Call Processing (ACP)
Advanced Call Processing (ACP) is a comprehensive provider of telecommunications services and solutions with a customer base spread across the United States and throughout the world.  Established in 1990, ACP has enjoyed exceptional growth, while supplying customized solutions for hundreds of businesses and government agencies.    ACP has assisted hundred of companies to achieve their business goals while controlling costs through the effective deployment of communications technology.

About AVST
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of communications solutions with over 10 million users that rely on its products and services to maximize their productivity. With nearly 30 years of innovation excellence, AVST is focused on delivering solutions that increase user and business productivity. Its flagship Unified Communications platform, CallXpress®, offers unprecedented interoperability and delivers advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities. With CallXpress, an organization can protect and extend its existing data and telephony infrastructure investment — now and into the future.

Headquartered in Orange County, Calif., AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, Wash. and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices across the United States. AVST’s Unified Communications solutions are sold and supported internationally by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners. For more information contact Denny Michael, Vice President of Marketing, at 949-699-2300 or access the company’s website at www.avst.com.

What is the Voice User Interface (VUI)?
Use easy to remember spoken commands to manage your messages, place calls to other system users, place calls directly to phone numbers and manage your mailbox settings completely hands-free to comply with government regulations when accessing your mailbox while driving.

• Easier to remember how to navigate as it uses commands that you would naturally say to perform actions
• Provides powerful features that would be difficult to use in a traditional DTMF TUI
• Most commands are the same as Seneca making it easy to transition from Seneca to the CallXpress VUI
• Utilize your 50 free UM & PA licenses to call contacts & manage your calendar from the VUI

* Speech Recognition is a licensed feature of CallXpress and is licensed on a per-resource basis.  Speech resources are pooled and allocated to ports as needed on a first-come first-served basis.

The CallXpress Administration utility lets you create mailboxes from the System Server or a client workstation. The utility also lets you create mailboxes individually or across a range of mailboxes for a specific type.  In the following 7 minute video, Pat Haney will show you the step-by-step process for easily adding a group of mailboxes using the Mailbox Export and Import commands.

During his demonstration, Pat uses the Administration utility’s Mailbox Export commands to export the information from an existing mailbox on the telephony server to a text file in comma-separated-values (.csv) format. He then edits that text file to add a group of new mailboxes and then uses the Mailbox Import command to create the new mailboxes on the same telephony server

Important:  Mailboxes are updated according to the information in the Mailbox Import file. If there are errors in this file, they are displayed in the Import Errors box that replaces the Import Contents box.

Do not create a mailbox import file by hand without familiarizing yourself with the online help topic “Mailbox import file.” This topic contains current information about the structure the telephony server requires the file to have, the data fields it can contain, and the data formats and dependencies of those fields. The telephony server may not import the contents of a file that does not meet these requirements, or it may import only parts of the file. 

The CallXpress Archive utility lets you back up the system files and databases, any or all mailboxes, audio components associated with mailboxes, and voice and fax messages contained in the mailboxes.  Tune into the following 9 minute demonstration to learn how the new Archive utility works in CallXpress 8.

Users of CallXpress 8 now have the option to manage the profiles for SMS notification and simple unified messaging separately.  In the following 5 minute video, Pat Haney demonstrates how to easily edit the default XML message templates found on the CallXpress server to make them appropriate to your organization.

In the following 3 minute video, Pat Haney explains how to create copies of one mailbox to all available numbers in a specific range.   He then demonstrates how to easily edit the range of mailboxes using the range edit/template edit commands.   By editing multiple mailboxes at one time, CallXpress administrators can save time and maintain accuracy.

• System Server
• Neverfail® Server
• Call Server or Combination (Call Server and System Server) with an IP integration
• Small to medium sized installations with an analog or digital integration(s)

Related Links:

E-2000 R5 Server Datasheet

as of May 18, 2009

And if your company uses multiple e-mail environments, CallXpress can deliver unified messaging capabilities where competitors cannot!

Click here to view the CallXpress 8 and CallXpress 7.91 e-mail access specifications.

CallXpress is the most flexible Unified Messaging (UM) system on the market today. It offers customers complete flexibility in how they wish to deploy and use UM. Unlike all other competing products, CallXpress allows users to deploy any type and mix of UM on a system, as well as allowing users to mix UM and traditional voicemail users on the same system. CallXpress supports both of the popular UM architecture types: Server-based UM and Client-based UM.

CallXpress was the very first product to offer Unified Messaging (UM) solutions to customers and most recently took the top spot for the most complete UM solution on the market today when evaluated against other UM providers. 

If you want to know what your real UM options are, take a look at some of the related articles posted below to learn more about UM from the experts at AVST.

 Related Articles:

• Know Your Options: Understanding Your Unified Messaging Choices whitepaper
• The 5 C’s (Considerations) for Unified Messaging blog post
• Defining the Right Path to Unified Messaging – blog post part 1
• Defining the Right Path to Unified Messaging – blog post part 2
• Unified Messaging Resource Center