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

09 Mar 09 Being a successful Asterisk Consultant

A while back, John Todd from Digium, had posted an entry on the Digium blog web site, regarding how to be a successfull Asterisk consultant. While I completely agree with John’s views on the matter, from obtaining a dCAP certificate to the involvement with the community – there are a few points missing from that post, at least in my view. I will try to add some additional information here, in the hopes that it may help you build your business.

Point 1 – Stay Focused

Most of us Asterisk consultants come from diversified areas of expertise. Most of us are plain old IP sysadmins or network managers who got thrown into the Asterisk world due to a requirement – got hooked on it and simply continued onwards. Some of us are developers, some web oriented, some core oriented, but developers yet. The diversity of most Asterisk consultants skill set can easily side track them.

When I say side track, I don’t meant that they don’t know what they are doing, I mean – it’s easy to try and swallow more than they can chew at one time. For example, example a sysadmin turning into an Asterisk consultant, after installing over 200 Asterisk systems. Now, a customer comes to him and says: “Well, I’m gonna give you the work, but I want you to also take over the various IT management aspects of the system.” – If at this point you will say: “YES” you are more of less dooming your business. You are an Asterisk consultant, no matter how a talented IT sysadmin you are, going about and taking both roles on your self would render you in a situation where you, at some point, will be in a situation where you are handling an extreme IT condition at that customer, rendering completely incapable of rendering services to your other customers. Remember, stay focused on what you do, you won’t run into a situation where you will be forced to hurt a customer.

Point 2 – Earning more is sometimes loosing money

This point relates directly to the previous one. Let us imagine that I’m an Asterisk developer with a background of Web development. When confronted with a project that may include both Asterisk and Web Development – the most logical answer would be “YES” – however, web developers tend to forget that they are working autonomously. Most web developers are backed up by teams of graphic artists, database developers, database managers and IT managers. Thus, a web application is much more than the web logic involved with it. Are you an all encompassing developer, capable of cater to all aspects of a web development project and an Asterisk project? if you have your own in house DBA and other resources, you should be fine, however, if you don’t – at some point in the project – you will be forced to outsource the work to a 3rd party – thus, lowering your net income on the project. So, by taking such a project you believe you will be earning more money, while in fact, at the end of the project you may end up in debt to 3rd party sub-contractors you hired.

Point 3 – Be true with yourself

Always be true and honest with yourself and always ask yourself: “is this really a deal that will advance me? or may it actually set me back?” – failing to answer these two questions for every project you are about to take on will end up with some disappointment. Remember, you can fool all people some of the time, you can fool a few people all the time – can you can’t fool yourself! You are your own worse judge, jury and executioner. If you end up doing a project that doesn’t feel right for you, or something with the various aspects of the project troubles your no a moral ground, at some point in time, it will creep up on you and bite you back in the ass.

Point 4 – Use it, don’t abuse it

We all deal with various aspects of the Asterisk project, an Open Source project at its core. It’s very easy to become side tracked by large sums of money, in order to either violate a GPL code or doing something which is completely negated to the Open Source spirit or the Asterisk community. Sure, you will abuse Asterisk and/or other Open Source Asterisk related projects, however, at some point, it will be discovered and your name will be smudged. For example, if you integrate ViciDial to a customer, tell them it’s ViciDial and don’t change its logo to something else. Same applies to FreePBX, A2Billing or other Asterisk related packages – at some point your customer will find out you integrated Open Source – and you will be branded a cheat.

For example, 2 weeks ago I was at a call center, where one of Israel’s leading Asterisk integrator had built a dialer platform for the call center. The call center manager told me that they paid a sum of about 120,000 Israeli Shekels (approx 30,000$) for that dialer. I was really interested to see the product, while the only thing I saw was a “logo” modified “ViciDial” with a couple of hooks into FreePBX (that also had its logo changed to the company logo). The customer was sure he was getting a personalised job, while actually, the entire amount of work done can be amounted to about 12-16 hours of work. Ok, so the hardware costs about 8000USD – still, 22,000$ for installing and modifying two pages on ViciDial – you can’t say that is right – is it?

Conclusion

Always be true to yourself, to your customers and to the community – you’ll never loose.

Tags: Asterisk, Consultant, digium, FreePBX, John Todd, vicidial

19 Feb 09 Copyright Enforcement in Israel – you gott’a be kidding me…

A few weeks ago I had posted one of my usuall “Open Source License” rants, where I explained and ranted about the state of Open Source license enforcement in Israel. A recent study by the IIPA (International Intelectual Property Alliance) had positioned Israel as the number 1 copyright piracy country in the world!

When you think abuot it, it’s a little strange, as Israel is fairly small. However,  in relation to the number of Internet connected users in Israel, the number of downloads of pirated software or other copyrighted material in Israel is of the highest percentage in the world. Sure, we all download a movie or episode here and there, but, some people in Israel go about and completely utilize pirated material only. Sure, I like watching my weekly episode of Fringe, but what can I do that no network in Israel is broadcasting it. So, I download the episodes via Bittorrent and watch them as they are published. However, on the other hand, I do purchase Microsoft licenses for my PC’s (yes, I have a Windows XP and a Windows Vista box - running Windows and Office), I did purchase a Mandriva PowerPack package for my Linux destktop and notebook and yes, I did purchase my books about DOJO, PHP and AJAX – so, I can honestly say that my utilization of pirated material is that for things I can’t obtain in Israel at all.

One would argue that it is still piracy, well, there is a certain point in that – however, if there is no one to pirate from where you are located, how can you pirate something? according to the dictionary, the noun priate means:

1. One who robs at sea or plunders the land from the sea without commission from a sovereign nation.
2. A ship used for this purpose.
3. One who preys on others; a plunderer.
4. One who makes use of or reproduces the work of another without authorization.
5. One that operates an unlicensed, illegal television or radio station.

Tags: Asterisk, ASTERISK BUSINESS EDITION, BITTORRENT, COPYRIGHT, digium, Elastix, FILE SHARE, FreePBX, FRINGE, Movies, P2P, RECORDING SYSTEM, TrixBox, TV SHOW

25 Jan 09 Raichu Asterisk Anyone? – PIKA WARP REVISITED

When I last reviewed the PIKA WARP Asterisk appliance, I  named the post “Pokemon Asterisk” – today I’ve decided to review the PIKA WARP Asterisk appliance again, only this time, with the newly released Asterisk GUI 2.0 release – our cuddly Pikachu is now a Raichu (relax, it took me about 30 minutes to find out what a Picachu evolves into).

The new PIKA appliance now boasts the new star fangled Digium Asterisk GUI 2.0, which takes the old Asterisk GUI (which was OK, but still had some miles to go) and more or less throws it into the waste bin. The new GUI is far more useful, far more usable and most importantly – makes life way easier for the integrator. While the previous version of the PIKA Warp appliance was targeted for developers, the new version of the WARP is aimed directly into the heart of the integration scene.

Asterisk GUI 2.0 on PIKA WARP

Now, I have to admit that after upgrading the system to the new PIKA WARP cuImage I had some issues logging into the system. So, what I did is more or less hack myself in via ’single user mode’. Here’s a small guide on how to do that. Before we being, you will require a serial cable connection to the WARP appliance in order to do this, which means, this is more or less a hardcore procedure.

The PIKA WARP Serial Connector Port

When the system boots up, and you are confronted with a message saying “Hit any key to stop autoboot:” simply hit any key on your keyboard, and you’ll be fronted with the “=>” prompt, indicating that the boot loader is now waiting for information. Now, we need to tell the PIKA WARP appliance to boot into single user mode.

To do so, we need to modify the ‘ramargs’ environment variable of UBOOT, to indicate that we want to start single user mode. Enter the following command:

setenv ramargs setenv bootargs root=/dev/ram rw ramdisk_size=130000 single

This will indicate to the UBOOT loader to initiate a single user mode bootup. Once in single user mode, you can use the ‘passwd’ command to change the root password of the PIKA WARP appliance. This procedure can be used by an other PIKA WARP based appliance.

Once of the nice additions in the new Asterisk GUI 2.0 is the support for Class of Service, which doesn’t really exist in FreePBX. In many offices, managers like to restrict various extensions from accessing different parts of the telephony system – that is performed utilizing the Class of Service screen.

Class of Service management

The “Class of Service” management enables you to create groups with access to specific trunks or PBX functions, thus, enabling you to seperate users and groups of users from specific PBX resources. For example, some users can be completely restricted from using outbound trunks, while others can be restricted to using a single FXO interface out of 4 connected FXO interfaces. In general, this is one of the best features in the GUI yet in my opinion.

I’m currently reviewing the new version, so once I have new information I’ll post my findings.

Tags: Appliance, Asterisk, Asterisk GUI, digium, embedded, FreePBX, PIKA, ucKernel, ucLinux, WARP

08 Jan 09 Open Source has bad reputation in Israel! – Part II

As if my previous post was’t enough, this week the ever annoying bad rep of Open Source in Israel showed its face yet again. This time, I’m talking about a recent talkback on the thecom.co.il online magazine website. The talkback was related to an article relating to various telecom tenders currently in progress in Israel. As part of the article, the authod mentioned the existance of a new Call Center solution for Asterisk from EasyRun – one of the world’s better known call/contact center solution providers – being in the market for over 15 years now.

Here is a screen shot of the post:

http://www.thecom.co.il/article.php?id=6178

For those not speaking Hebrew, I’ll translate. Talkback number 1 is from Alexander Argov, CEO of Tikal Networks informing the public that Tikal Networks also has a call center solution based on Asterisk, with a link to the demo. In itself, there’s nothing wrong there in my book – however, it would appear that others don’t agree. Number 3 says: “Well, if you are a part of this party, why do you need to advetise in a talkback?”, only to be followed by: “Well, Tikal is a Me-Too as always – nothing new there”. Well, comments will be comments and talkbacks will be talkbacks. However, numbers 6 and 7 are something else. Number 6 excuses Mr. Argov and his Sales VP (a Mr. Harari) as providing poor service and a poor product, warning people not to purchase Tikal based prodcuts. Now, number 7 goes the distance saying: “Selling a product that costs a single shekel for tens of thousends of shekels and giving poor service is something any 7th grade student can do. Don’t touch the solution provided nor any Tikal product”. Number 7 is currently simply stating: “Don’t touch Asterisk, the service is not good”. Number 7 seems to be incapable of distinguishing between the Tikal product line and Asterisk, and for him, they are one and the same. The end result is a bad rep for Asterisk, while the bad rep is actually intended to the solution provider in this case.

It would appear that in Israel, people mix up FreePBX, Asterisk and the solution provider as one and the same. The solution provider goes about saying: “I’m selling an Asterisk product, I’m state of the art!”, using the Asterisk name to leverage the sale. The customer belives that what he’s buying is actually Asterisk, while the only thing he’s actually buying is the integration service and support service. As long as people in Israel don’t realize that Open Source solutions mean: Free Software (Free as in Beer), Paid Support and Professional Services – the situation will remain the same for ever.

Tags: Asterisk, Crystal Clear, FreePBX, Service, Support, Tikal Networks