VAL board anyone? 2

The VAL board is a circuit pack that installs just like an TN750 board, however ... The VAL boad will hold up to 1 hour of announcements, as opposed to 4 1/2 minutes (based on encoding selected)on a TN750. I believe it comes with five minutes in a "bundle" with the circuit pack, and you can add additional time. It has an application you run on a PC that allows you to move the announcements for your pc to the card. The files are stored in wave format, so it is very easy to produce an announce and ftp the files up to the board. Hope this helps.

Chris

I hope this info helps, but remember, the TN2501 standard comes with 10 minutes of recording capacity, to go to 60 mnutes you need to purchase a seperate license.

Voice Announcements over the LAN (R9.5)
With DEFINITY R9.5 a new voice announcement board is being introduced, the TN2501AP Voice Announcements over the LAN (VAL).
This board allows backup and restore of announcements to an external PC or file server on the customer’s local area network. The announcements will be stored as industry standard waveform (.wav) files.
Now the customer will be able to create high quality, studio announcements, save them to their PC or server and then share the same announcements with multiple DEFINITY Systems each equipped with the TN2501AP Board.
The TN2501AP Board adds a wealth of capacity and intuitive tools to help easily manage enterprise announcement needs.

The following table compares the capability of the existing TN750C board and the new TN2501AP board:

Max. Storage Time/Board
TN750C:4 minutes at 32Kbps sample rate
TN2501AP(VAL):Up to 60 minutes at 64Kbps sample rate
Playback Ports
TN750C:16
TN2501AP(VAL):31 (plus one additional dedicated port for recording via telephone access)
Announcements on a single Board
TN750C:256
TN2501AP(VAL):256
Concurrent Calls per Announcement
TN750C:50 (csi, si)1000 (r)
TN2501AP(VAL):50 (csi, si)1000 (r)
LAN Backup/Restore
TN750C:Not Available
TN2501AP(VAL):Yes via industry standard waveform (.wav) files
Recording Method
TN750Chone only
TN2501AP(VAL):Via PC or phone to create .wav file
File Portability to Multiple DEFINITYs
TN750C:No
TN2501AP(VAL):Yes
Voice Playback Quality
TN750C:Toll
TN2501AP(VAL):Toll
Backup Speed
TN750C:Approximately 10 minutes per 60 seconds of announcement time
TN2501AP(VAL):2.6 seconds per 60 seconds of announcement time (500kbps)
Reliability
TN750C:High
TN2501AP(VAL):High
Firmware Downloadable
TN750C:No
TN2501AP(VAL):Yes
Number of Boards/System
TN750C:5 (csi, si)10 (r)
TN2501AP(VAL):5 (csi, si)10 (r)
Total Announcements/System
TN750C:128 (csi, si)1,000 (r)
TN2501AP(VAL):128 (csi, si)1,000 (r)

With the TN2501AP, the announcements will continue to be played over the DEFINITY infrastructure in the same manner as the TN750C to retain high reliability.
Instead the Voice Announcement over the LAN (VAL) gets its name because the announcement files can be backup to a PC/File Server on the customer’s LAN. The board is designed to work with 10 or 100MB Ethernet LANs.
However, the actual speed of announcement backup and restore will be a function of the customer’s LAN traffic and the size of the .wav file being transferred.
The DEFINITY R9.5 software will support both the TN2501AP and the TN750C.
The maximum number of announcement boards (any combination of TN2501AP and TN750C) will continue to be 10 for the r platform and 5 for the csi/si platform.
The number of announcements per board will be the same as the existing TN750C (256 announcements per board).
Also with R9.5, there will be new traffic measurement reports that provide usage information on the Announcement Boards and on individual announcements.
These reports are available for both the TN750 and TN2501AP Announcement Boards and they will assist in managing Call Center environments.
The key metrics include:

·Board Level Reporting: Maximum callers on the board and counts of all ports busy
·Individual Announcement Reporting: Number of play requests, calls queued, average speed to play, calls dropped while in queue, multi-port plays, maximum ports, and maximum callers



Voice Announcements over the LAN Manager
The Voice Announcements Over The LAN (VAL) Manager provides a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that allows customer’s to automate the transfer, backup and restore of .wav file recorded announcements to DEFINITY Release 9.5 or later systems with a TN2501AP Board.
It gives the customer a way to easily manage stored announcements.
The VAL Manager connects to a DEFINITY over a customer’s LAN to retrieve configuration information and perform administration tasks.
It connects to a C-LAN board (TN799B or later) and uses the Asynchronous Links Telnet Service (see Section 2.5) for interfacing with DEFINITY ECS administration via the OSSI protocol.
All TN2501AP boards must be administered (added to the cabinet and IP connectivity administered) on the DEFINITY before the VAL Manager will support them.
The VAL Manager is a software application, which resides on a customer-provided Windows PC.
The following capabilities are provided by the VAL Manager application:

·Ability to view the current status of TN2501AP board announcements
·Simplified administration to add, change, and remove announcements
·Ability to copy/backup announcement files from a supported DEFINITY to the VAL Manager via a customer’s LAN
·Ability to copy/restore announcement files to a supported DEFINITY from the VAL Manager via a customer’s LAN
One VAL Manager is required per customer network configuration, although additional VAL Managers can be purchased.

Customer Benefits of Voice Announcements over the LAN
The benefits to the customer of the Voice Announcements over the LAN feature are:
Larger Capacity
- Up to 93% increased announcement storage time over old announcement solutions
- Almost a 2x increase in playback ports
- Fewer boards required, freeing up carrier slots in the system
Powerful and Easy to Use Management Tools
- Uses industry standard .wav files with names (up to 27 characters) to allow easy identification of announcements
- Allows centralized administration of announcements across multiple sites
- VAL Manager software offers easy to use GUI
- Powerful announcement measurement reporting capability
Robust and Fast Backups
- LAN backup & restore on customer provided PC or server
- TN2501AP provides 32MB of flash memory for on-board announcement file persistence
- Increased backup speed to 500Kbps
High Voice Quality
- Supports remote file creation for high quality recordings (in addition to telephone access)
- High reliability playback through the DEFINITY infrastructure
- Playback sample rate at 64Kbps


Additional Requirements for Voice Announcements over the LAN
- The WAV file must be CCITT u-law or a-law, 8,000Hz, 8-bit mono
- Customers need to make sure they have enough space in their file server or PC to store the .wav files. As a benchmark, a one minute long CCITT a-law 8,000Hz 8-bit mono waveform file is 469KB in size. Therefore, 60 minutes would require over 28MB.
- Each TN2501AP must be connected to the network individually during backup/restore and firmware download.

Kind regards,

Edwin Plat
A.K.A. Europe