Unity Bellhop Administrator

Contents

Overview. 1

Requirements/Special Notes. 2

View Service Activity. 2

View Guest Information. 3

View Guest Information Remotely. 3

View Reports. 4

View Admin Log File. 4

View Raw PTCE Database. 4

Choosing a Language Interface. 4

General Hospitality Setup Information. 5

Reduce Mailbox Retention Time in Exchange. 5

You’ll Need More Subscriber Licenses. 5

Obtaining Updates. 5

Revision History. 5

 

Overview

The Cisco Unity Bellhop Administration tool is the application that helps with installing and configuring the Cisco Unity Bellhop service that talks to a remote Percipia PTCE server.  The Bellhop service communicates with the PTCE server to manage voice mail accounts based on front desk activity for hotel guest check in, check out, room move and room swap actions. Every minute (adjustable) the Bellhop service checks for updated activity on the PTCE server and takes appropriate action in the Unity subscriber database.

NOTE: You’ll find the “Hospitality and Property Management System Integration” chapter in the Unity Administration Guide for Unity 4.0(3) and later.  This help file has some more up to date details than is available in that document.  We recommend you read both before deploying.

The admin utility must be run before doing anything with the hospitality package.  It creates the hotel guest template and class of service as well as configures necessary items such as the logging location and archive times.   It also allows you to get a quick view of the hotel guests currently checked in or out, reset guest passwords, “uncheckout” guests and also provides a real time view of the diagnostic output.  See the following sections for more info.

 

When you first run the Bellhop Administration tool it will install and register a new service on the local Unity server called “Cisco Unity Bellhop”.  It will be installed but will not be started automatically since to successfully start you must provide a server name or IP address of the remote PTCE server to connect to.  Once you have setup the server information and configured the defaults the way you want, press “Save” and then you can go to the Windows Service Control Manager (SCM) and start the service.  It’s also a good idea to force the service to start automatically while you’re there.

The only value you have to provide is the server name or IP address of the remote PTCE server, however you may also choose to change some of the default values found on the main form.

 

NOTE: When you make a change to a value you must press the “save” button for those values to be written through and picked up by the Bellhop service.  The Bellhop service reads these new settings each time it checks the PTCE server for updates (every minute by default).

Requirements/Special Notes

View Service Activity

Select “Service Activity Window” from the View menu and the following window will appear:

 

This window is used for watching “live” activity from the service and for diagnostic purposes.  All check in, check out, room move, room swap, pause, stop, startup, log and archived subscriber deletes will be logged here.  If the show diagnostic option is enabled then additional information about each of those activities will be shown.

The text in the window will update “on the fly” every few seconds with information about what’s happening with the Bellhop service.  You can force it to always stay on top by selecting the “Always on top” checkbox.  If you press “pause” it will freeze the output for you to look at and you can then press “Resume” and output will begin streaming to the window again.

View Guest Information

Select “Guest Information” from the View menu and the following window will appear:

 

This form shows all the guests that are currently checked in or checked out (archived) in the system.  You can sort by any column in the table by clicking on it.  The date the guest was checked in (if they are currently active) or checked out (if they are archived) is visible on the right most two columns.

If a guest is checked out accidentally you can come to this form, select the checked out guest and then press the “un-checkout” button.  You will be asked to confirm and then it will restore that room and make it active.  If there’s an existing checked in guest for that room you will be asked to confirm a second time and then that room will be checked out first.  It’s important to note that messages and hotel guest settings for both checked in and checked out rooms are never lost.

If a guest forgets their password you can select them in the table and pres “Reset Password”.  You will be prompted to enter a new 3 to 10 digit phone password which will then be applied.  You can change the password of both checked in and checked out guests since checked out guests can log into their mailbox over the phone via the checked out guest access conversation via the front desk.

NOTE: If you would like front desk staff to be able to see the Guest Information form here but don’t want them to see any of the rest of the Bellhop Administration interface, you can run the Bellhop Administration tool with the “/GuestView” command line option and this is the only form they will be able to see.  This can be done off the Unity server as well, see the next section for more on that.

View Guest Information Remotely

You can allow the front desk staff to view the guest information dialog noted above from off the Unity server if they are logged into a domain that has access to the Unity server’s domain and the staff member’s account is given read/write access to the UnityDB database on the Unity server.  Only the guest view information is available from off box and only the “Reset Password” functionality is available.  You cannot “Un-checkout” a guest from off the Unity server, this button will only be available if run from the local server.

You can install the Bellhop Administrator on a Windows 2000/2003 or XP server that has access to the domain that Unity is in.  The account running the administrator must be authenticated in the domain Unity is installed in and must have read/write access to UnityDb.  This can be achieved by adding the account to the local administrator group on the Unity server itself or by manually granting these rights in the SQL enterprise manager.

NOTE: When you run the administrator from on the Unity server, you must include the /GuestView command line option if you wish front desk staff to see only the guest view dialog.  When running from off the server this mode is forced automatically without the command line option.

The first time you run the Bellhop Administrator it will present you with a dialog to select the domain and the Unity server in that domain:

 

NOTE: If you are going across domains, the “find servers” and “connect” buttons can take a minute or two to complete.  Be patient.

Once you select the server, press the “Connect” button and it will test to be sure the account can connect to the server and it is running Unity.  Once you get a success dialog you can press the “Exit” button and you will see the Guest View dialog noted in the previous section.  The “Un-Checkout” button will always be disabled when running off box, however.    Only the passwords can be reset remotely.

On subsequent runs of the Administrator, it will connect to the last server you selected and the remote connection dialog will not be shown.   If you need to force it to connect to a different Unity server for some reason, you can delete the value in the registry where it stores this connection information and it will present you with the remote connection dialog again.  This information is stored in HKLM\Software\Active Voice\Bellhop\RemoteConnectionString.  If you delete the key and rerun the tool you can manually select a different Unity server.

View Reports

If you select “Reports” from the View  menu you’ll see the Bellhop Reports form as shown here:

There are currently two simple reports available that both generate basic CSV file output. 

View Admin Log File

The administration tool itself generates a log file when it’s opened and when actions such as “uncheckout” and “reset password” are used (see above for more on those functions).  You can view the current log file or open the log directory and look at past log files using the “view current admin log file” and “view admin logging folder” options under the View menu.

View Raw PTCE Database

If you select the “View Raw PTCE Database” option from the view menu you’ll see a form that looks similar to this:

This form is used for diagnostic purposes for troubleshooting communication problems between the Unity and PTCE servers.  You cannot edit any of the values on the remote PTCE server from this interface, it’s a read only view.

Choosing a Language Interface

This tool comes with built in support for several languages including US English, French, German and Japanese. By default it will display the language the Windows operating system is set for.  If that language is not supported it will default to US English.

To manually force the tool to show a different language than the default, you can select the Help | About menu option and click the “Change Language” hyperlink on the About box.  The languages installed will be presented in a drop down list and the display will update into that language immediately when you select it. 

NOTE: If you select Japanese as a display language and you are not running on a version of Windows that has the Japanese code page installed, the display will show all “?” characters.  This is expected.

General Hospitality Setup Information

There are a couple of items that need to be taken into consideration when you are using Unity in a hospitality environment with the Percipia property management system.

Reduce Mailbox Retention Time in Exchange

Hotel guests are typically added and removed at a much faster pace than typical voice mail subscriber.  As such their mailboxes end up getting deleted every few days as opposed to every few years of a typical employee at a company.  In a large hotel it’s possible to have hundreds of rooms changing over every few days which will result in many hundreds of archived mailboxes in the system which can chew up hard drive space and affect performance.

By default, Exchange 2000/3 keeps mailboxes around for deleted accounts for 30 days after you remove the account.  In a hotel setting this is not ideal so we recommend you change this behavior.  To do this, open the Exchange System Manager and expand the “Servers” branch down to the mailbox store(s) your Unity server is connected to:

On each mailbox store that hotel guests will be housed on, right click and select “Properties”.  This will launch the Mailbox Store properties dialog show below:

 

On the “Limits” tab you can set the “Keep delete items for (days)” and the “Keep deleted mailboxes for (days):” to “0”.  A small value such as 1 or 2 is also fine if you would prefer but the default of 30 for the deleted mailbox retention time is far too long for a typical hotel environment.

You’ll Need More Subscriber Licenses

When hotel guests are checked out, their subscriber accounts are not removed for at least 3 days.  This retention time can be increased to as much as 28 days if desired.  However, these archived Unity subscribers are still using a full subscriber license.  There is still access to their mailbox store from over the phone and they are using an Exchange mailbox resource so the licensing must still take them into account.  As such you need to be sure you have enough subscriber licenses to cover the load.

For instance if you have a hotel with 100 rooms and all 100 guests check out and then another 100 new guest check in, you are using 200 subscriber licenses.  If the next night all 100 guests leave and another 100 check in, you are now using 300 licenses because the original 100 guests that were checked out are not removed from the system for 3 days.  Granted, this is a pretty unrealistic scenario but you get the idea. 

You cannot reduce the subscriber mailbox retention time to less than 3 days for legal reasons.  So please plan accordingly.

Obtaining Updates

To check for updates to this tool, visit http://www.ciscounitytools.com

Revision History

Version 1.0.36 – 8/29/2008

Version 1.0.35 – 6/29/2006

Version 1.0.34 – 5/22/2006

Version 1.0.33 – 4/4/2005

Version 1.0.32 – 3/29/2005

Version 1.0.31 – 3/24/2005

Version 1.0.30 – 12/10/2004

Version 1.0.29 – 11/22/2004

Version 1.0.28 – 11/16/2004

Version 1.0.27 – 9/14/2004

Version 1.0.26 – 8/10/2004

Version 1.0.24 – 7/26/2004

Version 1.0.23 – 6/28/2004

Version 1.0.18 – 6/4/2004

Version 1.0.16 – 5/17/2004

Version 1.0.15 – 2/17/2004

Version 1.0.13 – 12/18/2003

Version 1.0.12 – 12/15/2003

Version 1.0.11 – 8/14/2003

 

© 2003 Cisco Systems, Inc. -- Company Confidential