Planning Telephone Integration

Use

You need to consider your telephony environment before starting telephone integration. The following questions are intended to help you to adapt your telephony environment to meet the requirements of your enterprise.

Which sites are to be equipped with telephone integration?

In SAPphone, a site represents a physical company site, that is, the area with a common area code and general prefix.

How many telephony servers are required?

Every instance of the external telephony software (the connection software between the SAP System and the telephone system) must be represented by a telephony server in the SAP System. You require at least one telephony server (one instance of the telephony software) for every site, SAP System and client in which telephone integration is to be used.

Which number conversion rules are required?

The rules depend on the technical requirements of the telephony software and the local conditions. The number conversion rules convert telephone numbers into the form expected by the receiving system when they are transferred between the SAP System and the telephony software.

For more information, see Sites and Telephony Servers and Number Conversion Rules.

How is the work center to be identified so that a host can be found using the telephone number?

The technical solution depends, for example, on whether the telephony functions are also to be used from the Web browser.

For more information, see Work Center Identification.

Are there user groups with different requirements?

Which applications are to be started in connection with a call?

Which address data areas are required?

The tasks that are required depend on the user group. For example, sales employees will create purchase orders and service employees will create service notifications. The address data areas that are searched for caller data when an inbound call is received also depend on the user group. The address data area searched is normally the central address management, however some applications store their addresses in separate data areas.

You can create templates for the settings of each user group. The user groups then only have to assign this template to themselves. You can use the settings to define how inbound calls are to be handled (for example, display caller data or start an application directly). You can join user groups together in deflect groups. These groups enable calls that have not been accepted by users themselves to be transferred manually.

If the settings are to be changed later, this can be done either centrally by system administrators or by the users themselves. To reduce the need to adapt the settings to meet the requirements of individual user groups, you can also assign authorization for central maintenance to certain users.

For more information, see Work Center Settings and User Settings, Integrating SAP Applications and Telephone Work and Authorizations for SAPphone Activities.

To what degree are extensions to be protected?

You can implement extension protection according to the degree of autonomy of the employees in your enterprise. You either allow all users to assign themselves all extension numbers and, if necessary, protect particularly sensitive numbers or you disallow all numbers and allow the users of a site to assign themselves specific numbers only.