Monthly Archives: August 2007

Inside Office Communications Server 2007

Posted on by
1,510

I was invited to become an author for WindowsNetworking.com, a great web site published by CompuGenix. It is staffed by some very well-known authors including Mitch Tulloch and Brien Posey, guys who are worth their weight in Microsoft knowledge. Me, I’m just a VoIP guy and an adept Windows Server guy–so apparently I was a good fit to write about IP communications for these guys!

My first piece is up. It’s an installation guide for Office Communications Server. For those of you unfamiliar, OCS is Microsoft’s conferencing platform, which replaces/augments portions of a PBX, a GoToMeeting, a Videoconference, and instant messaging.  Check out my article.

Why Asterisk doesn’t sell against Avaya

Posted on by
1,332

Tom Keating posted the sentiment that Asterisk ought to be impacting sales of traditional IP PBX vendors such as Avaya and Cisco, but I’m not sure I agree. Here are six reasons why Asterisk has failed to cut into Avaya/Cisco/Nortel’s share of the market:

1. Digium and its channel can’t sell against blue chippers. Avaya has a huge distributor channel filled with high-paid salespeople that get the job done. Asterisk, not so much. So there’s a polish Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel offer that Asterisk doesn’t. Some of the people running around calling themselves Asterisk consultants are just plain shabby. Then again, this is not uncommon in the open source world, I’m sorry to say.

2. Avaya has well-defined hardware products that are tangible and capital-oriented. Digium does not.

3. Asterisk is open source and there’s no comfort level with open source among board room buyers.

4. It’s still too hard to get immediate support for Asterisk-based products, and a Switchvox or a Fonality doesn’t have the same mobile support force that an Avaya does.

5. Asterisk is a solution developer’s product of choice, not an end-customer’s product of choice. When people hear ‘Asterisk’, they think ‘API’ instead of thinking ‘solution’.

6. The market is growing. Asterisk’s market share could increase steadily without the necessity for a decrease among its competitors.

A GarageBand Track for the Recording Geeks

Posted on by
21

It’s been quite a while since I did a recording/music blog. But check this out. I’ve had this track setting on my Maxtor outboard drive for a few months. It’s a pop rock arrangement that was done to test my then-new microphone setup. Here are the techniques I used:

- Recorded two acoustic guitar tracks with XY close condensers. One pointed at the neck, the other at the bridge. One acoustic has a capo so it has that mandolin-ish sound.

- Recorded the drums on stereo track with four mics: XY overhead, inside kick, and close snare (AKG D88).

- Added software-generated keyboard pad.

- Added electric guitar and bass guitar tracks, direct to the mixer.

- Minimal compression on everything except the drums (hence the cymbals sound a little “dark”).

- A little reverb on the master track.

Tell me what you think after you have a listen.

The death of podcasting buzz

Posted on by
26

Is it just me, or did the obsession with podcasting just GO AWAY? Perhaps it was the difficulty in monetizing the creativity model. Or maybe it just was never easy enough to produce and consume podcasts. Not to mention the non-live nature of it. I haven’t listened to one in a long time, probably because I’m swamped and I no longer have a iPod hookup in my Pacifica.

Skype’s heretofore ‘explanation’ doesn’t add up

Posted on by
47

We’ll see what Skype’s official outage explanation is in the morning (they promised to deliver an official explanation), but I have a few theories:

  • It doesn’t take three days to restore a botched code patch. Skype is too smart not to be revision-controlling their server code. And these aren’t 500 GB patches, either. They’re probably a few MB in size and can be replicated across Skype’s network in minutes, if not seconds. This “algorithm” explanation makes no sense. If it were bad programming, why didn’t Skype just roll it back from their CVS or their CodeSafe or whatever rev system they’re using?
  • A more plausible explanation would be the disappearance and subsequent difficult restoration of centralized authentication data, ie. customer account information. Perhaps somebody forgot to push in a backup tape one night. No joke. This makes more sense to me. Did anybody change a password just prior to the Skype outage and then fail to have that password change reflected after the system came back online?
  • The Windows Update theory is out the window. pun intended. Mac users were knocked out too.

Avaya loses a deal (R.I.P. customer service Part Deux)

Posted on by
934

Had a deal with a client of mine in the pipeline for several months. I had been working very closely with an Avaya reseller on what looked to be a shoe-in deal. Cisco was involved–so were Nortel and Toshiba. But it looked like it was going to swing to Avaya. And this wasn’t a five-digit deal, if you catch my meaning. It was a good sized deal. Lots of locations; lots of users. Handset license gravy. (Which reminds me, when is Digium going to figure out how to compete in the board room?)

Anyway, this Avaya dealer was IN. They had it.

Then, they pulled out of our region due to come kind of fiscal responsibility move. Now, granted, the client hadn’t signed the paperwork yet, but the iron was ready to roll and the ink was ready to flow. I didn’t find out about this pullout until the sales rep whom I’d been dealing with, now fired from the reseller, called me to ask if he could take the customer even though he was no longer with the Avaya reseller. Hmph.

Wouldn’t have helped us in our decision-making to know that the reseller was going to pull out BEFORE we invested so much time into their design and their recommended solution? I guess it’s a good thing we never signed a contract after all.

Skype got some splainin’ to do…

Posted on by
90

As Europe has woken up to a new day and Asia is entering the evening hours, here’s the latest on the sign-on problem.

We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day.

An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.

Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.

We’ll update you again as soon as we can. Thanks for hanging tight.