The Cheap Panic Button for the Avaya IP office System

To create a Panic button in Avaya IP Office


In moving to a new phone system and a new building I was tasked with finding a solution to the panic button that may be cheaper. Well previous it required us having to setup buttons in all locations as well as having to pay a alarm company to monitor the system. It involved another phone line.

So we ended up choosing the IP Office solution. After chatting with my Avaya partner he said it could be done, but the phone would be on the hook the whole time. Not very discreet for a panic button so I worked at it.

What you need to do is open up your Voicemail Pro Manager. Create a new module, I called it Panic, but that is up to you. It will start you with a “Start Point.” You will be adding a Post Dial action so under Misc. you need to select “Post Dial” and click somewhere on the white space below.

Now double-click on the box to open it up. Change the” Token Name” to something you would remember. Now you are going to need to record a message for the system to use. So go to “Entry Prompts” amd click the + button. Set it to use your “Telephony Handset” extension. Put a name for the file, I called mine Panic. Hit the record button. Go through the process of recording the file until you like it. After you are done make sure you record the full path and file name for that recording. Press the “Close” button and click the “X” button to delete that prompt.

Go Under “Specific” and click “Post wave file” and check “Play out a looped wave file.” In the first box type or paste the full path to the wav file you recorded earlier. In the next box put in the number you want it to call remember to add a 9. (I recommend testing this on a number other than 991 or emergency dispatch first, since while testing you don’t want to bug them to death and send out the cops.) If you want it to page a page group than type “PAGE:” and then the number of the page group.

Press “OK” and then draw a “connector” line between “Start Point” and the Post Dial action you just created. Now at this point you could also add other number for it to dial. You would just create another post dial action and follow the steps above and add a connector line to it from the previous post dial action. When done press the “Save & Make Live” button. Close out “Voicemail Pro Client.”

Open “IP Office Manager” and go to Short Code. And a New Short Code and put in whatever code you want, I used *85. Change the feature to “Voicemail Collect”. Under telephone type in the name of the module that you created in “Voice Pro Client”, in my case it was “Panic” and this time put quotes around the name. (The quotes may not be necessary.) Leave the Line Group Id as 0. Merge the changes

Now you could dial the short code on your phone to test. It would work great. Problem is when in panic. You don’t want to be pressing a combination of 3-5 buttons. Also you will notice it will say on the phone you dialed it “Forwarded”

So to eliminate the first problem. Open “IP Office Manager” and go to the User or User Rights depending on who you want it applied to. Go under “Button Programming” and create a button that will be on the first page of the phones. I changed my Label to “PANIC” and leave the action as “Dial.” Under Action Data put in the short code you programmed earlier, ie #85. Press OK and Merge the settings into the Phone Switch.

Now you have a button to press. Problem is still it says “Forwarded” which you don’t a phone saying if the reason you are pressing the button is nearby. On the VoicePro Server browse to: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Avaya\IP Office\Voicemail Pro\VM\WAVS\enu\”. The last Folder may be different depending on the language of the system. Go down till you find the file called “ssb_10.wav” and rename it to “ssb_10-disabled”. Now you are good to go the phone doesn’t say anything either now.

So after all those steps you are able to drop those panic buttons. Now this may not work if you phone is out in the open easy to see by everyone. But most likely you will be able to press 1 button on your phone very inconspicuously if you need to.

DISCLAIMER: USE AT YOUR OWN RISK, if you use my directions I am not held accountable for any problems that may arise.

IP Office with 9600 phones Waiting for LLDP

At work we had setup the Avaya IP Office R6.0. When we purchased it we also purchased 5621 phones. I was asked to purchase some addition phones for one or two departments, but the 5600s are EOL(End of Life.) I don't dig buying EOL products so dug around and found the 9650 to be a worth equivilent. Instead of putting one phone out that is different in a department I thought I would suck in the new phone and figure it out.

First problem would be that it would boot up and just sit saying "Waiting for LLDP." After some hunting around I realized that the 5600s and 1600s use option 242. So I jumped into my DHCP server and added a scope option for 242. Put in the following info that was already in my 176 scope option. "MCIPADD=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX,MCPORT=1719,TFTPSRVR=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX" (You will need to add something else to this so jump below to grab the full portion)

It boot up and I was able to login. The phone was still acting a little funny. IE lots of the buttons were acting wierd. No Visual voice as well as a couple of other things. After running around long enough I found out that the phone needs to grab IP Office specific firmware. If your IP Office was purchased with the 6.0 release then you can skip the next step. If you upgraded it to 6.0(9600 are only supported starting at release 6.0) then do the following.

• In the Avaya IP Office R6 Manager click on "File>Advanced>Embedded File Management..."
• Login and then click on "File>Upload System Files" (May be File>Upload Phone Files if you are running an earlier version of the manager)

It will have then uploaded the necessary files for the phones to the SD card. No still no luck for me. Well after more digging around I saw that the phone was saying "Bad FileSV address" right before it would finish loading up. I than searched around some more I realized I needed to add the one more option to option 242. You need to add ",HTTPSRVR=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX" to the end of the above so that it appears as :
MCIPADD=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX,MCPORT=1719,TFTPSRVR=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX,HTTPSRVR=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

The addresses should be your IPO Unit, although depending on your setup it may be a little different. After adding the option and rebooting I was good to go. Hope this saves someone time they shouldn't have to waste.