Plum IVR Support

We are in the process of developing a phone-in dictation application (for doctors and lawyers) using your platform in the development environment. We're using Microsoft IIS 6 web server and "classic" Active Server Pages (ASP) scripting. Recently we experienced something strange that I thought we would run by you to see if you might have an explanation.

For weeks we were having a problem where we could do up to
a two minute recording but anything above two minutes timed out. We spent nearly four weeks and tried everything to resolve the issue, but were unsuccessful. Finally we tried changing all of the paths in our XML files to use the secure protocol, https, instead of http. This seems to have fixed the problem. This now brings up a few questions in my mind...

1. Do you have any idea why this may have solved the issue? That is, why would it record for under two minutes using http paths, but anything over two minutes needed to be secure, https?

2. We tried to set the start page (via your interface) to https, but
your interface would not accept an https URL. Why is that? This doesn't appear to be a problem though; I'm just curious.

3. We've noticed that the authority for our SSL certificate does not
show up on your certificate authority listing; and yet it is indeed
working (in development environment, at least). Do you think this might present a problem for us once we promote to production? We purchased the SSL certificate through GoDaddy.com and they use a company called Starfield Secure Certificate Authority. Will that hinder us in production? If so, would you be able to make a change on your end to support this type of certificate or is that a big deal? (That would save us the headaches and expense of getting a new certificate).

Thanks for the help.

Hello,

1. If large file uploads only work under HTTPS the cause is something specific to your IVR application server. There is absolutely nothing in our IVR platform that would restrict file upload sizes, we have had customers uploading very long recordings (+1 hour) using both HTTP and HTTPS for several years without issue.

2. There are no HTTP vs HTTPS restrictions in our IVR platform. If you experienced some issue where our platform was unable to access an HTTPS start url it is likely because something in your application was causing it to fail. One thing to keep in mind is that the web interface is not the same thing as the VoiceXML platform. It is simply a developer front end to configure the platform. As such the web interface is not guaranteed to have the same certificate list as the VoiceXML platform. This can create problems where you can not validate a URL in the web interface, but it works fine in the VoiceXML platform.

3. This is also related to the VoiceXML platform having a different list of certificates compared to the web interface that controls it. If you are able to call into IVR applications that use HTTPS then your certificate is fine. Starfield is in our current VoiceXML platform certificate authority list so you should not have any issues using that certificate with our platform. If at some point you decide to change certificate authorities and you find that it does not work with our IVR platform we can add new certificates to the next VoiceXML platform revision. Just post a message on this forum indicating the certificate authority you are having problems with, or if you have a support contract with us send an email to support@plumvoice.com with your customer number in the subject line.

Regards,
Plum Support