In addition to delivering a broad range of product enhancements, this release is mainly focused on security (for PCI-DSS compliance), the release of a completely redesigned version of ScreenREC and a set of valuable ScoreCARD features such as agent self-evaluation.
In line with ZOOM’s strategy to stay up-to-date with the Cisco and Genesys platforms and latest developments in Unified Communications, this release will also bring you enhanced support for new Cisco phones, improvements in SPANless & SIP recording and improved JTAPI support.

In future blog posts we’ll deep-dive into what this release brings to your business and we’ll be discussing topics such as:

• The need for contact centers to be PCI-DSS compliant and how your quality management solution should support you in adherence
• The value of performing 360 degree agent evaluations and the involvement of your agents using agent self-evaluation
• The power of the next generation of ScreenREC, your solution for agent desktop recording

Now, what does this 4.7 release bring you?

PCI-DSS Compliance Features

ZOOM PCI-DSS Compliance Support is a set of enhancements which allows customers using ZOOM QM Suite products to meet their PCI-DSS requirements.

“PCI-DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, it’s a set of requirements developed by PCI Security Standards Council, organization established by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc. International. These requirements are mandatory for companies in credit card payment processing industry.”
Read more about PCI-DSS via  http://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/

A subset of the PCI-DSS requirements have an impact on your contact centers’ compliance recording and quality management solution. ZOOM QM Suite fulfills all PCI-DSS requirements with the ZOOM PCI-DSS Compliance Support feature set.

PCI-DSS Status

PCI-DSS Status
ZOOM CallREC now provides an informative page indicating which ZOOM PCI-DSS features have been enabled and if all the required policies have been set.

Pause/resume support
To prevent recording of cardholder data such as CVV codes, ZOOM call and screen recording now offer pause and resume support. This feature is supported in SPAN and SPANless recording and in screen recording using ScreenREC via the CallREC API.

Enhanced password management

Password Management

The new password management features now support:

• Minimum required password complexity.
• Password expiration
• User access lockout

Call encryption support with integrated key manager
The new key manager supports:

• Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS12, JKS, JCEKS)
• Industry standard encryption algorithms (AES, DES, Blowfish)
• Encryption of recorded calls and captured screens
• Support for multiple keys and random usage
• Re-encryption support

Enhanced logging of user actions in audit log
The audit log will now capture all user log-in attempts together with an IP address identification of the user’s workstation.

Read more about ZOOM QM Suite and PCI-DSS Compliance on the ZOOM website.

ScreenREC Setup

New Generation ScreenREC
ZOOM’s solution for screen capture was completely redesigned and rewritten to better serve the current needs of the ZOOM QM Suite.

ScreenREC now better supports hosted environments thanks to the highly efficient method for uploading captured content and is better prepared for recording additional related interactions such as email and chat.
The new ScreenREC capture client is easy to install and uses limited resources on the agents’ workstation.

Use new ScreenREC and benefit from:

• Pause and Resume functionality for PCI-DSS compliance
• Captured content directly uploaded via http(s)
• An optimized intermediate format for uploading captured content that may be stored as is and transcoded for review on demand
• Encryption of recorded voice and video
• Transcoding on demand and streaming capability
• Target format after transcoding and mixing is MPEG 4 (H.264) with MP3 audio

ZOOM ScoreCARD Enhancements and New Features
ZOOM is proud to present a wide range of new features in ScoreCARD that make ScoreCARD the ideal, powerful and flexible solution for your contact center to manage the quality management process; easy, fair and informative.

Agent Self-evaluation
This new feature will greatly improve the agents’ involvement in the contact center Quality Management process.

Agent self-evaluation

By default agents will now have the permission to plan and complete self evaluations but of course will only be able to complete evaluations based upon their specific interactions.

The self-scoring agents will use the Evaluation Planner to plan evaluations similar to the way supervisors plan their evaluations. To prevent skewed data, agents will not be able to change any settings or influence how their self evaluations will contribute to the final 360 degrees view.

New graphs and export data to MS Excel
Use ZOOM ScoreCARD data the way you prefer. All ScoreCARD graph, chart and audit log data is now exportable as an Excel spreadsheet. Back office users can use Excel to process and analyze ScoreCARD data or create their own custom graphs.

The “League Table” and “Compare Scores” have been made available as graphs and will provide additional functionality for the end user in data management. The league graph and data exports will now contain the agent login name to provide additional information in reporting and data management.

Hidden group and question weighting in the evaluation reports
To protect the evaluation process and objectivity from potential influence by agents, the weightings are now hidden so the final scoring results can not be skewed based on any knowledge of weightings applied.

Additional ScoreCARD improvements
ZOOM partners and customers continuously push the ZOOM products forward and ZOOM takes their requirements serious. The following additional enhancements have been implemented in this release:

• Parent and child evaluations are now accessible via links in the tool bar of the evaluator form to link parent evaluations to evaluations that have been re-evaluated. This functionality is valuable during the re-evaluation process.
• Copy (cut and paste) from evaluation forms providing additional functionality for the user to copy and paste values between evaluation forms.
• An option to allow evaluators to re-open their evaluations. The status will change from the “Finished” to the “In-Progress” state.
• Show answer name in the evaluation report providing additional detail to the “Evaluation Report” when showing the specific answer name along with the scored result. The report will for example show “Yes 100%” instead of just the score of 100%. Fail all, fail group, etc. information will be shown along with the scores.
• Read only access to finished evaluations so that agents will be able to listen to call and gain understanding how the evaluation was completed. This feature gives agents the opportunity to review interactions and better understand the companies evaluation process.

The 4.7 release also brings a number of enhancements in recording methods and changes in the offered support for phones and contact center platforms.

SPANless and SIP Recording
Various improvements have been made to the Cisco SPANless recording interface such as:

• Improved performance
• The recording of barged calls
• Improved SIP session timeout implementation (RFC-4028)

SIP enhancements
The following SIP enhancements have been implemented:

• Implementation of IP fragmentation support for SIP sniffer (RFC-791)
• Implementation of a port number of zero in the SIP offer in SIP driver (RFC-3264)
• The identification of calling/called parties only from first INVITE

Support for New Phones

The following series of phones have been tested for compatibility: 6900, 8900 and 9900. In addition IP phones from the 7900 series are fully supported. These phones have passed the testing scenarios for: basic call, hold, blind and consultative transfer, Ad hoc conference with and without consultation. Additional testing for Barge, cBarge, join, swap/cancel and other scenario‘s is planned.

Enhanced Display of Call Information

ZOOM CallREC now displays additional call related information which allows for better selection, analysis and troubleshooting. The following data is shown:

• Call description
• Call / Couple IDs
• Call Status
• MLM Tools flags
• Synchronization ID
• Media information
• Attached data

Genesys Compatibility and Integration

• The versions 7.5, 7.6 and 8.0 are tested compatible and both SIP server and Cisco UCM/Genesys CIM deployments are fully supported.
• This release supports the T-server and Configuration server integration in Genesys CIM.

Cisco UCM Support and JTAPI Changes

ZOOM is dedicated to supporting the latest and even no longer supported versions of Cisco UCM. To provide full transparency, ZOOM CallREC will now indicate when an unsupported or not yet fully tested version is used. ZOOM always recommends to migrate to newer versions of Cisco UCM and to ease the upgrade effort we have improved the migration process.

Find below the list of supported and unsupported Cisco versions:

• UCM versions (with respective JTAPI interfaces) older than 4.0 are not supported. RTS JTAPI will refuse connections and will display an error message.
• UCM 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 5.0 are no longer supported, however the system will function. RTS JTAPI will accept connections and will display warning message.
• UCM versions 4.3, 5.1, 6.0, 6.1, 7.0, 7.1, 8.0 are fully supported.
• UCM versions newer than 8.0 (including 8.5) are partially supported. RTS JTAPI will accept connections with a warning message.

Well… That’s all folks !

This release has been made available for download on the ZOOM Partner Portal and soon we’ll be offering a VMware appliance for your evaluation purposes.

As said, stay tuned for future blog posts that will discuss some of these new ZOOM QM Suite features in more detail.

ZOOM QM Suite Scaling up.

Probably the heat has caused that we almost forgot to break the news that  ZOOM QM Suite version 4.6 has been released and is made available for download…

Enterprise, enterprise,enterprise, enterprise !!!

It is safe to say that this release is all about improved Enterprise Support. Supporting enterprises with their large or complex installations requires the best performance, scalability and high availability options and these are exactly those areas that have been addressed with this release.

Truly supporting  large contact centers and large  Genesys deployments  has raised the bar for ZOOM  to deliver a top-performing and enterprise class product suite and ZOOM is proud to say that with release 4.6 it has successfully delivered a true Enterprise Class product for both Genesys and Cisco environments.

This release brings you:

• Major Database Performance Improvements
• Improved Scalability options
• Support for Genesys High Availability Architecture
• JTAPI Enhancements supporting more and more complex network scenario’s

You could say that all key products from the ZOOM QM Suite have received a big  enterprise ‘power-boost’  to better support large, demanding and complex installations.

As ‘cherry on the pie’, this release also delivers new functionality and a more unified experience. Enjoy new ScoreCARD features to get your quality management program started faster, get more value for money and flexibility using ScreenREC, make your choice in OS platform and integrate ZOOM’s powerful media life-cycle management tools with IBM Tivoli. In more detail…

CallREC and ScoreCARD Unified
Enjoy an unified experience in installing and running CallREC and ScoreCARD. These two flagship products are one step closer to 100% integration.

ScoreCARD Questionaires export and import
ZOOM ScoreCARD now makes it a lot easier to get your Quality Management Program started with it’s Questionnaire Export and Import functionality.

Optimize your ScreenREC usage
ZOOM ScreenREC has undergone significant changes to support the capturing of more screens in higher resolution and allowing for flexible recording rules.

Red Hat Support
Enjoy the freedom of choice in operating system. Next to CenOS you can now choose for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to runs ZOOM products.

IBM Tivoli Support
Use provided scripts to integrate ZOOM Media Lifecycle Management with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) to seamlessly backup, archive and restore using TSM.

Read more details in the ZOOM QM Suite 4.6 Release Bulletin. The distribution of this release plus documentation is available for download via the ZOOM Partner Portal.

We’ll have a glass of champagne and then we’ll start work on the 4.7 release. Stay tuned for more product unification and a long list of new CallREC, ScreenREC and ScoreCARD features.

ScoreCARD Dashboard

Just before easter ZOOM has launched the latest version of ScoreCARD, ZOOM’s Contact Center Quality and Performance Solution.

Next to software enhancements, some major performance improvements plus the addition of Russian language support, this release provides a number of great new features:

• Contact Center Dashboard; a real-time overview of your contact center performance.
• Role Manager; create your custom role and permissions structure.
  

  ScoreCARD Role Manager

The release plus all documentation is available for download via the ZOOM Partner Portal.

Read more about the value of Quality and Performance Management for your contact center in the ZOOM ScoreCARD Solution Sheet.

Let me briefly describe what has been achieved and how it helps to improve usability, and make CallREC a more robust product.

Multi-Server Setup
Multi-Server deployment was already supported by CallREC; however we have improved the setup process itself. Version 4.4.0 already introduced a new installer, but it didn’t specifically support multi-server deployments and you had to do a lot of changes manually. Now during installation you can easily choose what the server role will be, where the other servers are and prepare almost all the required configuration steps. The only step missing now is NFS file sharing; this must still be done manually.

Full Implementation of IPP Libraries
This one is really technical, so what does it mean for “ordinary people”? IPP stands for “Integrated Performance Primitives” and is an Intel software product. Intel defines it as “an extensive library of multicore-ready, highly optimized software functions for digital media and data-processing applications”. Wow!
Basically, Intel provides optimized software libraries for media processing, which we’ve decided to use instead of our existing media processing tools (these libraries were already present in the recently released 4.3 version).
We have replaced the decoding libraries that handle all the G.whatever codecs (G.711, G.722 and G.729). This first step brought us a significant performance boost and  now we have made another step—we have replaced the encoding part (the libraries that are responsible for mp3 encoding). We were previously using open source libraries that had occasional issues, which had already caused us long-term pain. Now with IPP we have a much more stable and reliable media encoding part.
The side effect is that we can no longer support the Speex codec for recorded calls. Speex was officially discontinued in version 4.3 (although it was still available) and has now finally been removed. We believe this will not be an issue, since only a few CallREC users ever tried to use it and no one has been using Speex in a production environment.

Genesys Integration Module Improvements
The Genesys Integration Module went through a substantial redesign last year. The vast majority of changes were implemented in the latest 4.3.2 release. Now all of them (and a couple of new ones) have been ported to the 4.4.1 release as well.
Among the changes, such as improved reliability and efficiency in attaching the related call data, there is a really interesting feature—you can choose what external data will be attached and saved in the database (regardless of T-Server properties, attached data or configuration information). Some customers use tens of different attached data, so in some cases we were saving 70-80 different key-value pairs for every call, even if they used just a few.
The database performance impact is obvious. Now we can precisely set up what information will be stored and what will not.

Improved GUI Search Performance for Large Databases
The database and its associated parts are now one of the most closely monitored components and is the focus of a lot of development work. Changes in database structure and related components are planned for the next major releases, but we wanted to improve performance sooner—and on top of the current structure.
Fortunately we were able to implement some tweaks that have a big impact, boosting the database and GUI search performance significantly for external data. The tradeoff is that you need to stick to the recommendations and there are a few small limitations, but it flies!

Bug Fixes
No software is perfect and CallREC is no exception. There are several bug fixes in the Multimedia Management Tools (MLM), the Migration Tool (a Swiss army knife for upgrading data from one version to another) and in the setup scripts.
Last (but not least), CallREC version 4.4.1 includes Apache Tomcat application server version 6, which itself solves some issues encountered when running GWT based applications—such as ZOOM ScoreCARD.
There’s still a lot of work to do to make CallREC the “best solution in the world”. It’s a challenge for us and we’re working hard to deliver the best we can. Stay tuned—there are loads of exciting new features to come. And of course, we’ll be only too happy to share them with you…