Case Studies

Observations about Ask Seymour provided by the Natural History Museum and Northumberland County Council:

Bob Estcourt, the telecoms manager of the Natural History Museum, had a requirement to analyse the assets and configuration of his estate of Mitel SX2000 and MN3300 PABX's.

The Ask Seymour software from MIT Communications Limited enabled him to automate this process in order to provide him with a solution for the day-to-day control of his switches. When asked what benefits Ask Seymour provided, Bob said "The Ask Seymour software provides me with a 'Belt-and-Braces' solution in order to help assist me in the control of Moves-and-Changes, and provide an additional resource which could be used along with the system back-ups that we store off-site". When asked to expand on this, Bob continued, "In the event of a catastrophic failure, a replacement system would not necessarily have the same hardware or software configuration as the existing system. Ask Seymour's web interface would allow us to quickly examine the overall configuration prior to the disaster, with the ability to drill-down to specific cards and handsets for more detail. This would speed up the rebuild of any system after such a failure".

Ask Seymour's "comparison" report allows Bob to quickly compare a 'before' and 'after' scan in order to assist with the regular number of Moves-and-Changes that occur across the PABX's. Bob stated, "If a situation arises where a user has a problem after we have made some changes, we can quickly compare the changes on Ask Seymour in order to look for any obvious programming or configuration errors."

The intuitive web interface within Ask Seymour allows Bob or any staff (who may or may not have had formal Mitel training) to quickly examine system configurations, whilst protecting the security of his systems with a clear demarcation between the capture module and the reporting engine. The Ask Seymour reports also allow Bob to keep an historical record of changes across the entire estate over a period of time, and produces easy-to-read reports detailing capacity and utilisation of cards and circuits. All of these reports can be exported to Excel format, again saving Bob time compiling information manually.

During a recent audit of the telecommunications systems of Northumberland County Council, Shirley Colligan received an independent audit which stated (within "Asset Classification and Control")

"There are no formal records of any of the assets associated with the provision of the Telephony service. Inadequate asset records may result in an inability to prove or track any stolen equipment." And it was recommended that we should have "An inventory of all Telephony System assets… This should detail full hardware specifications wherever practicable"

Ask Seymour from MIT Duplex has provided everything we need in order to comply with the recommendation. In addition, it also provides us with detailed information at a glance which allows us to better manage our communications platform. If we need to populate a card it takes seconds to view the inventory, and although this is something we do not use on a daily basis, it saves a lot of time and is automatically kept up to date, therefore removing the need for us to keep independent records (which is a time-consuming manual process). Another area where we hove found Ask Seymour useful is when we recharge telephone users for maintenance of their digital telephones, although this could also be used to recharge for line rental in the same manner. Ask Seymour keeps a historic record of the scans, and with an easy-to-use web interface, allows us to view any scan, or even compare scans to details changes that have occurred.

Prior to the installation of Ask Seymour, these processes required a mixture of "looking in the cabinet", and complex spreadsheet maintenance. Both these methods, whilst effective, can be prone to mistakes, and would not give us the ability to easily compare reports for ‘moves and changes’ or card ‘swaps’. The web interface that Ask Seymour provides allows any member of the team to view the configuration of our systems without any knowledge of the PABX, and without the dissemination of restricted password information. The ‘point-and-click’ interface is intuitive, and displays all the important information in an easy to read manner.