12 Feb 10 Beyond the dialtone – PBX user experience revisited

When most of us think about PBX systems, we usually associate these with cumbersome usage, confusing dialing codes and in most cases – a PBX system is automatically associated with the annoying task of transferring a call from one handset to another. Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about how people use PBX systems, is this really the only way to use a PBX system? is there something else to the mix? can we really enrich one of the oldest operational paradigms in the world? – and for that matter, can the public be re-educated to assimilate a new breed of PBX systems or services?

As to answering the question of re-educating the public, I guess I’ll have to leave that question to the head shrinks. As to answering the latter, enriching the PBX experience is both achievable and advisable. When I say enriching, I mainly talk about your ability to bring to the IP phone functionality usually not associated with it. Imagine to have the ability to receive a stock exchange RSS feed to your phones idle screen, notice that you stock is either rising or falling, and by the flick of a button – either sell or buy. We’ve all come accustomed to IP phones that look like the one of the right. A whole bunch of buttons, that in most cases have no direct use when our phone is utilized using a single account. However, these buttons can be externally re-assigned and re-programmed to achieve greater functionality – surpassing the normal behavior of just making phone calls.

The technology involved exists on almost every high-end IP phone on the market (well, at least those made by SNOM, Aastra, Cisco and Polycom – most of the Chinese makers don’t have this) – it’s called a Mini Browsers. Mini Browsers are exactly what they are called, these are simplified versions of your typical Internet browser. Some vendors had produced their own XML based Mini browser markup language (SNOM, Cisco, Aastra) while others had decided to provide a sub-set of XHTML (Polycom). The variations between the vendors are at the neck deep of the problems of using Mini Browsers, and that is that the formats are considerably different. Sure, SNOM had more or less adopted Cisco’s general structure, however, it still varies.

Through the utilization of this technology, it is possible to create phone based browser applications, that seem native to the phone user, as the general interface resembles the native phone interface. It is now the developers job to make the web interface displayed to the user as seamless and as native as possible, keeping in mind that the developer must remain agnostic to the information retrieval layer. Most companies leave their phone systems and these tasks to their system administrators and infrastructure team, however, this task is far beyond their capabilities and skill set. Creating an agnostic IP phone minibrowser dislplay layer, capable of utilizing multiple vendors and models, is a question of content management and content rendering, very must similar to the content transcoding problem that is common to the mobile content world – in other words, a sys-admin will create an ad-hoc solution, a programmer will create a proper, well structured, well designed solution that carry the enterprise beyond its initial needs and requirements.

A short example of how these interfaces work can be found here – on my company blog.

Tags: Aastra Technologies, Asterisk, Cisco, Cisco Systems, digium, Fonality, FreePBX, freeswitch, Markup language, Nortel, Polycom, sangoma, SIP, TrixBox, User interface, VoIP, XHTML, XML

19 Oct 08 Thinking of using DELL with Asterisk – DON’T!

So, you want to replace your office PBX system with an Asterisk server – CONGRATULATIONS!

Now, before you go about downloading AsteriskNOW, installing your newly purchased Digium hardware and going about starting your work – take a moment to consider the hardware you’re about to use. Over the course of the past 5 years, I’ve conducted hundreds of Asterisk installations, utilizing various brands. 

No matter what brand I used, be it generic Intel’s, HP or IBM, I always got similar results. There was only one brand that always stood out with non-similar results. And it’s not only that the results were not similar to the other brands, I’ve had different results when using 2 machines of the same model – even when sourcing the two units at the same time. The vendor is DELL, I guess that DELL believes in the model that says: “No two computer are made alike” – and indeed, no DELL computer is ever similar to another DELL computer. Two people can purchase the same server from DELL, and each server will be completely different from the other – how can you manage an infrastructure when the hardware vendor keeps changing the spec and implementation? 

Just to give a small example, the same customer that I was talking about before had to have the entire motherboard and raiser board changed, 2 times, before Asterisk started running smoothly on the DELL 2950 server that they had purchased. Motherboard, we’re talking about motherboard, raiser boards, power supplies, the only thing that remained from the Original server was just the chassis and the CD-ROM – how funky is that. 

So, if you really like brands and you want to use Asterisk, make sure you’re using an IBM or an HP, at least these companies don’t cut corners like DELL – and makes each server unique, by saving a couple of bucks here and there. No wonder Fonality/TrixBox teams up with DELL, DELL wants to say: “We’re compatible with Asterisk!”, so they teamed up with the crew that closed a configuration that works on some measly server, and now, they are pushing this garbage to people over the Internet – Way To Go DELL!

Tags: Asterisk, DELL, Fonality, HP, IBM, TrixBox

23 Jun 08 Say No To TrixBox Campaign – Update

As some of you noticed, I’ve started a “Say No To TrixBox” campaign. In order toPL go about and monitor the usage of the banner, and it’s deployment across the net, I’ve installed an OpenX ad server to support the campaign. I guess that I didn’t realize what the little campaign would do!

Current statistics show that the banner had been deployed to over 300 different websites across the world, had been viewed over 60,000 times and had been clicked on for about 800 times. Not a bad CTR ratio for a little community oriented campaign.

If you are an Asterisk user, and you are fed up with the way Fonality/TrixBox had been conducting their business over the past 3 years, it’s time to show your support and put this banner on your website. If you have a blog, a company website, an Asterisk oriented business, show your support to FreePBX and other Open Source Asterisk oriented projects and website by showing the world that the community has power.

I am all for competition, as a healthy competition always keeps us on our toes and makes sure we always progress and improve – but Fonality/TrixBox’s actions must be denounced and rejected.

Tags: Asterisk, digium, Elastix, Fonality, FreePBX, GPL, open source, OpenVOX, sangoma, TrixBox, VoIP

15 Jun 08 SAY NO TO TRIXBOX !!!

A recent post on the FreePBX forum suggests that Fonality and Kerry Garrison are utilizing various unlawful techniques to discourage people from using FreePBX/Elastix/PBX-in-a-flash while promoting the TrixBox brand. These actions are currently under investigation by the FreePBX website maintainers, but they had published their initial findings of these actions.

While the possibility of NAT/PAT firewall from Fonality network is possible, it is clear that the tactics used are promoted by Fonality (Maybe by Kerry himself, but this has not been proved yet).

If you believe that the actions by Fonality are of negative origin and targeted at discouraging other Open Source projects, please put the following banner on your website:

The banner code follows below:

<!--/* OpenX Image Tag v2.4.5 */-->

<a href='http://ads.asterisk.org.il/delivery/ck.php?n=a299919b'

target='_blank'><img src='http://ads.asterisk.org.il/delivery/avw.php?
zoneid=7&n=a299919b' border='0' alt='' />

</a>

Tags: Asterisk, Elastix, Fonality, freeswitch, Kerry Garrison, PBX-in-a-flash, TrixBox