Subject: From: Date:

Re: RE: [ECS] Phone-C Gerry Duprey Mon, 24 Aug 1998 12:36:59 -0400 (EDT)

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On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, Daniel Dubay wrote:

> I would vote for the Phone Blaster. 

Unfortunatly, Phone Blaster was discontinued a while back (I had one -
pretty nice for the time).  I beleive that the ModemBlaster is it's
closest replacement.

> It is less expensive (~$200),
> easily available,  and would probably require less programming changes
> for Mark.  For those people interested in greater phone functionality, a
> central phone system might be better.  

The "core" problems are not ones easily solved with a phone system.  Most
problems stem from the TAPI Unimodem/V driver that MSoft provides.  Most
modem manufactures use this and it has a lot of problems (detecting
certain conditions, reporting status, being reliable, etc). 

That's why folks like HAL have bypassed TAPI altogether and got "straight
to the hardware" (I assume - I don't know their specifics). 

TAPI can be good, if it has a reasonable driver.  The dialogic/rhetorex
stuff has great drivers (both for TAPI and their own propriatary APIs). 

Techically, you can write just to the TAPI spec and those devices that
don't support it as well (i.e. Unimodem/V) will still work, just perhaps
not as well.  In reality though, once you do this and see just how bad
most of these boards are (drivers, really) and how well you app starts
working with a real telephony board, you usually toss the modems off a
tall building. 

I'm looking at ECS at some point, but don't have it yet.  If someone who
knows more about it could help, is there anyway to "plug" 3rd party
programs/services into ECS in a "clean" way?  If so, there may be ways to
get the support folks want quicker. 

If it weren't a huge hassle, I could probably adapt my basic telephny core
engine to work with ECS. Back when MASS existed, I worked with them to
implement a telephony engine for it (which was finished just before they
were bought out by HAL). I can't promise it'd be free (though probably
cheap to free - I have to check licensing issues) or how fast it'd be
available, but I'd be willing to give it a try if there was a reasonable
chance of it integrating well.

Gerry Duprey                     EMAIL: gerry@msage.com 
Micro Sage Software Systems      VOICE: (734) 663-0444
130 South First Street             WWW: http://www.msage.com/~gerry
Ann Arbor, MI 48104 USA

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