When building custom applications, there are a number of functions that are universally needed, such as recording. A series of application utilities are provided to do such functions. In addition, there are application modules that provide major functions, such as out-dialing lists of numbers, which are not stand-alone applications by themselves, but which provide the major part of a custom application's functionality. These utilities are grouped into this section.

Holiday Minder

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In many applications, including, for example, the standard Auto-Attendant, it is important for the automated system to change greetings or menu choices (such as transfer to an agent) on the basis of whether or not the organization is 'open.' Regular business hours are easy to track, and normally do not change. However, holidays are another matter. With rare exceptions, the exact dates of holidays cannot be predicted from year to year. They just are when they are.

All FAR Systems applications keep track of holidays through entries in a HOLIDAY data base. When a holiday has been 'used,' it is deleted from the data base. If the HOLIDAY data base becomes empty, obviously someone must attend to it. The Holiday Minder provides an automatic reminder to the system administrator, by placing an appropriate message in that person's voice mailbox, any time that the HOLIDAY data base becomes empty.

Self-Test

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Many system administrators worry about an individual telephone port becoming inoperative or partially operative (like not sensing a particular touch-tone), and not having the problem reported to them for an extended period of time. Such isolated system difficulties can be very irritating to users, but difficult to diagnose. Often they are not reported for long periods of time.

The Self-Test application normally runs at maintenance time (in the wee hours of the morning). It uses one or more voice ports to call all of the other voice ports. At each such call, both ports exchange touch-tones and perform calculations on the touch tones sent and received, thus testing all functional aspects of the port. If a fault is detected, a message is deposited in the system administrator's mailbox.