BMD Call Interface with/without BMD Cloud

1. BMD Call Interface with/without BMD Cloud

Our Call interface connects your telephone system with BMD NTCS. When the BMD NTCS client is installed, this separate application is installed as well and will run in the background.

It enables you to start phone calls in BMD NTCS. Moreover, the CRM module recognises the phone numbers automatically and assigns them to the respective customers.
Based on the Telephony Application Programming Interface (TAPI), the BMD Call interface communicates with the telephone system in use.

Our Call interface covers the following functions:

• Recognising calls and opening the BMD NTCS telephone log
• Listing the incoming and outgoing calls (history)
• Logging the duration and time
• Defining internal numbers that are not to be logged
• Dialling directly in BMD NTCS

2.    Technical requirements

2.1.    TAPI driver

Regarding the TAPI driver, 3 types of interfaces need to be distinguished:

• "Normal" TAPI driver: used on the client (local environment, managed by you).
• "Multiline" TAPI driver: used on the server or cloud. It can use multiple active extensions or active telephone lines so that all users can make phone calls (incoming and outgoing) at the same time on the terminal server while being registered with separate extensions.
• "Multi-instance" TAPI driver: This is required for cloud solutions since this usually means that there are several customers/environments. Thanks to the driver, multiple phone numbers and extensions can be processed with the same interface.

2.2.    Checking the TAPI interface

For the BMD Call interface, it is fundamental that calling via the TAPI connection using the Windows dialling help (dialer.exe) works.

This can be checked easily by executing "Dialer.exe" via "Run..." on the client or server.

2.3.    BMD Cloud

In order to run the BMD Call interface in the BMD Cloud, the local telephone system–or the virtual system managed by a provider–has to support a so-called ESTOS-ECSTA driver.
For more information, click here: https://www.estos.com/products/ecsta-series

For reaching the telephone system, it is also required that a permanent site-to-site VPN tunnel is used between your local network and the cloud network.
A separate server runs in the BMD Cloud for installing and configuring the respective TAPI driver for your telephone system. This TAPI driver must be able to reach your telephone system. So, the TAPI driver runs in our local data centre and not on your client.

This way, your phone numbers and extensions are available to you in the BMD Cloud as well and it is irrelevant whether you use a virtual/hosted telephone system or (still) a local physical telephone system. Instead, it is essential to use the correct TAPI driver for your telephone system and that our TAPI server can reach your telephone system.

Should you require more detailed information on whether our Cloud environment can connect to your telephone system, please contact our IT support team.