Nortel has launched the SCS500. This communications system effectively provides companies with a cross between the features offered by Timico on their Nortel AS5200 hosted VoIP platform and the Nortel BCM phone system.
Timico has found that many companies want to use Instant Messaging in their business but beyond insecure consumer products such as MSN and Skype don’t know how to do it.
Timico’s VoIP for Business service provides IM and is great for businesses where there are lots of distributed locations or many homeworkers. Our real world experience shows that as companies get bigger their needs change and we then sell them a Nortel BCM.
The SCS500 adds neatly to the portfolio with IM and other Unified Communications features. We can now cover pretty much every need of every sized company in our customer base and target market.
All credit to Nortel they have been making great strides to the extent that the Financial Times newspaper recently rated their stock as a “buy”. Their leading position in the Unified Communications market is a reflection of this.
This a picture I pinched from the Nortel website. It shows the SCS500 soft client. I don’t know who Chris Leary is but a larger image would shou you that he needs a shave 🙂 .
I recently wrote about access control and the different ways that we can open doors at Timico. Well this has gone one step further and certain individuals on the approved list can now send an Instant Message that will open the front door.
It is somewhat mind boggling where this is all going. It is quite possible to envisage a scenario where say the cleaner appears at your home front door whilst you are at work and needs to be let in. You have an application running on your PC that rings when the doorbell rings. Upon hearing this you look on your home website to verify that it is indeed he or she and open the door with a click, or sms or IM – whatever is easiest from where you are sitting.
Readers might be interested to know that the Olympic opening ceremony stimulated an increase of almost 10% in internet usage last Friday afternoon.
It will also be interesting to hear whether the consumer ADSL customer community will have seen any changes in the performance of their connection as their ISPs begin throttling to cope.
Before we set off on our camping holiday (destination unknown) I sat down at my daughter’s pc to print out some campsite options in Yorkshire.
I was somewhat bemused to find that her homepage was set to BBC iplayer.
Look out ISPs everywhere. Your bandwidth forecasts are inadequate.
My trusty E71 got me to the first campsite on the list and that is where we stayed. I also used it to write this post.
Before we set off on our camping holiday (destination unknown) I sat down at my daughter’s pc to print out some campsite options in Yorkshire.
I was somewhat bemused to find that her homepage was set to BBC iplayer.
Look out ISPs everywhere. Your bandwidth forecasts are inadequate.
My trusty E71 got me to the first campsite on the list and that is where we stayed. I also used it to write this post.
Categories
Nokia E71
Nokia E71
Nokia kindly sent me an E71 to review. I’m not a gadget man but I have now had a series of Nokia E Series’ which I hope qualifies me to comment on this latest one.
I some time ago decided that I would use Nokias for email rather than RIM. BlackBerry at the time did not support WiFi and offered no hope of a VoIP client. Windows mobile devices did not cut it. For me they did not seem to be very good phones to me; clunky with a poor user interface and not a very good battery life.
The E Series came along and with it the business mobile range for the future. I thought the E60 was good and was somewhat surprised when it was canned. I put it down to progress. It wasn’t perfect. Pages downloading from the internet frustratingly seemed to do so twice. I put it down to some strange caching process. Still the screen was very clear and I could lie in bed on a Saturday morning reading the paper over my home wireless network.
My replacement, taken in order to run mobile voip clients on the latest Nokia device, was the E65 which I thought was great and is what I have been using since it came out. It seemed to be a stabler device although it still locked up from time to time. I eventually worked out that if email was synching some of the other buttons wouldn’t respond – crucially the address book. It still seems to download web pages twice.
Cosmetically the paintwork on the E65 rubs off so it doesn’t necessarily stay looking good but this isn’t what turns me on. I would happily carry on using the E65.
Enter the E71.
What I like about the E71?
Old fashioned PDA footprint but is a lot slimmer and slips in the pocket very easily.
Good weight – the Blackberry’s are too light for my liking
Good screen
You can listen to your text messages
On board satnav
WiFi – you can also get software that turns it into a WiFi hoptspot.
Battery life seems reasonably good
What don’t I like about it? I need to get a Bluetooth car kit. It isn’t really fair on the device because most modern cars probably have Bluetooth built in but mine is a “Classic” and so I have to switch SIMs to my E65 which has a generic Nokia interface that fits into the car.
If that is all I can complain about I think the Nokia E71 does very well. In fact it looks to be a huge step forwards as devices go. Well done Nokia.
BT has made the headlines again for throttling all peer to peer traffic. www.samknows.com has just produced a report on the subject.
People perhaps don’t realise that P2P isn’t just used for downloading (often illegal) media from the internet. P2P is often the most efficient way of moving large amounts of data from one location to another and as such is an essential business tool. Timico doesn’t throttle any of it’s traffic.
This suggests to me that the UK is moving more to a two tier ISP market. Tiers are usually based on the size of an ISP – the big ones are Tier 1, medium sized are Tier 2 etc. I would suggest that in future the Tier classification should be based on the quality of the customer experience. Tier 1 = good, Tier 2 = not so good.
I’ll leave you to decide which one BT fits into but I would have to say that Timico would certainly fit into the former.
The photo is of the Davies’ back garden and was taken at around 7.45 PM on August 7th using the Nokia E71. I had to go to my PC to help upload the photo itself – it uploaded to the website ok but at a certain point of the proceedings I kept losing the link to the website. I’m not sure whether this is specific to the WiFi connection. I have found that the WiFi on the E Series isn’t as robust as it might be although I do like the phones in general.
Note the grass needs cutting!
Following my last post which was on security I was sat in the Timico NOC today and interestingly watched a SPAM attack in progress.
It was an alphabet attack. This is one where someone’s email server is compromised and used to send out SPAM by rotating through the alphabet for email addresses (eg [email protected] – the SPAM algorithm works its way through every combination of alphabetical variants. In this case it was targetting Italian .it addresses.
Our network monitoring picked it up and we immediately blacklisted/shut down access to that Exchange mail server. We also contacted the customer to let him know and so that he could take remedial action and remove the offending SPAM.
Apart from being interesting to watch it in action, a bit like standing on the edge of a battlefield watching the fighting, it again highlighted the need to have secure passwords. In this case we tried accessing the offending server and were able to log on using a simple admin/password combination of credentials.
When I started this blog I didn’t think that security would become such a mainstream subject but I was wrong
I enjoy this business so much because of the wonderful diversity it provides me in terms of issues, problems and successes. The latest is the fact that the firewall at our corporate headquarters has been the subject of a number of attacks by some unfriendly person.
These attempts to break into corporate networks happen millions of times daily around the world, which is why businesses need to be on top of their security strategy. What interested me here was the fact that this was the same attack coming from a number of different places around the world.
The sources were in China, the USA, Poland, Australia and a couple of other countries whose names escape me. The same common username and password combinations were used each time from each different source (lesson here – never use “admin” and “password”) .
Of course the same individual or organisation is almost certainly involved in all of them. That person will have systematically hacked into a certain type of server whose operating system and security patches has not been kept up to date. It is likely a company server hosted at a datacentre somewhere.
Our course of action, if the attack persists, is to look up the owner of the IP address from which the attack is coming and ring the business up to let them know they have a problem. In the case of the Chinese source we send them an email – only because they will almost certainly be in bed. 🙂 Usually this sorts the problem out and indeed the recent spate of attempted break ins has abated. No doubt there will be more.
We know what to do in these cases but it is a lot to ask of a business that is not and ISP or doesn’t have a highly skilled IT department, which is why it very often makes sense to outsource your security management.
The more I play with websites such as Facebook the more I find out. Initially I couldn’t see the sensible use of Twitter. The selling pitch to me was that it provided someone who was sat in a closed meeting with the ability to send messages that could be broacast to the outside world from their mobile phone. I didn’t really get this.
Now i have found out that I can use Twitter in conjunction with Facebook. When I send a SMS to Twitter it not only posts the message on Twitter but also as a status change on Facebook. For me it is easier to do it this way than to use the Facebook mobile upload.
I have used the Facebook means of uploading photos from my mobile – I just send an MMS message to a Facebook address and hey presto the photo appears in my profile.
This is all technology that now looks useful for business purposes. The Twitter SMS service, if embedded in my company intranet might be a secure way of me sending out messages whilst on the move (ok I can email it but Twitter can be programmed to send the same message as an SMS to other mobiles). I could say the same thing for the photo upload. This adds to the flexibility of business communications and who knows what it will evolve to.
I don’t know if businesses will use Facebook in anger or whether they will demand closed websites that are specific to their use. This is to some extent possible with Facebook already but would I trust my secure business data to Facebook? Probably not yet. Still the ride is exciting.
Businesses need to be mindful of the need to manage their domain name strategy sensibly. There are any number of individuals and organisations out there ready to take advantage of the careless.
For example take a look at http://www.cricinfo.com/. Not a bad time to be visiting the site during an exciting match between England and South Africa (yes I did say exciting).
If you now visit http://www.crickinfo.com/ you will see a difference. The spelling mistake is an easy one to make for someone looking for the main cricket website in the world (wide web). A good domain name strategy would have seen cricinfo snaffle both domains.
Now visit http://www.cricinfo.co.uk/. This one you might think would certainly take you to cricinfo but it doesn’t. It is owned by someone else and until recently took people to a cricket shop completely unassociated with cricinfo.com.
This is quite a high profile example of someone not doing something right when the business was small and it didn’t matter but paying for it downstream.
There are other different examples – the famous myspace court case where the .co.uk domain name was owned by an ISP long before myspace.com existed.
It is quick and easy to check your own business’ domain name – click here if you need a domain name checker.
Good luck England.
Businesses need to be mindful of the need to manage their domain name strategy sensibly. There are any number of individuals and organisations out there ready to take advantage of the careless.
For example take a look at http://www.cricinfo.com/. Not a bad time to be visiting the site during an exciting match between England and South Africa (yes I did say exciting).
If you now visit http://www.crickinfo.com/ you will see a difference. The spelling mistake is an easy one to make for someone looking for the main cricket website in the world (wide web). A good domain name strategy would have seen cricinfo snaffle both domains.
Now visit http://www.cricinfo.co.uk/. This one you might think would certainly take you to cricinfo but it doesn’t. It is owned by someone else and until recently took people to a cricket shop completely unassociated with cricinfo.com.
This is quite a high profile example of someone not doing something right when the business was small and it didn’t matter but paying for it downstream.
There are other different examples – the famous myspace court case where the .co.uk domain name was owned by an ISP long before myspace.com existed.
It is quick and easy to check your own business’ domain name – click here if you need a domain name checker.
Good luck England.
After a fiercely fought video competition which brought in some imaginative entries I am pleased to announce that the winner is Scott Wroe from the Timico, Newark, marketing department. The winning video is well worth watching timicofinalscottwroe.
Congratulations also to Andy Twine of Twang.net who came a close second with commendations to James Vestbirk, Jo Barker, Adam Jackson, Harry Singh, Andrew Massing, Richard Wright, Jo Smith, Andrew North, Clare Morrell, Will Curtis, Dean Bruce and Katie Nicholas who all put in a good effort.
Nortel just announced that they have been chosen to provide the communications infrstructure for the London 2012 Olympics. This is quite an achievement because as well as voice it involves the provision of a wide area network that one might more normally associate with Cisco. I get the impression from Nortel that power consumption/Carbon footprint played a part here although I’m sure that in such a complex bid there were a great many decisive factors.
Their press release talks about having to support 205 sporting organisations, 20,000 media, nine million spectators and over 4 billion viewers worldwide. I’d like to have been the salesman getting commission from that lot. No doubt there will be a few tickets floating around for Nortel partners wanting to attend the track and field finals:-).
Tesco has just announced a new investment worth £100m over 5 years in a new next gen telecommunications platform connecting 1,800 sites over 14 countries. What the announcement doesn’t say is that it is based on Nortel technology. Specifically the multimedia collaboration features are based on the Nortel AS5200 platform. This is the same platform used by Timico for its multimedia Unified Communications based VoIP services. Tesco is using video conferencing and Instant Messaging as well as file collaboration and VoIP.
The Tesco network is big enough to justify it’s own platform. However Timico provides partitions on its Nortel platform so that smaller organisations than Tesco can benefit from the same feature set (without having to spend £100m).
This is a big milestone for the Nortel platform and an endorsement of Timico’s VoIP strategy.
Tesco has just announced a new investment worth £100m over 5 years in a new next gen telecommunications platform connecting 1,800 sites over 14 countries. What the announcement doesn’t say is that it is based on Nortel technology. Specifically the multimedia collaboration features are based on the Nortel AS5200 platform. This is the same platform used by Timico for its multimedia Unified Communications based VoIP services. Tesco is using video conferencing and Instant Messaging as well as file collaboration and VoIP.
The Tesco network is big enough to justify it’s own platform. However Timico provides partitions on its Nortel platform so that smaller organisations than Tesco can benefit from the same feature set (without having to spend £100m).
This is a big milestone for the Nortel platform and an endorsement of Timico’s VoIP strategy.
BT has bought a company called Ribbit based in Silicon Valley, California. Why is this interesting or significant to the UK business community? Maybe it isn’t.
However there is a chance that in the UK we will see the effects of this acquisition in the next year or two. Ribbit provides the hooks to make voice calls from different applications. In itself this isn’t anything special – Timico could do the same thing using it’s Nortel 5200 platform given the time and inclination.
Ribbit has tried to make it easy for 3rd party developers to do so and as a company whose sole reason for existence seems to have been to do this then one must assume that they would be doing a good job of it.
I think my one observation relates to what BT expects to do with the platform. It seems to me that Ribbit is set up as an applicaton for a wide community. I suspect BT might just use it to develop their own embedded voice applications. This to me would be a lost opportunity. Here BT has the chance to position itself at the centre of a Web2.0/VoIP2.0 world in the UK but it needs to keep Ribbit open to all to do so.
In the world of voice, at least in business voice and Unified Communications, it is also important to keep the activity and platform UK centred when selling to UK parties. This is why I believe that a Webex service with a voice platform based in the USA will never have a huge market reach in the UK. The same applies for the apparent efforts of Microsoft with hosted OCS.
Timico is based in the UK, offers UK services and telephone numbers, and I believe will be going head to head with Microsoft and Cisco in this space. Of course in other areas we will be partnering them. Interesting times…
BT has bought a company called Ribbit based in Silicon Valley, California. Why is this interesting or significant to the UK business community? Maybe it isn’t.
However there is a chance that in the UK we will see the effects of this acquisition in the next year or two. Ribbit provides the hooks to make voice calls from different applications. In itself this isn’t anything special – Timico could do the same thing using it’s Nortel 5200 platform given the time and inclination.
Ribbit has tried to make it easy for 3rd party developers to do so and as a company whose sole reason for existence seems to have been to do this then one must assume that they would be doing a good job of it.
I think my one observation relates to what BT expects to do with the platform. It seems to me that Ribbit is set up as an applicaton for a wide community. I suspect BT might just use it to develop their own embedded voice applications. This to me would be a lost opportunity. Here BT has the chance to position itself at the centre of a Web2.0/VoIP2.0 world in the UK but it needs to keep Ribbit open to all to do so.
In the world of voice, at least in business voice and Unified Communications, it is also important to keep the activity and platform UK centred when selling to UK parties. This is why I believe that a Webex service with a voice platform based in the USA will never have a huge market reach in the UK. The same applies for the apparent efforts of Microsoft with hosted OCS.
Timico is based in the UK, offers UK services and telephone numbers, and I believe will be going head to head with Microsoft and Cisco in this space. Of course in other areas we will be partnering them. Interesting times…
I was on a rare Tuesday night out with Ben our Head of Network Operations and Dean, Chief Technical Architect. Ben was up from the NOC in Ipswich for a meeting so we combined business with pleasure and had an evening discussing technical strategies and roadmaps for The Timico Group.
The output will reveal itself in due course but the nature of such evenings, spent in Tequila’s Mexican Cantina in Lincoln, is that the conversation lead to other subjects.
On this occasion it was magnolia paint. Dean said it was a completely boring subject and that there was nothing really to talk about. An earlier career spent in RAF accommodation had coloured his judgement on the subject.
My take was that magnolia paint is in itself a complex subject with many facets. After all you can get gloss magnolia, matt magnolia, emulsion, satin, small pots, large pots, industrial sized pots etc etc. It is also quite possible that there are many different shades of magnolia.
The point is that there are probably experts in magnolia paint who can advise the mere mortals and colour blind amongst us as to which tin of magnolia we need.
Now compare magnolia paint with your internet connection. You have probably taken both for granted but in reality a broadband internet connection is a complex animal. What sort do you go for? Is the free one that comes with a phone line the one for you or do you actually pay good cash for something different? Is there a difference? How do you decide?
Let me tell you even if you think you know what you are talking about it is not easy. It’s like the first time I had my own business and needed to choose a mobile phone tariff. There were so many on offer I basically had to take a pin and stick it in the pricelist and hope that that one was the right one for me. Someone had always made the choice for me before.
Not every business has the luxury of employing staff to specifically choose on your behalf. In fact most businesses don’t. They need to team up with someone who can advise them and who they can trust.
The fact is I leave the choice of magnolia paint to an expert, in this case my wife. My wife knows nothing about internet connections so in that case she asks me.
PS, Ben and Dean also wanted me to write on the subject of croquet. There are around 3,500 members of the Croquet Association spread amongst approximately 165 clubs. The Association was founded in 1897 so it is still taking a little while to take off! If you want to know more go to http://www.croquet.org.uk/. They are looking for support.
For internet connections go to http://www.timico.co.uk/. They want your business.
Interesting fact that came out at the nominet meeting today was that they have almost 7 million .uk domain names under management. These are being added to at the rate of 137,000 new registrations a month, offset by the fact that only 70% of domains are renewed when they expire.
It’s not very often I get excited about an ISDN line going down. This is what happened today at Timico Headquarters in Newark. Apparently becausewe are currently going through normal summer weather (that’s normal hot not normal British wet) the BT telephone exchange in Newark began to overheat. The BT response to this was to switch off some kit includiong our ISDN lines. Uhuh.
However fear not dear customer. When you called in you probably didn’t notice because our Disaster Recovery plan kicked in and the ISDN numbers were diverted to VoIP ensuring continuity of service. Hooray!
It is not true to say that this was seamless. It did take us a few minutes to realise that the lines were down and then switch over but the time lost was minimal.
The outage happened at around 14.20 and normal service was resumed at just before 17.00 hours, presumably because the sun had gone over the yardarm and the BT engineers wanted to get away for a cooling thirst-quencher.
It isn’t often you go to a meeting which launches a new industry. This is essentially what happened at the Radisson SAS Hotel in London today as Nominet launched their ENUM registration service.
The presentations gave a basic training in ENUM for those who needed it and then offered an open forum for discussion as to how the market would be developed.
For those that don’t know, ENUM is a means for VoIP users to connect with other VoIP users without having to pay for calls, assuming that you have the IP bandwidth. It assumes that calls are going to become free and that service providers will have to find other ways to make money. The more registered ENUM subscribers the morecalls will be free.
The reality is that it will still take a long time to happen. VoIP to VoIP interoperability is a long way from being straightforward and the service will rely on using the internet for connectivity with all the quality issues that that entails. VoIP providers such as Timico typically use high quality private IP network connections as opposed to the internet for their call traffic. This is important for businesses.
The near term pitch is the ability to connect multiple islands of VoIP such as multi site businesses (retail, police, NHS etc). VoIP providers can however do this today. Nominet rightly responds to this saying that this is not currently being done with standard scalable solutions such as ENUM. They are right but the solutions in use today exist and work and come from reputable market leaders such as Nortel and Cisco.
Timico has been involved as a pioneer in UK ENUM from its basic beginnings when it was down to volunteer efforts. With a DTI sponsored commercial activity it may well be that ENUM will eventually start gaining ground although all the building blocks are not yet quite there. Nominet has a good team but it is still going to be a long haul. Nominet recognises this and has assumed that it will take at least five years to break even.
Its going to be interesting to see what happens. Timico will participate when it believes the market, that does not yet exist, is ready.
Categories
Nortel carrier strategy
Had a really good meeting with the Nortel Carrier team on Wednesday – I’ve not really had a chance to write it up and post before now. The meeting was held to discuss their SIP/multimedia product roadmap. The Nortel Enterprise Division has been making a lot of noise in the multimedia/Unified Comms space (SCS500 – I’ll write a piece on it soon) but I had been afraid that the Carrier side had sold its soul to Microsoft.
This turns out not to be the case. The Nortel AS5200 platform, which is the SIP platform used by Timico, has been adopted by a number of major Tier 1 operators and is benefiting from what seems to be a large amount of attention and investment. This to me is a very sensible thing for Nortel to do as the 5200 represents a leading edge platform for them – one which is streets ahead of any competition in the hosted VoIP/Unified Comms space.
Timico has been selling services on the back of the 5200 for 2 – 3 years. We are talking hosted VoIP, video, IM, presence, collaboration – perfect for small offices and homeworkers. The Nortel developments look to be adding more PBX type features that fill in some holes in the 5200’s repertoire. Whats more it seems to me that this switch is moving in the direction of becoming Nortel’s main carrier play. After all the CS2k, which gives Nortel its huge lead in the market, is a platform designed to emulate legacy services but in a much cheaper way than its DMS 100 TDM swich.
What’s more, new features such as federated presence, FMC, links to external directories and better support for SIP Trunks will keep Nortel at the forefront of the business communications space and allow tight integration with its Enterprise products – something that we haven’t seen before.
This is reinforced by the movement of Enterprise staff to the Carrier to aid the process.
Lastly but by no means least Nortel is moving the 5200 to Linux which will have a huge impact on the cost of rolling out and supporting 5200 based services and which I whole heartedly welcome.
I look forward to growing our Nortel relationship.
This isn’t really a technology post. I have just had dinner in a hotel sports bar somewhere near the M25 outside London.
Initially I couldn’t get near the bar because the one barman was snowed under with customers attending a function that had closed the restaurant. I didn’t mind that because I don’t like being seen as a sad git reading a book on my own in the restaurant. I prefer to sit at the bar with a beer and a burger and then go back to my room to work/sleep/watch TV. I did mind it taking ages to get served with my glass of shandy (yes).
On this occasion the bar eventually emptied of function goers only to reveal the lonely individuals normally seen in the restaurant but this time sat on their own at tables in the sports bar.
It does get worse. The four screens in the sports bar all displayed the same round of some boring darts competition. Probably the world championships J. I seem to recall that at the age of eighteen I was interested in darts. I’m 46 now and no longer interested in darts.
Back in the room I’m writing my board report. Can’t send it though. The Wifi signal although present is too weak. I have to go back to the bar to get a strong enough signal. It will have to wait until morning. I could do it through my Nokia E71 (more on that later) but the GSM signal is also pretty crappy.
There you go. It was a technology post after all – sent from reception in the hotel.
Despite the advent of faster (ish) broadband the demand for leased lines is on the up. At least that is a trend we are seeing at Timico. This is evidenced by the statistic that in one day last week we received 32 (that’s thirty two) requests to quote for a leased line from our existing customer base.
You might argue that 32 quotes from a base of ten thousand or so businesses is not much but I’m telling you it is. That is the annualised equivalent of 8,320 leased lines in one working year, assuming no one takes a holiday but doesn’t work weekends.
Now we don’t get that number of RFQs every day, it would be great if we did. Also this is a recent statistic so they will not yet all have turned into orders although I’m sure that a significant proportion will do so.
It does point to a growing demand though. Businesses’ need for stable higher bandwidth is on the up as they have more and more internet (or at least Internet Protocol running on private networks) based communications that they rely on. With the best will in the world broadband (ADSL) is not going to give the same degree of reilability as a leased line, but there again it is significantly cheaper.
One huge opportunity for TImico is the massive installed base of BT leased lines. I read somewhere recently that this amounted to around 118,000 installations. Most of these leased lines will likely be 2Mbps connections that have been installed for donkeys years and are now well out of contract.
You can bet your bottom dollar that BT will not have mentioned that IP bandwidth costs have plummeted in the same timeframe. The chances are the typical BT leased line customer is still paying the same for the service that he or she was five years ago. This represents a serious opportunity for fast growing outfits like Timico.
If anyone out there needs advice on their leased line needs just drop me line or leave a comment and I’ll sort out an independant assessment.
Tromboning is the method used by some operators providing access to mobile services in the UK. It is cheaper to route the calls via the USA and back into the UK than to do it directly to a mobile. The downside is longer call set up times and sometimes poorer call quality.
I have just invented a new type of tromboning. My friend Terry has an American daughter. She is over on holiday (vacation) and he got her a pay as you go SIM from Orange (Orange). There was as usual a bewildering choice of tariffs. He settled on one that charged 20p per minute for any UK network including landlines and only 6p for calls to the USA.
If she needs picking up from town she calls he mum (mom) in Oklahoma and mum calls dad in Lincoln (England) using Skype (insecure consumer VoIP). Even if she used her landline service it would still be cheaper than a call to a UK network from her UK pay as you go mobile.
When I began this blog I intended to cover subjects that I felt would be of general interest to users of business communications services in the UK – Timico customers generally. I didn’t think that this would for one moment include the topic of door entry systems. It does.
Some time ago we began a relationship with a company called Paxton Access. This was because we needed a security system for our new purpose built Headquarters building in Newark (Notts – not New Joisey for the benefit of international readers). Since then we have started installing it as part of an integrated package for customers.
Door locks have moved on a long way. This system comes with a Software Development Kit. I’m not suggesting that this is something particularly useful for general business customers who won’t know one end of a SDK from the other. However the rich engineering talent we have at Timico has been able to put it to good use.
We now have an intranet page that provides access to the door entry system. One click on the web interface and the door can be opened. Is this a security risk? We don’t think so. Access to the web page is controlled via Active Directory authentication and is tied down to specific individuals. This can apply to any door at any of the Timico UK locations and can be tied in with camera visuals so that the person allowing entry can see who they are letting in.
The same door can be opened by anyone holding a registered keyfob or, using the intercom, via any telephone handset on the Newark Nortel PBX. This functionality could be extended to opening by sms pin number from registered mobile handsets, or via command line interface from non Windows PCs as is the case in our Ipswich NOC where the engineers have the traditional geek’s abhorrence of all things Microsoft.
There is more. This system can be used to set the alarm and turn off all the lights when the last person leaves the building. This is serious use of web technology for mundane but important business needs.
When I began this blog I intended to cover subjects that I felt would be of general interest to users of business communications services in the UK – Timico customers generally. I didn’t think that this would for one moment include the topic of door entry systems. It does.
Some time ago we began a relationship with a company called Paxton Access. This was because we needed a security system for our new purpose built Headquarters building in Newark (Notts – not New Joisey for the benefit of international readers). Since then we have started installing it as part of an integrated package for customers.
Door locks have moved on a long way. This system comes with a Software Development Kit. I’m not suggesting that this is something particularly useful for general business customers who won’t know one end of a SDK from the other. However the rich engineering talent we have at Timico has been able to put it to good use.
We now have an intranet page that provides access to the door entry system. One click on the web interface and the door can be opened. Is this a security risk? We don’t think so. Access to the web page is controlled via Active Directory authentication and is tied down to specific individuals. This can apply to any door at any of the Timico UK locations and can be tied in with camera visuals so that the person allowing entry can see who they are letting in.
The same door can be opened by anyone holding a registered keyfob or, using the intercom, via any telephone handset on the Newark Nortel PBX. This functionality could be extended to opening by sms pin number from registered mobile handsets, or via command line interface from non Windows PCs as is the case in our Ipswich NOC where the engineers have the traditional geek’s abhorrence of all things Microsoft.
There is more. This system can be used to set the alarm and turn off all the lights when the last person leaves the building. This is serious use of web technology for mundane but important business needs.