Mitel

Windows 7 and later has a feature named FastUserSwitching. We all know about it, but ShoreTel do not understand it. The discussion about their setup bug goes back for more than one year now and they still do not listen after 4 case reopens. It is clear that ShoreTel development do not understand how thier own software and Windows works. So I decided to publish this information to help you running ShoreTel Communicator properly in your environment. This affect nearly every version for about 5 years or more, but has been fixed in Mitel MiVoice Connect R1803. If you may ask why FastUserSwitching need to be disabled - the answer is simple. ShoreTel Communicator's SoftPhone feature is not compatible with multiple users on the same computer. This VoIP EyeP driver under the hood does not allow more than one user on a computer.

FastUserSwitching is these neat featue you may like a lot at home. It allows users to login to a computer with several users at the same time without logging the other user out. A typical home users scenario.

Situation:

We had a ShoreTel SG90BRI switch that was brand new and failed to boot. It always tried to request a DHCP address and it looked like it get's no answer from DHCP first. This was wrong as the network is clean and working properly. It is just the operating system of ShoreTel that is broken and not updating it's DHCP settings after moving the switch from one network to another.

Symptom:

The switch boots up and shows you this in an endless loop:

Searching for active link Found active link on port 1 ENET Speed is 100 Mbps - FULL duplex connection DHCP broadcast 1 DHCP broadcast 2 DHCP broadcast 3 DHCP broadcast 4 DHCP broadcast 5

You may hate to configure every ShoreTel Communicator 13.x client - again and again if a new user is logged in very first. If you run Active Directory SSO with ShoreTel there is a way to archive this. ShoreTel itself does not provide any GPO files to make our life easier, but you can add the following registry keys via a Group Policy and if you click Communicator icon on your desktop it just starts up and that's it.

I have setup a GPO with below registry keys with action "Create".

If you are running ShoreTels Call Recorder you may notice that Call Recorder will fill up your disk over time. There are thousands of files created over time and I guess you do not like to remove them manually. Also for privacy reasons you need to delete them after some time based on your needs or law requirements. ShoreTel Call Recorder itself has no cleanup feature implemented.

I filed a feature request, but there are no plans to add it. Maybe it's these grab everything you can and never delete it mentality as you cannot know if you may be able to use or sell it some days, but I don't know. That's at least not the way how we understand data protection and privacy of our customers. Call recordings are allowed to use as quality assurance tool and to help the agent to optimize their selling activities in trainings just as one example. It's not allowed to use this outcomes to evaluate an agent performance in feedback discussions.

We have implemented the following storage settings just in case you need to understand the folder structure that is cleaned up by the below script.

If you are running a ShoreTel System (at least in Germany or Switzerland) and you have some people forwarding calls to external phones like mobile phones and/or land lines. They may not see the incomming caller ID on their external device. They will only see your system default PRI caller ID. This is very bad if these guys miss the call, they cannot call back.

This behavior can be changed since 11.x with a registry hack and since 11.2 it has been integrated much better into the system, but it does not exists by default and leaves you in the rain; if you are not aware of this feature. Until today these settings are not documented in the public.

UPDATE 01/20/2012: We rolled back all below settings, after we have been migrated from Nokia to Siemens EWSD and are now using a Custom Trunk Group Dialing Rule with a value of ;3E only.

In previous 11.x builds this was done by appending a registry hack flip_rnie 0:

Sometimes you may have issues with the ShoreTel Communicator application and you need to find out what's going wrong behind the scenes. And there is a quick solution to extend the logging level. Please keep in mind the log files folder in %APPDATA%\ShoreWare Client\Logs may grow.

Enable debugging in Communicator is done with the following secret keys strokes:

1. Focus curser in Enter you name or number field, where you normally enter the numbers for dialing
2. Hold CTRL down and press F12
3. A window opens with several debugging options.
4. Enable what you need and close. Disable after you finished debugging.

The feature Make Number Private better known as CLIR in ShoreTel PBX is not working out of the box in Germany / Europe on ISDN and PRI lines. You can solve this by altering the Trunk Group Dialing Rules of your ShoreTel system.

Sometimes you may be in the situation that a ShoreTel phone may be unresponsive or does not connect to the headquarter server. You may receive messages on phone display like No service or Cannot connect to... or the phone completely hangs (and power off/on does not solve your issue) or similar issues. This could happen because of reboot failures or firmware loading issues if you may have unplugged the phone while it have booted up and such issues or if there are firmware bugs. Often it helps to power-cycle the phone again, but if this does not help you can reset the device. We have seen this in rare situations, but here is a way how to solve this issue.

Follow this step-by-step instruction and the phone is starting from scratch:

This article describes how you can setup a proxy server on an existing Microsoft IIS Server in your company to tunnel the ShoreTel Communicator for iPhone App calls to your internal ShoreTel server. ShoreTel was so kind to document this with Apache, but not with IIS. If you do not like to run Apache as an extra instance in your company only for the ShoreTel App you can follow this document and save your time as this solution is really easy to implement.

Installation