Building an easy to use management on top of the APIs of a complex IP telephony system

Abstract

New ICT technologies and solutions can dramatically improve the effectiveness of the end users by giving them the right IT tools for their job. While the end users are happy to see improvements in the tools they are using, the ever growing ICT infrastructure is getting more and more complex and difficult to manage. Human errors in the operations phase are among the key issues that might lead to a system instability and in the worst case, even cause downtimes. Proper training of the administrative people can help to reduce these issues, but with the tight OPEX budgets, it is getting difficult to train a sustainable number of people for every specific technology. To still minimize the number of errors caused by incorrect configuration changes, simplifying the management tools and adding automation into multistep processes can dramatically reduce the number of human errors. In this paper we are presenting an in-house-built tool at the Technical University of Kosice, which is used in the daily operations as a replacement of the official management interface of a complex IP telephony system. Tasks that normally required several steps to complete, including configurations created or modified on different places of the original management system, are now created in a simple web based management tool.