Virtual Office

Last Updated : Jan 29, 2020 |
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Virtual Office allows an endpoint device to use as a guest phone (logging in as a remote user) to recover its identity and a home phone to retain the identity. A guest phone recovers its identity automatically as soon as the phone is VO logged out. This does not apply at the home phone because a user can do another VO login from a third (or fourth) phone, and that login from the user can log out the guest phone. As opposed to Multi-Device Access (MDA) and Sequential Registration, which does not allow an endpoint device to retain its identity after logging out, the Virtual Office UNIStim phone saves the original TN, which helps it to recover the original identity and register to it. You can use the Multi-Device Access (MDA) configuration fields to limit the number of concurrent registered devices to 1 for Virtual Office to maintain the CS 1000 Virtual Office user experience.
The following is an example of Virtual Office:
  1. Device X is the home device and registered with the user identity A.
  2. Device Y does the Virtual Office login.
  3. Session Manager verifies whether this is a permissible registration and does one of the following:
    • If the configuration is to block new registrations, the registration request is rejected.
    • If the configuration is to allow new registrations, Session Manager terminates the SIP registration of device X and registers device Y.
  4. If the configuration is to allow new registrations, device Y takes the user identity A, but the same user identity is still saved in Device X.
  5. User presses the Home soft key at device X.
  6. Device Y reverts to its original identity that is user identity B.
  • CS 1000 endpoint user experience
    The registration handling process upon network failures for UNIStim endpoints in Virtual Office is similar to that of the CS 1000 TPS.
    The following is the initial registration recovery attempt in CS 1000 for UNIStim endpoints:
    • UNIStim endpoint: When a CS 1000 UNIStim endpoint restarts or fails over, it attempts to register with the TPS load balancer of the primary server (S1). The UNIStim endpoint may or may not register on the same TPS.
    The following is the registration recovery attempt in CS 1000 when initial registration attempt fails:
    • UNIStim endpoint: If the primary server TPS is unavailable, then the TPS on the geo-redundant alternate data center is attempted. The endpoint attempts the alternate server (S2). In this case, it does not register on the same CS 1000 that it was originally using. Therefore, it uses a different TPS load balancer.
    In both cases, CS 1000 identifies the hardware ID of the registering endpoint or the TN entered by the user when registering a UNIStim endpoint. CS 1000 uses the hardware ID or TN to allow or block fail over and endpoint registration when a UNIStim endpoint restarts or loses connectivity to the current target. If there is a mismatch in the hardware ID between the original registration and the new one, the registration fails.
    Unlike Virtual Office, CS 1000 rejects a new device attempting to register to an existing registration, but accepts a re-registration on another TPS or call server.
    This CS 1000 behavior can be deemed as conditional Virtual Office. If the same device re-registers at another TPS, the registration is allowed. If a device with a different hardware ID tries to register, the registration is denied.
  • Device Adapter endpoint user experience
    To configure Virtual Office, set the MDA configuration fields to the following:
    • Set the Max. Simultaneous Devices value to 1.
    • Clear the Block New Registration When Maximum Registrations Active check box to allow new registrations. Session Manager terminates the registration of an existing device to register the new device.
    This provides a similar CS 1000 user experience in case of a fail over or endpoint restart. However, if a user tries to register a second station to CS 1000, CS 1000 blocks the registration attempt. This is because the fail-over handling in CS 1000 does not find a match in the hardware IDs of both requests.
    However, the Device Adapter allows the new registration request, because the device ID of any set which is VO logged in, is not available as the device ID is an attribute of UNIStim phone and not of any other SIP phone. Hence, the device ID cannot be sent to the Session Manager. If the Session Manager user profile is set to allow new registrations when the maximum number of registered devices is reached, Session Manager allows another endpoint to register by using Virtual Office and terminates the registration of the current endpoint.
    Virtual Office allows sequential registration for any endpoint that can use the CS1K-IP station definition to define the endpoint. Although, the Avaya Aura® SIP endpoints will have a different user experience.
For more information, see Virtual Office in Appendix H: Call processing features and services.