Category: UC

Unified Communications

Microsoft Lync, Embrace or Ignore?

Post author By Peter Cox
Post date Wednesday, 7 May, 2014
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Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Peter Cox, UM Labs Ltd. Founder and CEO

As the VoIP industry continues to grow, a new and potentially disruptive force has emerged. Microsoft Lync. While not exactly a newcomer (tracing its origins back through LCS and OCS), the latest version of Lync — Lync 2013 — is clearly making an impact on both VoIP and the Telecommunications industry in general. So the question is, should VoIP service providers and users embrace Lync or ignore it?

Microsoft is clearly positioning Lync to extend their reach from data into the VoIP world. The product is understandably popular with end-users who like the features that it offers, as well as with CIOs who see Lync’s Unified Communication services as a way of getting more out their investment in Exchange and Active Directory. Lync also provides Enterprise Telephony features, albeit at an additional cost.

So what does all of this mean for VoIP service providers and users?

One thing not in short supply is opinions on the merits of Lync. The consensus is that Lync is great for Instant Messaging and for integration with Exchange, but that it does not deliver the industrial strength telephony needed by many end-users, particularly those in call centres. Mixed deployments are the result — with Lync in the back-office, and a more traditional PBX in areas with tougher call processing requirements — and these present a challenge.

One of the hurdles facing any Lync deployment is the product’s sheer complexity. Even a simple system for a small office requires three or more servers, with scaling for larger numbers of users and multi-site deployments complicating the picture still further. But the greatest challenge comes from attempting to interconnect Lync with other VoIP systems. The Lync architecture includes the Mediation Server for 3^rd party connections, which can connect to a PSTN Gateway (Microsoft’s terminology), and as its name suggests can also provide restricted connectivity to other VoIP systems. The Mediation Server does not enable callers to be identified with anything other than a caller-ID, nor does it support presence or instant messaging, and therefore it cannot provide integrated Unified Communication services across a multi vendor network.

Lync is based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the same protocol that virtually all other VoIP products and services use. Microsoft have added so many extensions to the Lync version of SIP, though, that providing the level of integration needed for a mixed Lync and standard SIP deployment is beyond virtually all end-users and many system integrators. On the plus side, Microsoft has published details of the SIP extensions they have implemented. While these specifications will not help the average end-user, they have enabled the development of enhanced connectivity solutions for Lync. It is now possible to deploy a mixed environment, for instance, with Lync in the back-office and an alternative VoIP system in other areas.

The Microsoft marketing machine will clearly continue to promote Lync, end-users will continue praise the integrated services it offers, and CIOs will continue to value the improved ROI. Also, the ability to provide true interconnection with other VoIP products and services means that there is now an opportunity for service providers to offer new services centred on Lync, and for end-user organisations to benefit from the optimal mix of Lync’s UC services and call centre grade services from other vendors. End-users will continue to adopt Lync, and thus service providers and system integrators able to provide Lync integrated with other VoIP products and services will have an edge. As such, the VoIP industry needs to embrace Lync or become a casualty of its advance.

VoIP Week Posts:

End User social networking

Pinterest blocking suspicious activity in your area

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
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Curious one this. I currently manually do “shares” for blog posts, one of which is with Pinterest. It’s to make sure I reach female readers.

The predominance of blokes amongst the engineering fraternity doesn’t totally do it for me. I am all for equality of the sexes etc, or so Mrs Davies instructs me. On that basis I have to reach out to demographic communities other than just the majority of attendees of UKNOF meetings¹.

So I share posts on Pinterest which apparently has more female than male users. Fair play.

This post is nothing to do with who uses Pinterest though, although in some respects it does. Just makes me wonder what the suspicious actitivity is. It’s not at all fair really. The mind is now racing wondering what they could be referring to?

Has someone been posting naughty photos? That would be naughty. I’m sure there are better places for such artefacts. I know not where, genuinely.

When mentioning “area” are they referring to my IP address, that of ISP Timico, or are they referring to Lincoln? My home town. Questions questions. Timico subscribers are in the main business customers. Surely nobody would be using their employer’s internet connection for suspicious activity! Surelement.

It’s quite disappointing really. Not knowing what the suspicious activity is/was. I have since pinned a pic (if that’s the right way of putting it) so the suspicious activity must have either gone away or determined in the end not to have been suspicious. Still makes you want to know what it was though:)

Anyone shed any light here?

¹ Yes ok girls I know some of you attend UKNOF meetings

UC voip

UC Disappearing Like VoIP

Post author By Mehdi Nezarati
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
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Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Mehdi Nezarati, President of EMEA, Esna Technologies Inc.

Communications, Then and Now

Old Cell Phone It was not that long ago that phone companies — and their charges for long distance calls — could not be avoided. We don’t often think about it now, but calling overseas used to be expensive and somewhat complicated. It would require a certain calling plan and a special way of dialing the traditional telephone. Then along came the ability to make calls over the Internet, and now we don’t think twice about having long conversations with friends traveling abroad or scheduling conference calls with business associates in other countries. Apps such as Skype, Google Voice and Tango have made VoIP part of how we live and work, and whether the call we are on is connected via VoIP or not is no longer relevant. And the fact that we know hav the ability to use these apps on any device — a phone, tablet, or computer — means we can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Thank you, VoIP, for this seamless and standard method of communication now at our fingertips.

The same thing is happening in the field of Unified Communications (UC). What is Unified Communications, you ask? Like many people asked about VoIP in the early 2000’s. I’ll save time and let Wiki answer that. What’s important to know is that UC saves time, improves communication and collaboration, and is becoming seamless in our lives. What was once possible only by large organizations deploying a suite of tools is now quickly becoming a part of our everyday lives. Consider these likely unnoticed aspects of UC we use every day:

Visual voicemail functionality built into our smartphones

Speech recognition capability that allows us to dictate emails and texts for communications on the go

Cameras as standard issue equipment on our smartphones, tablets and computers that facilitate face-to-face communications

As VoIP replaced traditional telephony, nowadays UC is beginning to disappear into our devices and workflows, making communication faster and easier and thus improving our lives. Video calling is a natural means for communicating with one another, and talking to our phones to complete tasks is all now part of a day’s work. At UC’s maturity, where VoIP is now, we can expect to experience more benefits in the devices and cloud apps we use in everyday workflows, as both are becoming the standards for the way we work and get things done.

Tref: As a business, trefor.net does not have a landline. We primarily use Google Hangouts, and occasionally (rarely) Skype. Of course, we also communicate via mobile, though often the mobile handset is the medium for Hanging out on Google. Not to say that this would work for every business, though, as there is a massive sunk cost in Telephony equipment out there, not to mention the investment in marketing collateral that includes inbound numbers. Businesses, however, are gradually adopting Google Apps, in great part due to the powerful collaboration capabilities it makes available. For example, looking again at our own situation, last week I met with a journalism graduate who plans to put together material on the use of tech by students. I started things by creating a Google Doc in which we could jointly work, which I then shared via her Hotmail address.

Google builds safety nets into the system in the form of policies that keep staff from using Google Docs as a means for leaking company data. The point, though, is that the Google App setup is already a Unified Communication environment in every sense of the term. It is a short step from where we are now to businesses integrating Google’s functionality with their own PBX and with their existing inbound telephone numbers.

Elsewhere, the Davies family communicates mostly through Google Hangouts and Facebook, with the occasional moment of dad calling back an offspring on their mobile when they don’t want to use up their valuable credit. The Kids are mostly always on Facebook, too, where IM often initiates a move to a video Google Hangout. We have even extended this to the setting up of whole family “video conferences” (although the term is rapidly being replaced with video Hangout) with five participating laptops, three of which are in different rooms in the house, with mum flipping between these rooms. I suspect the quality of the group Hangout is driven by the uplink bandwidth available to one of the remote family members, but it is no doubt the way ahead.

IMG credits: voicemail – http://www.intomobile.com/2011/02/13/youmail-visual-voicemail-ios/ dictation – http://singularityhub.com/2009/12/14/dragon-dictation-voice-recognition-comes-to-the-iphone-for-free-video/ video – http://www.cultofmac.com/276995/snapchat-adds-instant-messaging-video-calls/

VoIP Week Posts:

Tags Esna, UC, Unified Communication

Business internet phones voip voip hardware

The Conception and Birth of a New IP Handset

Post author By John Bennett
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
3 Comments on The Conception and Birth of a New IP Handset

Trefor.net welcomes John Bennett, Managing Director snom UK Ltd

There are five mainstream manufacturers of IP handsets active in the world today, and for the business client, service provider or reseller seeking to select a handset supplier it can be difficult to evaluate the differences amongst them. Price is an obvious criteria but that reveals little about the expected handset life, quality of voice and the durability or usability of the handset, all of which contributes to the user satisfaction and the lifetime cost of the handset. Two reliable options for evaluation are (1) references from existing users, and (2) a good look at the manufacturing process.

A reliable quality manufacturer will operate an in-house research and development team. Interoperability and the ability to work with a very broad range of PBX and hosted service providers on the market are absolutely key in the specification of IP handsets.

The design, development and manufacturing guidelines for IP handsets are quality, security, interoperability, a practical and aesthetically pleasing design, and inclusion of features that meet the needs of modern communications. Products must be stable, functional, efficient, durable, and must provide a quality in which customers can have confidence.

Defining the Designer Baby

The starting point for any new handset development is with the customer, customer feedback is key to understanding what is working, what is not, and what is needed, what is liked or disliked. It is particularly important to understand the end user experience both for handset use and from a deployment and manageability point of view. A good way to develop such understanding is to process and analyse any returns or repairs working in close collaboration with development and production teams. This has an immediate benefit for the customer as minor modifications can be quickly integrated into production. It is perhaps even more important in that a constant and systematic analysis of complaints and faults allows companies to produce reports and identify trends and issues, thus allowing for continuous product quality improvement and the development of new devices that meet customers’ requirements and deliver high levels of reliably in the long-term.

It is also important to track the changing technology trends to ensure that handsets meet tomorrow’s needs as well as today’s, and to take into account the need to easily adopt new technologies into the business. In today’s business world, key capabilities are remote provisioning, support for virtual private networks (VPN), CTI solutions and integration with Microsoft Lync.

Once the specification is agreed to the next stage is the prototype build followed by market testing. Manufacturers should maintain a close relationship with key end customers that allows for market testing of new handsets, to establish they are not only fit for purpose but that they provide customers with a solution that will excite and motivate them to continue to buy their product.

The standards of the tests to which a manufacturer will submit their products are another key indicator of handset quality. Manufacturers should have very strict criteria, and before approving a handset to move to full production the phone must successfully pass various drop tests and tests on the electrical interface. One characteristic that is of particularly importance is maintaining highest standards of audio quality, not just at first production but on-going as the handset will likely be exposed to heavy use for five years or more. Products should be regularly subjected to audio tests and careful measurements taken to determine and resolve audio deterioration.

Product Birth is only the Beginning

Once the prototype has been approved the manufacturing process goes ahead full steam. Material selection and build quality has an effect on both the audio quality and the durability of a telephone handset. Developers should continuously monitor the production process, and handsets should be spot tested to ensure that quality standards are met. During the production not only should the operational performance of the handset be monitored and tested, but also the entire response frequency of each phone. The smallest difference in build quality can adversely affect the phone quality, and this can involve anything from build impacting on the audio quality to introduction of a specialist coating that prevents the discoloration of handset keys and ensures the handset durability.

Regular analysis and systematic review of problems or complaints can ensure that product quality is maintained and improved to effectively meet user needs.

So what should you look for when evaluating IP hone handsets? I recommend you consider the need for in-house testing and fault evaluation and feedback, a process of continual improvement rather than a throw-and-replace approach, and a controlled and monitored manufacturing process, all of which will ensure a high quality and durable solution.

VoIP Week Posts:

Business voip

#voipweek on trefor.net brings diverse set of posts

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
1 Comment on #voipweek on trefor.net brings diverse set of posts

I have been involved with the VoIP scene since 1999 when my employer at the time, Mitel, decided it would “get into VoIP”. In those days the discussion was very much whether SIP or MGCP would win out. Each platform vendor had its own version of MGCP so the bet was placed on SIP.

At Mitel I developed one of the earliest SIP phones. It was a variant on one of Mitel’s standard (and proprietary) Minet phones that was sold in volume with their 3300 PBX. In those days it was the custom and practice of the great and the good of the SIP world to converge each January for the Paris International SIP Conference.

I recall that at my first year at the Paris Conference I went counted three SIP clients: a Microsoft soft client (for MSN), a Pingtel Java phone (now defunct) and if I remember right an Analogue Telephone Adaptor. The following year the number of handsets increased to around five including my own Mitel SIP phone and in year three we thought we had hit the jackpot as I counted a dozen or so clients. That was the year we considered the industry to have gone seriously mainstream.

Pingtel — One of the first SIP phones which happened to be Java based

I stopped counting after that because by year four I couldn’t fit all the handset photos onto a powerpoint slide.

The problem at the time was there were very few Internet Telephony Service Providers around to buy/sell the handsets. At the six monthly pulver.com Voice On The Net conferences only a single session was given over to talks by ITSPs. There just weren’t any and the small number that did exist had few subscribers.

Had we had a blog week of VoIP posts back then it would have contained primers on what the technology was all about, debates about which protocols would win out and wistful gazes into the future looking at a networked world that consigned ISDN and the Plain Old Telephone to the science museum. All pioneering stuff.

This week we are having a week of posts about VoIP on trefor.net. A wide range of real world subjects is on offer including the problems of VoIP fraud, how to defend against this fraud with more secure provisioning, why it is important to get your connectivity right, net neutrality, number porting in the VoIP world, how to develop a VoIP phone, designing a conference phone, location services for emergency calling using VOIP, the evolving world of Unified Communications and a look at Microsoft Lync.

The world has moved on from those early days of VoIP. In the UK the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association now numbers around 70 members and the reality is that the total ITSP count in this country is probably nearer double that as ITSPA members don’t typically include those white labeling or fronting someone else’s back end service. This diverse collection of posts has been written by C Level Executives from around the VoIP world, both from service providers and their equipment suppliers who now have a critical mass of sales to be able to support ongoing product development.

We are at the point where VoIP is no longer a hard sell. People are asking for it. They all use the tech in their every day lives and want to start seeing the benefits for their businesses. It will be a long time before the Public Switched Telephone Network disappears but you sense that time will definitely come. In one sense the only thing that is stopping VoIP from taking over completely is that you still have to have a copper line with an associated telephone number in order to carry the broadband line that allows VoIP to work. A move to a world of ubiquitous data only connectivity would kill off the PSTN once and for all. At least sooner rather than later.

In the meantime the VoIP industry goes from strength to strength. ITSPA membership is growing in number and every member is growing in size. It is a good time to be around VoIP.

Please come back and read the posts as they are published each day. For many of the contributors it is their first time on trefor.net but they are all leaders in their field and their views are worth hearing. None of the posts are intended to be sales pitches although some of them do use their own company experiences to illustrate their story.

It wouldn’t have been so long ago that these experiences would have existed only on paper and there isn’t a print edition of trefor.net:)

If you want to connect you can reach me via trefor.net on Skype or [email protected] on Google Hangout. We don’t do landlines at trefor.net…

VoIP Week Posts:

Business phones UC voip voip hardware

Ten Years of VoIP – Happy Birthday!

Post author By Colin Duffy
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
No Comments on Ten Years of VoIP – Happy Birthday!

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Colin Duffy, CEO of Voipfone and ITSPA Council member

ITSPA and Voipfone are both 10 years old this year so perhaps it’s a good time to look back at how the industry has developed.

Back in 2004, VoIP was just becoming sexy; Skype had made a big impact on international telephony revenues and was in the public eye — particularly amongst students and those with family overseas. Perhaps more importantly for the industry in general, though, was the acceptance of two technologies: SIP (Session Initiation Protocol, which has become the international standard for VoIP telephony) and Asterisk (the brilliant open source PBX software that allowed anybody to build a telephone switchboard either for their own office use or as a Hosted Service Provider). The combination of these two technologies has efficiently killed the old TDM-based PBX and is well on the way to killing ISDN circuits.

Of course, VoIP couldn’t have been as successful as it has become if it wasn’t for the growth in broadband provision to home and office. In the early days, ITSPA was concerned that the entire industry would be strangled if the Internet Service Providers blocked VoIP, and net neutrality was a much-discussed issue. As it turned out it, ISPs have not stood in the way of VoIP and the two industries have learned to live together fairly peaceably, give or take a few issues surrounding the routers of end-users. Now, the main net neutrality issues correlate to the mobile networks, some of which are grimly determined to keep VoIP off their networks, despite advertising the Internet as a main selling point. (The Internet minus some of the services that the Internet provides is not, in my view, the Internet, it’s Internet Light.)

We also dealt with VoIP regulation worries. Ofcom seemed determined to treat VoIP as something requiring separate legislation, in a ‘there be dragons’ sort of way, whereas ITSPA took the view that this was not necessary. ITSPA lost that argument, however, and — in one of the strangest of many strange meeting I’ve had with Ofcom — we managed to convince it that VoIP Service Providers needed to provide 999 services. Burning grannies were a big thing at the time…

End User events fun stuff gadgets google H/W internet mobile connectivity UC wearable

Band Camp Coincidences

Google Glass. Telephony. Synchronicity

At my age, you would think that I would be long past adolescent self-consciousness; that I wouldn’t feel awkward with the geeky way of thinking. A girl that I had a crush on back in the 2nd Grade said to me, “You talk funny. You talk like a scientist.”, referring to my vocabulary. At that age this wasn’t a compliment, nor was it really a criticism. It did not, though, bode well for any potential romantic entanglements.

On the way to the conference I find myself sitting next to two attractive, well dressed middle-age women, three abreast in the aisle seat. We start the long first leg of the flight with a little small talk. We are flying together from Dallas to Albuquerque, where they will leave the plane prior to its flying on to Seattle (my destination).

“What’s in Seattle?” they both ask.

I feel like I’m on my way to band camp. What do I say to them? I tell the truth.

“I’m going to speak at a conference on Content Management – a technology conference.”, I say.

“Oh. Technology stuff.”, from which they return to conversing among themselves for the remainder of the flight. It’s fine. I wanted time to think, anyway, to be quiet on the plane so that I could figure out what I am going to talk about at the conference. I booked the conference before deciding to leave my last corporate job. I opted to keep my commitment, though, and now I need to put my presentation in my own voice.

The plane is landing in Albuquerque. The small talk starts again, and it turns out that the two women also live in Austin. I hear them say something about two local radio hosts known as JB and Sandy. I ask a question regarding Sandy. They fill me in. It’s friendly, partly because we’re parting way in five minutes.

Nobody sits next to me on the Seattle leg of my flight, and I have time and space to think, to figure out a theme for my talk. I’m basically speaking on the lessons learned over the last year as a software team trying to buy the next generation of the solution instead of building the next generation of solution.

“Choosing a system is like a plane trip…”

“Choosing a system is like traveling through Mexico…”

Ugh.

End User social networking

Early morning meanderings of an insomniac – for the other insomniacs amongst us

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 2 May, 2014
1 Comment on Early morning meanderings of an insomniac – for the other insomniacs amongst us

In the wee small hours of the morning when the whole wide world is fast asleep I get up and go and sit downstairs and listen to the cars go racing by (sung to the tune of “Wee small hours of the morning”). Who is about at 4.50am? Where are they off to? It’s a bit early for a shift to start or finish. They can’t all be bakers or milkmen – folk known to keep anti social hours.

It is Friday, one of the days the milkman comes but I’m not sure I’ve heard him yet. When he arrives you hear footsteps in on the drive and the sound of a milk crate being plonked down in the porch. You don’t usually hear his float because it is electric. Perhaps the soft whoosh of his tyres as he pulls up and then moves on.

When I was at University I knew a baker called Ray. He made great wholemeal bread. Really tasty, solid loaves. One or two slices were the equivalent of a meal. After finishing the baking, at around 11am, he would nip round to the nearby Globe pub for a couple of swift ones, before going to bed. Who’d be a baker?

The birds have just woken up. Must be starting to get light out. I can’t see because the curtains are closed. I am surrounded by books and the noise of the birds. It’s almost as if the books are reading out loud the words written on the spines of the books.

At this time of the night, or morning, there is the company of the internet to while away the hours. On my Twitter or Facebook timelines most of the posts in the night are from people in the USA. I get the odd British insomniac. One just now reads “Starting your day at 4.45am cos you’re bloody bat shit crAAAzy.#NightShiftProblems #WhyAmIAwake #SaveTheSquirrels “.

Looks like some people must schedule tweets for overnight posting. Who reads them? Twitter is a fleeting¹ medium at the best of times. You might catch a tweet but probably not. There are some events (eg #trefbash) that I promote like crazy in Twitter and other social media destinations and after weeks of doing so have still had people asking me when it’s on this year and why haven’t they been invited? Huh!

On Facebook a friend who has moved to India says “8.30 in the morning, driving to work and it’s 98 degrees outside and sunny. (36.6). Some days don’t you just wish it would be cold, wet and windy…………Nah. I love India.”

98degrees doesn’t do it for me. All I’d be able to do would be to sit in the shade in a pool, perhaps at the wet bar, drinking cool ones. I used to travel to the USA a lot and I recall sitting around a pool in Arizona in July. The water was like tepid tea and the pool surround was constantly sprayed with water mist which was supposed to keep the temperature 10 degrees lower. July is tourist low season in Arizona. The same is true for popular destinations such as Florida where Brits migrate in masses during UK summer holidays. The natives avoid the place in the summer.

I’ve been writing for just over half an hour. Not fast for me. It’s another hour before it will be time to take the tea up. The working day has started. Today must be an “early” which is good because as it happens I am playing golf this afternoon. Good timing that, insomnia.

The clock ticks away on the wall, the only noise when the road outside is quiet. That and the unseen touch-tapping of my Chromebook keyboard. The TV is switched off at the wall, powerless to communicate. All the actors have gone home or are sat in an all night bar somewhere in a place where only actors and insomniacs go.

We have had a few posts in overnight from guests contributing to next week’s VoIP themed week. Some of them need a bit of an edit, the wave of the magic wordprocessing wand. That’s ok. One or two guest posts look like blatant sales pitches. There will be changes. People should realise that a professional, authoritative post is a far better sales pitch than something that just says “buy my stuff”.

As I get older I notice that I seem to need less sleep. This is good although I do tend to go to bed earlier than most – 10 – 10.30pm. It’s a hangover from years of having small kids around the house. They aren’t small any more and the early morning antisocial demands for attention are things of the past. Even on Christmas Day, a time when kids have historically stretched the definition of “time to get up ” to a point where the parents haven’t even gone to bed yet, they now have a lie in which is a real result.

The getting up early to make a cup of tea has real advantages. Going back upstairs with the tea tray makes the lie in to a normal getting up time feel longer and more luxurious.

I’ve drawn the curtains and it is definitely light now. Time to do other things. ~~See you in the morning~~ Catch you later…

¹ I’m even tempted to say fly by night 🙂

End User social networking

Death of a friend

I had a series of messages a couple of weeks ago from different social media contacts informing me of the death of a mutual friend. He became ill a month or so ago and whilst at one time they thought he might be recovering he went into a sudden decline and sadly passed away. This came as a shock but I guess these things happen and life moves on.

Yesterday I was trawling through my contacts database looking for people to invite to write guest posts for the trefor.net VoIP week next week and I came across his name. This gave me a genuine problem. Not whether to invite him to write a post but whether to delete his contact details. It didn’t seem right that he should be wiped from my virtual hard drive like that but what was the point of keeping his email address?

Obviously everybody dies and we all hope to reach a decent old age before it happens to us. He was 58. At 75 or 80 we consider someone to have had a good innings and don’t grieve so much but when it happens to a younger person it hits us more.

A school classmate of mine went in her twenties. I last saw her in a pub in the Isle of Man where she tried to persuade me to come to a reunion. It was timed for the day after our ferry home was booked so I couldn’t go. I found out a few month later that she had died of leukaemia and the reunion was planned as her last farewell. That made me pause for reflection.

An old university friend died four years ago in tragic circumstances. She was my age, around 47/48 at the time. It was a great shock and I wrote her a poem¹ which I posted on her Facebook timeline and which was read by her family and friends. The timeline began to fill with spammy trivia and invitations to play games automatically broadcast by people to all their friends. I stopped looking because I didn’t want her memory tainted by such rubbish. I’m sure social media platforms have processes for dealing with such circumstances though the notion of there being a process doesn’t quite feel appropriate here.

In the long run none of us matter. We are all mere blips in an incomprehensibly long universal timeline. But as people and communities in the here and now we have to recognise that we are all that matters and the fact that someone is no longer with us is deserving of some consideration.

My friend who just died was Simon Gwatkin. I first met him when I was developing VoIP chips at Mitel Semiconductor. He ran marketing at Mitel Telecom. We kept bumping into each other in exotic bars around the world. Singapore and Geneva spring to mind. When Terry Matthews² bought back Mitel Telecom. I crossed over to work with Simon developing SIP handsets and then systems.

Our ways eventually parted. Simon ended up working for Sir Terry at his VC arm Wesley Clover but we still contrived to “bump into each other” on different occasions and he came to one of the trefor.net UC Executive Dinners in London last year. Simon also invited me to watch the Wales Open Golf at the Celtic Manor Resort – he is the guy in the cream linen jacket sat in front of me on my right in the fourth photo in this post. As I recall in the pic we are drinking Gwatkin cider at the Clytha Arms cider festival.

This is a difficult time for his family but they should take some comfort from the fact that everyone who came into contact with Simon loved him and thought him a great bloke. He will be missed by many. I’m going to leave him in my contacts list. What’s the hurry?

RIP Simon Gwatkin. A lovely bloke…

¹ You can read the poem on my creative writing site philospherontap.com here.
² Terry together with Mike Copeland was one of the original founders of Mitel – the Terry in MIke and TErry’s Lawnmowers.

Engineer social networking voip

VoIP week on trefor.net and a Tweetup in Town after the ITSPA workshop on Thursday 8th May

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 28 April, 2014
No Comments on VoIP week on trefor.net and a Tweetup in Town after the ITSPA workshop on Thursday 8th May

From time to time we have technology themed weeks on trefor.net. The last one was Peering Week where we published around 20 guest posts on the very niche subject of Internet Exchange Peering. Next week is VoIP week.

VoIP is far from being a niche subject. Every man and his dog¹ uses VoIP if they but knew it. It’s VoIP week because at the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association (ITSPA) we are having a technical workshop on VoIP provisioning. VoIP provisioning is a very niche subject. Many people might also consider it to be a very boring subject.

Be assured that whilst provisioning is not every man’s kettle of fish (or words to that effect) it should be of interest to everyone involved in providing services. This is because the VoIP industry needs to coordinate how they go about providing their services so that they are not exposed to fraud.

For example if every VoIP phone was shipped with a default username and password that would be silly. It happens and people lose money when someone hacks in using said default username and password and starts running up big bills to premium rate numbers in the Philippines (or Senegal or anywhere really).

The industry needs the support of handset manufacturers in deciding how to go about methods of making their services secure that can be applied across many different brands of VoIP phone.

Details of the ITSPA workshop can be found here. The workshop and associated networking drinks will finish at 6pm. Thereafter we plan to adjourn to a nearby pub for a trefor.net tweetup.

This is open to anyone so if you are a regular reader/commenter/writer/tweeter (etc) on or with trefor.net you are welcome. Stick the date in your calendar and I’ll follow up with a venue when I’ve sorted one out. The Workshop is at 5 Fleet Place, London, EC4M 7RD so it will be around there somewhere.

Thursday 8th May trefor.net tweetup 6pm onwards.

Check out all the Peering Week posts here.

¹ Yes even the dog. Believe you me:)

Business voip voip hardware

Cisco SPA303 phone at @harbour_lights < the photographic evidence

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 14 April, 2014
1 Comment on Cisco SPA303 phone at @harbour_lights < the photographic evidence

As a wrap up the the name the IP phone competition here is the photographic evidence – taken on Sunday morning before leaving the Isle of Man for the mainland.

Also a hot chocolate as served up at the @harbour_lights – spot on I say.

Business UC

Churn and Drang

Far from the richest of subjects for 500-plus words of clever (one hopes) pondering, Unified Communications (UC) does, though, seem to generate its fair share of pixelated words across the Internet on any given weekday. Breaking “news” on the subject seems to pop quite often, in fact, regarding this award or that award (yesterday, for example, it was reported that 8X8’s Cloud-Based Unified Communications and Contact Center Suite had won the award for “Best Midmarket Solution” at the Midmarket CIO Forum), and there is a constant trickle of hot scoops as to which company has been awarded which UC contract entailing this feature and that. Then, of course, there are the compelling tidbits detailng which executives from which companies are moving to whatever positions in whatever companies.

Thus, like any other industry doing business today, a ton of fill-the-space churn is being kicked into view — into print? — with the primary intent of filling space and selling advertising (and don’t for a second think I am deaf/dumb/blind to the blatant irony threading through and wrapping around that sentence). Still, there has to be some honest-to-goodness need-to-know UC news out there…somewhere. And, by gum, I am going to be the one to find it and bring it into the light, right here…right now?

Down the UC Rabbithole

According to ITWeb, “Unified communications (UC) is becoming a necessity in the South African workplace, yet many organisations are still grappling with why it needs to be adopted as an integral part of business operations.” Not that pointing out contradictions is much of a sport, but…what? A survey declares UC is becoming necessary in business, yet organizations (the U.S. spelling this time) particpating in the survey do not know why this is so? I provided the link, so you are welcome to go read the piece if you haven’t already wasted your time doing so.

My effort up to now at bringing hard UC news into the light? Not really going so well. I’m a gamer, though, so I’ll pound the dust off and try again.

Headline: VoIP increasingly considered thanks to features like flexibility.

Ah, this could have a little juice in it…lessee. According to a survey — so many surveys, so little time — 84% of organizations that “specialize in technology” (can only shake my head in wonder at how entry into that exclusive circle is secured in these “an app that will ping you to empty the dishwasher” days) are thinking seriously about integrating UC to the way they do business, though only 40% of businesses are using such services today. So how does that break down? Assuming the 16% of technology specializers who have no interest in UC are not among the 40% currently using it, the cited statistic means that nearly 50% of the 84% who are considering putting UC to work are already doing so?

Business voip voip hardware

ip phone competition @harbour_lights

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 9 April, 2014
7 Comments on ip phone competition @harbour_lights

This picture was taken at the @harbour_lights caff on the prom in Peel IoM. It shows a traditional seaside cafe but with a twist. The @harbour_lights, as regular followers of holiday blog posts will know, has free wifi and a Twitter account. It also has an IP phone which impressed me greatly.

There is a prize of a pot of tea for two at the Harbour Lights Cafe for the first person to tell me the brand of the phone and where it is in the picture. Clicking on the image gets you a full size version which should help.

Air France has Me all A-Twitter

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Tuesday, 8 April, 2014
No Comments on Air France has Me all A-Twitter

Decided to leave the cave and go mobile to do the writing thing today. And why not? Both of the pieces I hope to crank out are of a mobile ilk, the weather on this early April Paris Monday is Spring Fever inducing, and a new local wifi-enabled coffee house (Le Café Lomi) has opened its doors nearby…a perfect storm!

The battery icon says I have 2:11 before all goes dark, so let’s start clacking.

This past 21-December I packed up My Missus and The Boy for a 5-day trip to visit family in Chicago (far more accurate to say that My Missus packed me and The Boy up, but I don’t see any reason to ruin a good story with facts…except, paradoxically, I do). We left the flat early that morning, all media-delivery devices fully charged and ready for the 12+ hours we would spend in the air travel envelope (bubble?), and headed for the RER B train that would deliver us to Charles de Gaulle (the airport, not the long dead general and president). En route I decided to check our flight status, and having successfully carried that out I then thought, “Let’s see if anyone is awake at the Air France Twitter switch on this fine Saturday.” Not being the most avid Twitterer, this was actually a bit of personal evolution on my part.

Within just moments I received a response, and a somewhat personal one at that (as evidenced by the reference to my day’s destination)! Shocked and delighted, I immediately tweeted back.

Then my wheels started turning…hmm…yes, I would look for ways to keep my @AirFranceFR friend apprised as we moved through the system.

End User social networking UC

Many Happy Returns of the Onslaught

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Friday, 4 April, 2014
9 Comments on Many Happy Returns of the Onslaught

According to some algorithm or other deep in its cockles, Facebook reports that 79 people of the oh-so-fine folk I am connected to via that social media behemoth posted birthday wishes to my wall on Monday (which, yes, was my birthday). On top of that, after I posted acknowledgement and thanks for all of that warm thoughtfulness quite a few others chimed in to make their good wishes known in the comments of my post. Thus, it is no April Fool’s joke to say that over 100 individuals, each with their own lives to lead and their own days to traverse end-to-end, had me in mind for at least a few moments and made the effort to let me know it. I consider this to be somewhat remarkable in itself, however when I take these well-wishers into account and realize that (a) a high percentage of them are people to whom I am not related, (b) I haven’t seen many of them in over 20 years, and (c) a little mental straining is needed to recall where we met …well, at that point it just gets me thinking.

Admittedly, I almost wiped my birthday data from Facebook a couple of days prior to the date, not because I am sensitive about getting older, but because I just didn’t feel up to dealing with what can only be considered an onslaught of contact. No doubt the majority of you reading this piece – and thank you for doing so – know exactly what I am referring to. Depending on where you live and how the time zones for your Facebook “Friends” break down, this onslaught can actually last for far long than the 24 hours it traditionally takes to move through one’s birthday. It begins with the Notifications. Each time someone writes a birthday greeting on your Facebook wall – and doing so is now so easy that a puppy can do it (and likely has…check youtube) – you receive a Notification stating such. And because we are all unabashedly self-centered, we immediately chase that Notification so we can see exactly what it was that someone wrote (more often than not, some variation of “Happy Birthday”…capitalized, not capitalized, ALL CAPS, with and without terminating punctuation, and so forth). Then, of course, because we are all inherently polite, we acknowledge the birthday greeting in some way, be it by clicking “Like” or actually using the Comment function to write something back. It is this exercise, which goes on over the course of a full rotation of the planet and then some, that had me pondering the three clicks needed to erase my Birth Date from my About|Basic Information. That said, I am truly glad I didn’t do so.

Business UC

Oh, the Places We Won’t Go!

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Thursday, 3 April, 2014
1 Comment on Oh, the Places We Won’t Go!

Travel Communications Survey Report 2014, a new survey released last week, shows that although customer service and staff productivity to be at the top of the list of concerns by those in the British travel industry, only 9% of the businesses are currently implementing some form of unified communications technology. The survey, performed by leading unified communications provider, Elitetele.com and UC manufacturer Swyx, in conjunction with Travolution magazine, breaks the entire pool down as follows:

9%      Implementing unified communications in their business
18%    Know of UC, but have not yet applied it in their business
13%    Know of UC, but do not understand how its potential benefits
60%    Are completely unaware of what unified communications is

Yes, you correctly read that last bullet point. When asked about unified communications, SIXTY PERCENT of the travel executives surveyed responded by stating that they have no knowledge or awareness of UC whatsoever! And curiously enough, despite this lack of UC understanding this same pool cited cost as the prime showstopper to upgrading their systems, while also forwarding the notion that improving customer service and the flow of communication amongst the business Holy Trinity (staff, customers and suppliers) are more important than cost reduction.

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Clearly, there is a significant amount of confusion amongst UK travel industry technology decision makers with regard to unified communications system pricing, installation, and maintenance. The Travel Communications Survey Report 2014 acknowledges this fact, too, placing it at the center of their conclusions, saying “…we presume that because unified communications technology is ‘new’ and marketed as an ‘upgrade’ companies may believe it to be more expensive when it actually isn’t. The platform evolved to simplify cost management and save money and resources across IT and telephony.”

Apps End User Mobile mobile apps phones UC video voip

A Chatty Kory

Who among the teeming throng hasn’t at some point or another had the thought, “Instant Messaging sure is a marvelous thing…no idea what I’d do without it…but really, by this point shouldn’t I be able to seamlessly carry on an IM conversation via Yahoo! Messenger with a contact using Google Talk? Or AOL AIM? Skype? And vice-versa? And do I really need to subscribe to all of these services – and lest I forget to mention Windows Live Messenger, Facebook Chat, Twitter, and so many others — to ensure real-time IM reachability?”

Yes, that is one large mouthful of a thought, but it should be easy enough to chew and swallow.

Numerous times over the past 15+ years the effort has been made to establish a unified standard for Internet-based instant messaging, and all of these efforts have thus far come to naught. Entrenched proprietary protocols die hard, after all, and with such integrated services as IP telephony, video conferencing, desktop sharing, and file transfer thrown into the IM provider mix (to name but a few) the potential for absolute and utter world communication dominance is such that no one major player is ever likely to champion a true standardization. No, “the greater good” will never be enough of a reason to hasten such a sea change. Instead, it will require either (1) a scenario in which instigating such a protocol will benefit all parties, (2) an irresistible push/pull prompted by a powerful outside party (government?), or (3) good old-fashioned fish-eat-smaller-fish empire building.

A Chatty Kory Now to be fair, there is some light in the sky these days regarding inter-network IM capability. For instance, with Yahoo Messenger you can add and communicate with contacts using Windows Live™ Messenger, and you can add your AOL AIM contacts into Google Talk. Such functionalities, however, are the result of agreements reached between the networks, agreements in which a bridging of two (or more) proprietary protocols has been put in place not to open communication up but to simply extend one IM provider’s boundaries to include those within another’s.

Business social networking UC

Meet Kory Kessel – an American in Paris & editor of trefor.net

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 1 April, 2014
1 Comment on Meet Kory Kessel – an American in Paris & editor of trefor.net

Happy to introduce Kory Kessel as the first editor (not counting me) of trefor.net . Here is his bio wot he wrote.

Kory Kessel’s 25+ years in high-tech span a remarkable roster of companies both large and small, and include such universally recognized brands as Grey Advertising, Dell, IBM, and Apple. His past successes, though, are not limited to ubiquitous commercial giants, as he has also completed government contracts for the Texas Education Agency, co-founded a London-based Internet gaming start-up (Quingo), and led the documentation effort for a first-generation mobile Internet services platform.

More recently, Kory has found himself deeply interred in Internet-based communications, serving a long stint as Jeff Pulver’s communication specialist for his various companies and ventures (e.g., Free World Dialup, Pulver.com, pulvermedia). He has also written (and ghost-written) a bevy of industry-specific white papers and articles on a freelance basis.

First among Kory’s achievements in information architecture is helping to develop and then subsequently documenting Apple Computer’s first PowerBook support and service program in 1993. Soon after he joined Dell, helping to lead the company’s nascent intranet initiative. His chief accomplishment at Dell, though, was serving as a key member of the IT team that conceptualized and then built the company’ first data warehouse, a project that comprised not only the construction of global financial and human resources databases, but also included the development and deployment of a proprietary suite of reporting software applications.

A proud Chicagoan by birth, a Texan by transplant, and a New Yorker by choice, Kory has made his home in Paris since 1999¹. He has a foodie’s soul, goes in heavily for sport, is an aficionado of jazz (pre-electric) and blues, and is constantly focused on his photography with a considered aspiration for eventual relevance in that field.

With his wide and varied background in technology Kory is going to be a great asset to the site. If trefor.net was a place where suits were worn and the CEO put out encouraging messages to the troops I’d be saying to you all “join me in welcoming Kory to the business and please say hello to him if you see him in the corridor.” Well I’m not that kind of guy and this is not that kind of business.

We don’t have corridors but we do have comments sections so feel free to say something in response to his posts. Nothing too soppy now. Just a firm handshake and a look in the eye:)

¹ I think I first met him in a bar in London though I’m a bit hazy on that one.

Business UC

Journey’s Start

I can hardly have a conversation with anyone these days without being asked, “Hey Kory, what exactly is ‘Unified Communications’?” As such, I will attempt to provide a definitive answer to that oh-so-ubiquitous question by copiously leveraging/paraphrasing/appropriating/borrowing/stealing from various authoritative (or authoritative-ish, at least) online resources, using my handy-dandy search engine and my remarkable knack for pulling effective keyword criteria out of my noggin.

Here, as they say, goes nothin’.

Back in 2006, Unified Communications Strategies defined UC as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.”, and I daresay a crisper, more to-the-point description is not to be found anywhere. It has big words, a jargon-y swagger, and suffers not a lick for punctuation. Kinda dry, sure, but it is an excellent start, and when you consider that it was first floated some 8 years ago that really is all it needs to be. That is, except for its strict confinement to business.

Since first defining UC way back when, Unified Communications Strategies has fine-tuned their “foundational” definition, and today their quite useful publication What UC Is and Isn’t leads off with their New And Improved take on it all: “UC integrates real-time and non-real-time communications with business processes and requirements based on presence capabilities, presenting a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.” A more fleshed-out delineation of UC, to be sure, but still overwhelmingly business-centric.

A little less than a year ago RIC Services’ Rick McCharles offered his UC definition:

End User social networking

A Twitter death

I woke up in the middle of the night, took a spin round my phone and noticed that someone I followed on twitter had died.

I had never met this guy but at one time he had been a fairly frequent tweeter and you got his whole life story. He was out of work with a broken marriage. It looked as if he had been prone to aggression and had an alcohol problem. Then he kicked the habit and seemed to be pulling himself together.

At some point he disappeared off my timeline. I didn’t really notice. I follow 1,772 people at the time of writing. A lot of them come and go and many of them hardly tweet at all. Also it doesn’t take much of a change in your personal habits to not be looking when they are tweeting. I don’t try to read all the tweets in my timeline.

So last night when I saw someone mention that he had died it came as a surprise. I took a look at his timeline and he seemed to have gone quiet on social media platforms from around the middle of last summer and he died in the autumn. There was a reference somewhere to intensive care.

I have no idea what the story is. I’m not really interested and it is really none of our businesses. What is interesting is the fact that his life was in some small measure played out online. I have over the past few years been researching my family tree (hence the mention of me buying the History of the Welsh Baptists in a previous post). I’m at a point where there isn’t much to go on. It’s all hard slog in records offices in West Wales.

However any descendant of my twitter friend, indeed your descendants and mine, are likely to have a wealth of information about our day to day lives like never before. In some respects we are planting trees that will only be enjoyed by people that come after us. Much of what I post is private and shared only with the family, which could be an issue downstream. The family is a specific named set of individuals so my details could be closed to 4G grandchildren (for example). This might require some thought re sharing rules but the principle is there and in any case my Twitter timeline is open for anyone to read.

We are also here relying on the continued existence of today’s social media platforms and their data bases far into the future which is by no means a racing certainty.

It doesn’t really matter anyway. I’ve waxed on long enough.

RIP my twitter friend.

Take care now…

Business gadgets voip voip hardware

Android DECT VoIP phone from Gigaset and the all new R630 waterproof handset

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 5 March, 2014
2 Comments on Android DECT VoIP phone from Gigaset and the all new R630 waterproof handset

Android DECT VoIP phone by Gigaset is impressive piece of kit

Probably spent more time on the Gigaset stand than any other. Party because I kept bumping into people I know there and partly because they had a couple of great products being demo’d.

The first video is a demo of an Android DECT VoIP phone. It’s basically a tablet mounted on hardware that turns it into an useable telephony device with a DECT handset on the side. There is a wired version available.

The phone costs £500 but you have to consider this in relation to the cost of a high end business phone together with the functionality on offer.

Business UC voip

Report from Connected Business show

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 5 March, 2014
No Comments on Report from Connected Business show

Went along with Dan Winfield of Voxhub to Connected Business – the show formerly known as UC Expo. UC is so yesterday isn’t it? Trouble is all they have done is change the name. The content was much the same as ever. Things don’t move particularly quickly in the connected business game (there were a few interesting toys which I will expound on in a later post).

I suspect what will happen is that one day we will look up and the whole world will have changed. A gradual process that we will only be able to observe when looking back, or browsing through an internet archive somewhere (if you have time to do that kind of thing – loser).

Getting the important things out of the way first below is a picture of me and Dan with “the girls”.

End User webrtc

uber cool WebRTC app – appear.in

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 5 March, 2014
No Comments on uber cool WebRTC app – appear.in

Sat in the lobby of the Hilton Metropole yesterday waiting for UC Exec Dinner special guest Alan Johnston when I hear a voice from afar. “Hey Tref wot you doing here?”.

It was Nominet’s Ray Bellis up on the balcony. He popped down and we chewed the fat for a while. Explaining why I was hanging round Ray mentioned a new WebRTC service called appear.in. This is a WebRTC video conference facility free for up to 8 guests.

You might say to yourself so what? This can already be done through the likes of Google Hangouts. Appear.in though is a brilliant ad hoc service that you can fire up in seconds with anyone anywhere through a browser. The site allows you to generate an instant conference room or reuse one you “made earlier”. I’ve bagsed /tref obv.

It just worked. We used Ray’s laptop and my Droid and were up and running. Looked a bit daft me getting up and chatting to Ray from a few yards away. Had to to it to avoid the feedback He was using the hotel WiFi. I had 4G on O2.

I got into a bit of a fluster when my cellular device actually rang whilst we were in the middle of the WebRTC session but hey… Modern day problems eh?

I’d give Appear.in a go if I were you. Let me know how you get on or drop me a note and we can conference in.

Ciao (bebe).