Month: April 2007
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Native (and UNofficial) Blackberry clients for AIM, MSN/WLM and ICQ available (for some networks)
Continue Reading: Native (and UNofficial) Blackberry clients for AIM, MSN/WLM and ICQ available (for some networks)(Continuing my effort to flush my “queue of things I want to blog about”…)
Last week, per Rich Lafferty, I learned that there are now “unofficial” versions of native Blackberry clients available for AIM, MSN/WLM and ICQ. I used WebMessenger a bit in the past and found it useful, but stopped using it for some reason I can’t exactly recall… in any event, I’ll be curious to try out native Blackberry versions. Of course, I can’t right now. I naturally tried to download the MSN/WLM client and was told that “this messaging service is not supported by your service provider” (Verizon). Ah, well, I’ll just have to wait a while. I don’t really need IM on my blackberry, but every once in a great while there’s a time when I’m travelling and IM would be great to have.
Technorati tags: blackberry, rim, aim, msn, icq, im -
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Telephony… *disrupted*: "Dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic"
Continue Reading: Telephony… *disrupted*: "Dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic"If you are a Blackberry user (I am), you probably discovered sometime early this morning that you were not receiving email messages… and then you no doubt learned that pretty much all Blackberries in the entire Western hemisphere were offline since last night. For email, that is… they still worked as a phone, but I mean, you don’t really get a Blackberry for the phone aspect. At this point, basically every major news outlet is covering the story, and I’m sure we can expect the stories to continue for quite some time. The service seems to be back up now (mine is, anyway), but I’m sure it will take a bit for it to be restored everywhere.
Working in my home office today, I actually didn’t notice the outage until I did one of my very occasional scans of Twitter and saw Chris Brogan complaining being stuck on a train without email access. Knowing Chris, I figured I’d give him a quick call and was rewarded with this great quote about his trip around New York:
“Yeah, I was just in Penn Station and there were all these dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic!” (Chris Brogan)
Indeed! …
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Rich Tehrani on DiamondWare, "3-D audio conferencing" and how the sound of telephony is changing
Continue Reading: Rich Tehrani on DiamondWare, "3-D audio conferencing" and how the sound of telephony is changingThose who know me well are aware that one of my hot buttons is my belief that one of the greatest disruptive potentials of VoIP is to fundamentally change the sound of telephony. With VoIP, we are no longer constrained to the 3.5kHz frequency range of the PSTN… I’ll save my wideband rant for another day, but tonight I’ll just point you over to Rich Tehrani’s post “DiamondWare in HD“, which talks about the power of DiamondWare‘s “3-D” stereo technology. As Rich describes in his blog entry:
Once on the call I was able to easily position the three callers all around me. One could be directly ahead of me and one on either side. The computer can automatically position participants as well if you so choose.
When everyone was in place, Keith had one coworker start counting from 1 and another reciting the alphabet from letter “A.” While these two participants spoke, Keith proceeded to speak with me and the strangest thing happened. I could focus on anyone I wanted and was able to absorb what all three participants were uttering.
It was an amazing experience and the sound quality was beyond compare. I could hear everything in…
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Mitel connects directly to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 via SIP
Continue Reading: Mitel connects directly to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 via SIPIn my incredibly long queue of things I’ve wanted to write about for the past few weeks, one item was the Mitel news release about making a direct SIP connection to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging. The cool part is that you can just use our basic 3300 ICP communications platform (or IP-PBX, or whatever you want to call it) and connect it directly into a Microsoft Exchange Server to use the Exchange Server for a unified inbox (email, voicemail, fax, etc.). No other boxes or gateways necessary. Just a nice, standard SIP trunk. As a long-time proponent of open standards and general “standards geek”, it really can’t get much better. It’s great to see.
Technorati tags: mitel, microsoft, exchange, voip -
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My article "Using IP Communications as a Tool for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity" is now online
Continue Reading: My article "Using IP Communications as a Tool for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity" is now onlineI just realized that I never wrote here that an article I wrote recently came out online. Published in Mitel’s “Presence” magazine, it’s titled “Using IP Communications as a Tool for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity“. Okay, so the title’s not overly catchy, but here’s the first paragraph:
If a hurricane devastated your main office, how rapidly could you restore telephone connectivity? If a branch office had a fire or other disaster, how soon could you connect back into the main office? Or if Avian flu or some other pandemic created a situation where you needed to stay out of the office, could you access remote phone capabilities equal to that at the office? How long would it take your business to recover? How much (and how many customers) could you afford to lose in the process?
I go on to talk about why IP communications/IP telephony/VoIP fundamentally changes the traditional way you might address these issues and offers tremendous benefits. In fact, to me, the ability to put an IP phone pretty much anywhere you can get an IP address remains one of the major – if not the single biggest – disruptive aspect of…
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Skype begins private beta of Enterprise Edition, rolls out new versions for Mac (including Call Transfer), Windows beta…
Continue Reading: Skype begins private beta of Enterprise Edition, rolls out new versions for Mac (including Call Transfer), Windows beta…Quite a bit of activity lately, it seems, over in Skype-land:
1. Private beta of an “Enterprise Edition” – First seen on Jan Geirnaert’s weblog and then subsequently confirmed, it appears Skype is sending around an email looking for participants in an “Early Adopter Program” for a product that would include:
- Enterprise network compatibility.
- Company-owned Skype Name creation.
- Customisable to your corporate requirements.
- Direct technical support from Skype.
- Ongoing upgrades maintenance.
A bit more text about it on Jan’s weblog. Will be interesting to see what evolves out of this.
2. New version 2.6 for the Mac with Call Transfer, public chats, Skype Prime, etc. – Over at Skype Journal, Jim Courtney writes about the new Mac version that brings the Mac version closer to parity with the Windows client (as seen in the release notes). It also apparently includes “call transfer” that will, per the download page, “Transfer calls to your Skype contacts – effortlessly.” Jim provides a teaser to us that Windows users can use this Call Transfer as well… and this will be described later this week.
If Call Transfer does indeed work, this is the first time I’ve really seen it in a P2P client. (I’m…
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MAKE: Turning an antique phone into a USB headset (and therefore Skype phone)
Continue Reading: MAKE: Turning an antique phone into a USB headset (and therefore Skype phone)Through a link from Phil Wolff, I learned that Bruce Stewart has posted at the Emerging Telephony blog about someone turning an antique phone into a Skype phone (which actually points to a post on the MAKE Blog). Okay, so as best I can tell, it’s really a glorified USB headset, but I admit that the geek side of me finds it rather a fun idea. Bruce links to a page on the Instructables site that has more pictures and instructions.
(I’d note that while the articles say that it is an “antique Skype phone”, it really looks to me like it’s a USB headset, so it could really work with any VoIP program.)
Fun stuff…
Technorati tags: skype, etel, make, voip -
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Attaining BLISS… (at least in the world of SIP)… a.k.a. why can’t we all just get along?
Continue Reading: Attaining BLISS… (at least in the world of SIP)… a.k.a. why can’t we all just get along?So you’d like your SIP phones to all work together, eh? And you’d like your SIP phone from Vendor A to work with the SIP phone of Vendor B and yet give you the business functionality that you used to have in the PBX from Vendor C?
Good luck.
Yes, they will (or should!) all work together for basic call functions, but if you want to do more than just the very basics, you rapidly wind up in the realm of incompatible SIP implementations. Different vendors support different RFCs… or interpret RFCs differently. It’s a challenge to go beyond basic functionality.
Enter “BLISS“, one of the latest working groups coming out of the IETF. It stands for “Basic Level of Interoperability for SIP Services” and, as noted in its charter, the intent is to define a basic set of functionality (“minimum interoperability requirements”) to allow SIP endpoints to interoperate on 4 specific telephony services:
- Bridged/Shared Line Appearance (BLA/SLA)
- Call Park/Pickup
- Do Not Disturb (DND)
- Call Completion to Busy Signal/Call Completion on No Reply
More details are on the charter page. These are just the initial four issues chosen to be addressed and Internet-Draft documents are already circulating on…
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Shawn Merdinger – The Top 11 VoIP security issues you need to discuss with your vendor
Continue Reading: Shawn Merdinger – The Top 11 VoIP security issues you need to discuss with your vendorOver on the Voice of VOIPSA weblog, security researcher Shawn Merdinger is 2/3 of the way through a series of posts on the “top 11 VoIP security issues you need to discuss with potential vendors”. His posts are:
- Pucker Up – Intimate VoIP Phone Security Questions, Part 1 of 3 (1-5)
- Pucker Up – Intimate VoIP Phone Security Questions, Part 2 of 3 (6-8)
with the third post coming at some point soon to cover points 9-11. Shawn’s posts are definitely “required reading” for anyone working on or concerned about issues around VoIP security. He’s done a great job bringing into one place the many questions that you should be asking VoIP/IP telephony/IP communications vendors about the security of the systems you are considering (or have already deployed).
Technorati tags: voipsa, voip security, security, voip
