There will be several planned maintenance periods for the university’s Unified Communication (VoIP) system during this coming week.
The first will occur on Tuesday, March 2nd, starting at 5:00 pm and lasting until 8:00 pm.
During this time, calling to and from the university VoIP system may be intermittent and there will be periods where Webex will be unable to register to the VoIP system and will therefore be unable to make or receive calls. This maintenance will allow the Office of Information Systems to do some software and firmware updates to prepare for an upgrade to the VoIP system.
The second maintenance will occur on Friday, March 5th, starting at 5:00 pm and lasting until 10:00 pm.
During this time, calling to and from the university VoIP system will be unavailable for periods of time which will impact services such as, but not limited to, incoming calls to extensions or departments, vFax, outgoing calls from desk phones or remotely registered Webex clients, and voicemail.
This maintenance will allow the Office of Information Systems to upgrade the Unified Communications System to a newer version that should continue to improve service in the form of bug fixes and new features. There are several important changes that users should be aware of and prepare for:
- Existing voicemails still on the system will not be available on the system after the upgrade. If the voicemails were delivered to your email box before the update, they should still be available in your email afterwards, however, they will not be available to listen to through the desk phones or Webex afterwards. While the voicemail system usually cleans up voicemails in your email and moves them to the Deleted Items folder and then, eventually, deletes them completely, any voicemail emails still in your email inbox at the time of upgrade will not be moved or deleted and will need to be deleted manually if you no longer want them. Any new voicemail will function just like they do today and will be available to listen to through email, desk phones, or the Webex client.
- The system upgrade will come with updates for the user interface on the desk phones. The changes are mostly cosmetic to make the interface look a little more like Webex, however, some of the custom ATU backgrounds we’ve added to the system may create issues with reading text on the screen. If the background you’re using makes reading the text difficult after the upgrade, we recommend changing to a different background image.
After the update is complete, incoming and outgoing calls should function as they normally do. This update will also enable the Office of Information Systems to work on better push notifications for Apple iOS devices and a further announcement will be made once that fix is in place.