Bulk Destination Set Route Managment

Hello and welcome to this Sippy Soft Video Tutorial. Today we will be showing you how to create destination sets and routes in bulk by using the bulk upload feature. Let's get started, first we log into the switch. and we navigate to the destination sets by scrolling down to 'Routing' and clicking on 'Destination Sets'. I already have an example destination set created, and I'm going to click the 'Open Routes' action. This destination set currently does not have any entries. To begin with, I'm going to add one route manually for demonstration purposes. We click the 'Add' button to add a new route. And we add the prefix '1' for all of North America. The 'Activation Date' determins when this route will become active, we can leave it set to 'now' or we can specifiy a date and time. For this example, we are just going to leave it as 'now'. Expiration date determins when this route will expire, we are going to set it to 'never' so this route will always be active. The Billing Parameters dictates the billing profile that this route will have. We will leave it as 1:1 which means it will be per-second billing. Finally we will give the route a rate. The rate we are going to specify for this destination is 5 cents per minute. We will click the 'Save &Close' button and now we can see that the route has been added. In order to upload routes, we need to have an example file. It is easiest to work with a pre existing template, and the easiest way to get a template, is to download our existing routes by clicking the 'Download' button. This will download an Excel file to your computer, When we open this excel file we will see the route for North America is already present. This was the route that we added manually. Let's speak about the different columns. The first column is important, it is the 'Action' column. It can contain a series of commands; A D U S SA A stands for ADD, and it will add a new route to the system. D stands for DELETE, and it will delete the specified route. U stands for UPDATE, will update the specified route. The ID column is generated by the system, and should not be touched. The prefix column contains the prefix of the number dialed, for example '1' is for 'North America', we will add more prefixes in a moment. 'Interval 1' and 'Interval N' dicates our billing pattern, in this case, 1 and 1 - per second billing, and 'Price 1' and 'Price N' represents the price for this route. Again, 5 and 5 which means 5 cents per minute. 'Forbidden' allows you to forbid calls to this route, it can be either 0 or 1. If you set this column to 1, then calls to that route will be rejected by the system. This is useful for blocking calls to premium numbers. 'Activation Date' will determine when this route will become active in the system. If the date is in the future, the system will not use this route will only use routes with an activation date in the past. Similar to activation date, the 'Expiration Date' is used by the system to expire routes. The system will only use routes with a blank expiration date, or an expiration date that is in the future. If a route as an expiration date in the past, then it will skip this route. Now I'm going to add some routes. I'm going to add the route 353 which is the country code for Ireland 44 which is the country code for the United Kingdom 1212 which is the North American country code and area code for New York. 1415 which is the North American country code and area code for California. These are all new routes, so I'm going to give the action 'A' for each of these. Because this is a new route, I'm going to leave the ID column blank. The system will generate this. The same for the Country Column, the system will automatically fill this in. I have to give a rate for each of these routes. For the rest of the parameters, I'm simply going to copy and paste the defaults. The 2nd column with prefix '1' - North America, I have not specified an action, it is just blank. The system will simply ignore this line, because there is no action specified. The next four rows are all ADD actions. So lets attempt to upload this into our system. We will go back to the Destination Route page, we will click 'Choose File' and select the file we have been working on. Then we click 'Upload'. A-Ha, another file has simply downloaded. Lets have a look at this. As you can see the name of the file is 'Example_Destination_Set_Routes_errors.xls'. That means that here is a problem with the data that we tried to upload. Lets open the file to see what is wrong. In the Errors file there is a new column called 'Error Message' and it tells us what is wrong with each line. It says here 'Invalid "Activation Date" it cannot be in the past". I see, we forgot to specify activation date for our routes, so lets switch back to our other file, the original one. Okay, I see what happened, we left Activation Date blank. We have two options here, we can either set the activation date to 'now' and the system will set it to the current date & time that it was uploaded on, or we can give it a specific date in the future. Lets check the system time on our switch. The system time always appears in the top left hand corner of the switch. In this case it is September 11th at 18:23. Lets set a future date and time for the activation date of the New York and San Francisco route. We will set them to activate at today at 7pm. Make sure you enter the Activation Date in the format as shown here. Otherwise the system will not parse the date correctly and it will fail. So lets try and update this file again. We will go back to our destination sets, click 'Choose File' select the file that we were working on, and click 'Upload'. Okay, that looks better. the system will give us a confirmation message, it says 5 rows were processed, 4 commands were recognized. Let's have a look and see what happened. Okay, our four new routes are present. United States - New York and United Sates - California have been added, but the status shows an exclamation mark !. It says Effective in future at Sept 11 17:00, that's great. Looking at our system time, it is 18:42, so these routes will become active in about 20 minutes from now. The routes for United Kingdom and Ireland are already added. Great! Now let's see if we can update and delete some routes. We will start again by clicking the Download button which will download the routes from our system. So when we open the file, we see our familiar 5 routes. Lets update the rate for New York, so we will specify action "U" in the update field and we will increase the price on this route to 0.03 cents. Let's also set an expiration date on our California Route. So we will specify U again, and have it expire tomorrow at 19:00 hundred hours. The 12th of September 19:00. Okay, I'm going to delete the Irish Route by simply specifying the "D" action, and we will leave the United Kingdom route as is, and also the North America route. So in this file, we have three actions that are going to execute. Two updates, and one delete. Let's give it a go. We will go back to our Destination Sets page, click Choose File, select the file that we have been working on, and then click Upload. The system confirms the actions that have been taken. It says that it recognize three commands, it updated two records, and it has deleted one record. Lets inspect the changes, and see that everything worked properly. Okay, the route for Ireland is gone, lets check the rate for New York, Ah-Ha, it is now set to 0.03 cents instead of 0.02 cents. Remember that we set an expiration date for the California route. We have to click on the California route to see the expiration date. And as you can see, the Expiration date is set to 12th of September at 19:00. That means that this route will expire tomorrow at 19:00. We have now covered all aspects of using the bulk upload facility for Destination Sets and Routes. The same functionality exists for other areas of the soft switch too, for example, Customer Tariffs can also be managed using the upload routes feature. The format for Tariffs is similar, but you will want to use the download rates in the Tariff to get the exact format. And also, you can do the same for accounts. You can create accounts in bulk using the bulk upload facility too. This brings the video tutorial to an end. We hope it was informative, and you can now create records in bulk on your soft-switch. If you have questions about this feature, you can email us at support@sippysoft.com or you can visit our support forum http://support.sippysoft.com/ In our support portal there is further documentation on how to use the bulk upload feature, you can also ask a question on our forums by starting a new topic.