Good Training Creates Good Customers

Over time, we have learned that really good training is the best platform for a profitable partnership. We have also learned that each of our Partners is unique. Each one will arrive at our training programme from a different starting point, each brings different experiences and most have different requirements. So, we have designed our training programmes around you.

The Mix of Training and Experience

Active SoftSwitch is a very powerful service platform and at its core is PortaOne, with all its Class 4 and Class 5 features, all wrapped in an excellent Content Management System. Its capability is vast. Our own support team members say that it takes most of them 3 months, with a mix of classroom training and live desktop support experience, before they feel confident about fully supporting all of our Partners. That is why we listen to you, we work hard to understand your individual needs and then we provide you with a tailored training package to get you into service as quickly as possible, but we know that with Active SoftSwitch, you need never stop learning.

Your Tailored Training Package

Your individual training package is built around this common training programme of five two hour sessions, including three formal training sessions and two Q&A sessions. These are:

Session 1 - Active SoftSwitch Porta Billing

This first session will give you an overview of the service capabilities of the ICC Active SoftSwitch solution and we will introduce you to some of its basic concepts and tools and will give you a good general understanding of the construct and interoperability of the service platform. We move forward to focus on Porta SIP, Porta Billing and Porta UM. By the end of this session you will be able to create test accounts and make test calls. After this session you will be able to find your way around and you will no doubt spend some time familiarising yourself with your new environment. At the end we will fix the time and date of your next session. 

Key Milestone - Good understanding of the basic concepts of Porta.

Session 2 - Active SoftSwitch Porta Billing

The second session always starts with your questions. Once we have dealt with the issues that have come up since the first session our trainer will go into much more depth on tariffs, products, customer setups and other critical concepts. The Reporting and Troubleshooting sections are also covered in this session to help crystallise your understanding of the platform. This session is focused on giving you the tools to start creating your own tailored solution for your target customers.

Key Milestone - Good understanding of the way the services components link with each other.

Session 3 - Active SoftSwitch CMS

If this is your first introduction to Content Management, the session will probably take the full 2 hours, but increasing numbers of customers arrive at these sessions with a reasonable experience of other Content Management Systems so we can move fairly rapidly through the generic part of the training. We then focus on your own site and show you have to take one of our recipes and add and modify themes (which will save you a lot of time) and how to create a unique look and feel for your site. We will show you how to add and remove modules, where to find new ready-made modules and how to modify and tailor your Registration Forms for your chosen services. We will show you how to get started and other things you can consider modifying over time.

Key Milestone - Good understanding of the general structure of AS CMS

Session 4 - Active SoftSwitch Porta Billing - Q&A

Our fourth session turns back to Porta and focuses on the detail of your own products, tackling the issues that may have arisen since the end of your second training session as you will undoubtedly have been setting up your services. We explain how you can use different approaches to achieve a desired end product, with explanations of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach so that you can choose a solution that suits your market. The session will also look at Unified Messaging services and also at troubleshooting in more depth. The objective of this session is to deliver a detailed understanding of your own product and to give you tools to troubleshoot some of the issues you may face and to show you around the knowledge base. By the end of this session you should be able to manage your own service with the aid of our Knowledge Base and our Ticket Support Team.

Objective - Good understanding of how to configure the service to meet your customer's needs.

Session 5 - Active SoftSwitch CMS - Q&A

This last formal sessions is your chance to really get into the detail of the CMS, as it relates to you. As with any of the sessions, If takes more than 2 hours to reach this objective or in fact any of the milestones or objectives, that's fine with us! We will devote a total of up to 10 hours for your training, all as part of your set up charge. It's your opportunity to really get to know the systems and get the best out of them.

Objective - To answer questions raised and to strengthen and deepen your understanding of AS CMS.

Post Training Support - The ICC Knowledge Base

The ICC support team constantly updates its knowledge base with step by step guides and video tutorials. We encourage you to suggest new Knowledge Base articles. Our aim is to continually add further detail to an already rich library of articles.

ICC Ticket Support

After your 5th sessions, training will continue as part of ICC on-going support contract. Your support questions will be answered with clear guides and screenshots where necessary. ICC are proud to partner with Zendesk for Ticket support.

Premium Training Sessions / Refresher Courses

Some Partners find our additional "Pay" training sessions and refresher courses helpful, particularly if they take on a new member of staff. These sessions can be arranged at our Leeds Support office or at your own premises or of course, via telephone conference meeting.