A care home chain wanted to update their phone systems and deploy VoIP. Our reseller positioned SARK as a low cost solution to their needs but the customer had an unexpected extra requirement.

At nighttime they wanted a monitoring service, similar to the concept of a baby alarm but covering multiple endpoints simultaneously. To do this with a dedicated solution would be expensive and disruptive requiring installation of a sound system, microphones, cabling and so on. They asked us if we could help.

One of our techs came up with an elegant, yet simple, system extension. We identified “zones” of about 4 phones each and created a new feature dial code for each zone. An administrator can enable monitoring at will by simply dialling the feature code for a specific zone. SARK creates a conference bridge on the fly and connects the caller as an administrator. It then originates a call from each target phone and brings it into the same bridge. The operation is silent because the zone phones are bridged in “talk-only” mode. They receive no audio. The administrator is bridged in “listen-only” mode which can be overridden with a DTMF press if it becomes necessary to speak to the zone.

The whole thing took a couple of hours to put together and required no additional equipment. This one example nicely sums up what SARK is all about; easy to deploy, efficient, extensible.