More thoughts on SwitchVox

After having several extended periods of evaluation time with Digium’s SwitchVox PBX appliance, the AA60 model, I’ve developed a list of what I love about it–and what I’d like to see improved.   It’s running the current SMB firmware (sorry I don’t have the revision in front of me at the moment).  I don’t normally run into SwitchVox gear in the field, but I visited a soon-to-be client that was running the AA60 with a full-on Polycom phone set.  The standard AA60 rig.  Of course, they had complaints (but they’re running 4 dial-tone trunks over SIP on a single DSL line, doy.) Naturally, I told him I could help.

Anyway, I’ve summarized what I love about the AA60, and what can be improved:

Pros:

- Recording calls from the web interface. Works great. Recorded calls end up in your voicemail box. Perfect. In-call recording using a dialed code to start and stop, not included.

- Panels can easily be integrated into desktop apps, like the experimental panel I built for my Excel contact sheet using RealBasic’s browser control.  Good stuff.

- No problems with call quality. Works great with Junction Networks IAX and SIP trunks (I’ve tried both but prefer IAX since it’s more firewall-friendly).

- Auto-provisioning is stupid simple.  And Polycom makes some of the best SIP hardphones money can buy. P.S. Polycom seems to be the preferred phone vendor for SwitchVox PBXs.

- Call-logging and reporting is great. There are a variety of built-in traffic reports, CDRs, and an Excel export that works very well.

Cons:

- No IAX endpoint support.  Given how downright simple it is to support IAX in an Asterisk environment like SwitchVox, this is just silly.  Add IAX support, guys. Really.

- The web interface could use a few tweaks. Setting up cascading call groups is tricky, for example. But hey the AA60 is a small business product so it’s hard to complain.

- No redundant power supply or storage (the higher-up model offers both).

November 28, 2008 | Tags: , , , , | 985 Comments »

DOES Grand Central matter to Google?

Here’s an interesting piece questioning Google’s lack of improvements to the Grand Central service since acquiring it a while back.  The author asks why nothing has changed with GC since the acquisition.

The trick to understanding Google’s publicity lag for GC is the core technology they use: VoIP.  This technology family has not fully matured, and isn’t likely to be pervasive until somebody, Google, really figures out how to get the final frontier of datacomm applications–realtime media–OFF of traditional transmission mechanisms and ONTO the web. Up until now, VoIP and telephony have remained largely excluded from the Google party, relegated to a climate of inaction where business dictates the preservation of legacy, circuit-switched networks. End-to-end VoIP hasn’t materialized yet, so the penetration of services like Grand Central into mainstream culture has been low. That’s got folks wondering why Google is apparently just sitting on what we in the industry consider to be a gold mine.

So why hasn’t Grant Central become the showpiece many of us expected?  I think I have the answer: the industry isn’t ready.

The opportunity for Google to capitalize on Grand Central might still be ahead of us, not behind us. Grand Central’s core technology is VoIP call-switching.  Software is used to automate this core technology and create a very simple, very useful palette of telephony tools, mostly for directing incoming phone calls to cellphones and SIP agents such as Gizmo Project.

I see Grand Central mashing up with services like searchable voicemail, language translation, Fonolo, which dials phone menus to save time, and things like SwitchVox and Fonality, which provide SIP-based telephony at the desktop.  To Googlize voice, the notions of search and user-preference-driven intuition  have to enter the equation, and Grand Central gives Google a means to this end.  But, I say again, the industry may not be ready.

In the background, Google is doing what it can to ready the industry–making access to the network more ubiquitous, fighting regulation of currently open access mechanisms (primarily radio spectrum), and readying a path to open converged platforms via its Android mobile operating system.  All the while, Google has avoided the nasty temptation to cozy up to the big phone companies, because of their affinity for the status quo.

A little success on each of these fronts could create the perfect storm for GC, just as the desire for cheap advertising and darn good searchability created the perfect storm for Google during Bubble 1.0.

October 29, 2008 | Tags: , , , , , , | 1,230 Comments »

SwitchVox AA60: Part Three

Well, I’ve finally had what I consider to be ample time to check out every nook and cranny of the SwitchVox AA60 VoIP , and I’ll stand by the belief that SwitchVox is the best Asterisk variant available, and not just because of its slick user interface. (For what it’s worth, Polycom owns the sound quality battlefield, too.)

One of the coolest things about SwitchVox is called Panels, which are web service apps that you can run in your web browser when attached to the SwitchVox server. When a call comes in, or some other event occurs on the phone system, your panels can perform certain behavior–like display a virtual switchboard or the status of a call queue.  Or, my current favorite, the Google Maps panel, which displays the location of the caller based on the caller’s area code and prefix.

There are a few problems with Panels, though.  For one, there doesn’t seem to be enough adoption of the Panels idea in the industry. That is to say, you can’t just go download cool new panels the way you can download Dashboard Widgets or iPhone apps.  So, the few Panels that are freely available in the marketplace, while nifty, serve as little more than props for the idea of Panels, concept demos if you will.

One of the programs I’ve been experimenting with is Now Software‘s Now Up-To-Date and Contact, a contact management / quasi-CRM package from the fellas a few miles south of me in Columbus.  I’m really digging this program, but as I’ve begun to envision how I might combine Now Contact with a telephone system such as SwitchVox, the integration becomes a daunting task.  I’d like to be able to trigger web service events from what Digium calls “SwitchVox URLs” (get requests that occur when certain telephony events happen) that point to the server where my Now Contact data is stored to, say, set up an automated dialer, or better yet, journal incoming and outgoing calls.

Of course, the folks at Now are knee-deep in their as-yet-unreleased flagship product, Nighthawk, and I believe that, architecturally, the Now people are keeping an open mind about VoIP interfaces and XML web services-the two things that could make Asterisk users (numbering in the 100′s of thousands) absolutely lust for Nighthawk.

Indeed, adding a combination of simple SIP signaling and XML web-service functionality to Nighthawk and then setting it alongside Asterisk/SwitchVox would create a CRM/contact-center system so potent that even fearless old Cisco might tremble.  After all, Cisco’s Express contact management and CallManager are a hair more expensive than Now’s products and SwitchVox, even if Cisco stuff could be dumbed down for SMBs.

So I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing from Now Software, but equally excited about SwitchVox, so back to the AA60.  Configuring hunt patterns and call cascading was kind of a pain at first, probably because I’m so accustomed to doing it on other systems, most notably plain vanilla Asterisk, but now that I’ve got the hang of it on SwitchVox, I realized how dead simple they’ve made it.

I can’t wait to see future revs on the user interface. The AA60′s response time loading web page was a bit less than snappy, and there are elements of the user interface that shouldn’t require full blown page loads, so I would love to see Ajax used heavily in future revs.

In a future post I’ll talk about how phone provisioning differs on SwitchVox versus Jazinga, and I’ll also cover setting up a soft phone on SwitchVox and describe the interesting experience I’ve had with Junction Networks this week.

September 17, 2008 | Tags: , , , , | 898 Comments »

SwitchVox AA60 VoIP Appliance, Part Two

(Part one can be found here.)

Regarding the Digium/Switchvox AA60 appliance, it’s obviously Linux and Asterisk based, but all the delightful fun ordinarily associated with Asterisk administration has been boiled down to a cute web interface that really works, and really works better than the competition.

And it’s built to run.  I mean, the thing doesn’t even have a power switch.  Plug it in and it boots up.  Want to shut it down? Unplug it (or do a soft shutdown).  Point is, there’s nothing to bump to accidentally turn off your PBX, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Neither is the external power brick–much more serviceable than an internal PC power supply.)

Out of the box, the self-signed certificate on the web interface will make IE and Firefox both moan, but add it to your exception list and you’re off and running.

The version I’m looking at is SMB 3.5.  The web interface is the familiar Switchvox red-bar-across-the-top with pop out menus.

Above, you can see Switchvox’s clean, snappy UI, probably one of the main reasons for the appeal to Digium, whose Asterisk Appliance had a comparatively clunky, slow UI.

The User Tool is a web-based app that any user of the PBX can log into using a browser. It gives access to personal call histories and allows the user to export his/her own CDR directly to an Excel file.  Useful stuff. I can see this coming in handy for inside salespeople.

The Switchboard, launchable from the User Tool, is another web based app. It provides front-desk-like command and control of all lines, extensions, and calls within a user’s credentialed reach so they can drag and drop to perform telephony functions like call parking and so on.  I’ll go into more detail on this later after I’ve provisioned a few phones on this AA60.

This Switchboard app is not as sparkly as the Trixbox HUD (which is not web-based), but I would think this would be sufficient for a small call center operator or a group manager.  The only drawback is being forced to leave a browser window open.  We all know how tricky it can sometimes be to surf the web with a window we WANT to keep parked a certain URL open in the background. Sometimes the browser or a client side script will decide to jack that window and poof, there goes our Switchboard.  But that’s no fault of the AA60, of course.

Next I’m going to add some phones to the system. Stay tuned.

August 6, 2008 | Tags: , , , , , | 780 Comments »

SwitchVox AA60 VoIP Appliance, Part One

I’m just getting started with the new Digium SwitchVox AA60 unit.  This VoIP telephone system was introduced this past spring. I’ll be evaluating it with two Polycom SIP phones and a Junction Networks IAX trunk account for PSTN dialtone.

SwitchVox is a San Diego-based IP Telephony technology integrator that has been producing very eyeball-friendly Asterisk phone systems for the last several years. Brian and Tristan Degenhardt, both with SwitchVox since its early days, were instrumental in publishing my second book, VoIP Hacks, as Brian contributed some fantastic material for the book, and Tristan coordinated his contributions.

I met Tristan briefly at Fall VON Boston two years ago (in the Asterisk Pavilion), but didn’t have much time to go over things with her.  Well, as it turns out, SwitchVox was very soon later acquired by Digium, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The AA60 is aimed at small offices (there are more capable models aimed at larger offices, of course). Street price on these is around $3400 for a 10-user bundle.  Now I’ve never been a big fan of licensing users for PBX access (especially on an open-source system), but I realize there’s no better way of appropriately monetizing the offering.

Initial setup of the AA60 involves connecting a PC keyboard, mouse, and monitor to the rear panel of the AA60 (shown a few scrolls down).  Once you’ve done the network setup, the keyboard, mouse, and monitor are no longer needed, and the unit is configured through a fantastic web interface. Actually, SwitchVox’s web interface is arguably the main reason Digium acquired the company.

So the AA60 is really a PC. It does have sort of an odd form-factor. I was expecting it to be 19″ rack-mount standard, but its enclosure is about the size of a slimline/SFF desktop PC, maybe a bit bigger.  Digium does include a mounting bracket for placing the AA60 on a wall board.

Now the AA60 doesn’t come with any legacy telephony interfacing out of the box, though Digium’s cards can be configured and installed as a part of your order. This would allow you to equip the unit with T1/E1 PRI access or analog trunk/station ability.  I have a Digium Wildcard TDM with two stations and two trunks that I’m going to try out as a part of this demonstration, so I’ll let you know how that goes.

The AA60, unlike other VoIP appliances (such as the Jazinga we looked at a few weeks back), delivers only voice functionality. That is, it isn’t a switch, router, or firewall.  For installers looking at a more high-end PBX product with fewer strings attached, this is a blessing.  For some offices, and all-in-one unit makes sense. I would argue though, that for most, having a standalone PBX makes the most sense.  Keeping PBX separate from infrastructure spreads out the points of failure and doesn’t make your phone system reliant on a bundled switch or router. Digium has wisely decided not to include those extra components.

In the next post, we’ll get into configuring the AA60 and talk about the pros and cons, if we discover any. See you then.

July 25, 2008 | Tags: , , , , , , | 1,190 Comments »