I have written several articles on Zultys phone systems and the accompanying hardware. If you are expecting to use the MXIE (the client/headsup/softphone application) then don’t expect the same functionality across platforms.

Windows users get the highest feature-set. OS X and Linux users, yes you are still behind on features.

One of the biggest features that you’ll miss is the softphone! Of-course you can use any third party soft-phone and bind MXIE to it, but that does not give you the seamless experience that Windows users enjoy.

Hopefully, we’ll see some sort of soft-phone capability built into MXIE soon.

I’ve written here about the venerable Zultys MX250 before. MX30, it’s younger cousin is much smaller in size but offers most of the benefits of the MX250.

The MX30 is much smaller and lighter compared to the MX250. It can be easily mounted on a wall (mounting holes are already in place), it comes with a 4 port FXO card and the best part is it doesn’t have a hard drive but uses a SD card instead.

It still has two ports, one for LAN and one for WAN. You use the same MX Admin UI to administrator the MX30 and the software is almost identical to the MX250.

In my opinion, a very powerful box in a small package at a better price point. No moving parts make it a no brainer for a small office where you don’t always have the best place to install the unit.

If your deployment calls for a cluster, then MX30 is not an options. This is one of the licensing restrictions, but usually at a small business clustering is not required.

Voice communication will truly be unified when we can check the status of the other party from any application on our desktops. You can currently do this, to some extent from certain applications. For example, if you have deployed Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server  you can check the status quickly and easily of the person who created the document you are working on. You can even send the person an instant message or if you have Microsoft Office Communications Server, have a voice chat.

There is a wide variety of vendors offering different parts of the puzzle. If only a standard can be set for applications to exchange “status’ information, that would certainly make things a lot easier.

Zultys provides presence via their MXIE client but this information is only available in the client and not in other applications. Office Communications Server offers presence information in a host of Microsoft applications, but still falls short when it comes to other third party apps or even certain Microsoft applications.

Microsoft is one of those entities that can really be the force that guides the standard since it controls most of the enterprise desktop stack. One tenet of Microsoft’s UC strategy is, “A user should be able to move between IM, conferencing, desktop phones, email and mobile devices using familiar interfaces that share common functionality.” This means you should have a single identity that flows across all types of media.

Microsoft is working towards unifying the UC market. With products like Microsoft Live Meeting, Office Communicator, Microsoft Exchange and Office Communications Server Microsoft intends to unify voice communications and take it a step further to commoditize it.

The time is here to consolidate identities into your corporate directories like Active Directory. This will be the basis of unification so you can be well prepared to deploy the UC platform of choice and easily provide authentication and brokering information to seamlessly connect with your clients, suppliers and partners.

If you have outgrown your traditional phone system or even your IP phones system that cannot scale out or up, you could look at one of the system that support clustering.

Check out the systems from Zultys. The MX250 series can be clustered for redundancy or for additional load. Keep in mind the system has plenty of redundancy built into each unit.

Now even small business can afford a phone system that can be clustered and doesn’t break the bank, crucial in these times!

Happy New Year!!

It is no secret that we are falling into, if not already in a recession..what does that mean for the VoIP industry?

While we all should believe that a recession is universally distressful, there are good reasons to believe that the VoIP industry may not be hurt as much. VoIP’s big draw is, and always has been, that it is cheaper and easier to manage than traditional telephony. So as more businesses look to cut costs, it is simple math that many will decide to make the switch to VoIP. In fact, a recession could turn out to be VoIP’s golden moment, as more enterprises dump costly, aging telephone systems in order to take advantage of VoIP’s cost-saving potential and technological flexibility.

Rising travel costs could also work in VoIP’s favor, as more businesses order their managers to cancel expensive trips to customer sites and industry events. VoIP’s ability to provide cheap, easy and high-quality communication services, including video conferencing, makes it an attractive choice for businesses looking to cut travel costs.

Despite this silver lining, a prolonged U.S. recession would likely be painful to many. The VoIP industry as a whole, however, should suffer no permanent damage. While sales may drop over the short term, VoIP is now a firmly established industry, one that should be able to resume its growth as soon as the economy begins to recover. So will investing in VoIP recession proof your business? Probably not, but it sure will help stretch for the long haul.

Let’s all hope for a great 2009!

Have you ever run into an issue with over head paging and your IP based phone system?  Normally this is not an issue, if all else fails, you can always get an analog adapter and hook it up to your IP based phone system as another extension. The problem is when you have a hosted/hybrid type phone system like the PBXtra from Fonality.This is a problem because first Fonality will not want you to install a paging system, second they will charge you extra for a customer provided device requisition.Once you get over the first hurdle, the second option is real easy. We have successfully setup IP based paging systems from companies like Bogen. They offer a variety of systems even horns with built-in amplifiers. The most cost effective solution is to get one driver and multiple horns to cover the entire area and remember you can even have paging in remote offices/warehouses since you have an IP based phone system. 

You’ve made an investment in IP (internet protocol) voice infrastructure that uses you data network. You are already enjoying lower maintenance costs, quick add/removal of voice nodes and lower infrastructure costs, it’s now time to start thinking outside the box.Since the same infrastructure now carries voice that used to carry data only, you can start thinking of how you can deploy voice devices in areas that were cost prohibitive to reach in the past. You can use WiFi or optical bridges to spread your reach, you can use the same infrastructure not only for voice but also for data and security.So once you have a location “lit” up with IP connectivity, you can use the same pipe for data, voice and devices like cameras for security and sensors for temperature/humidity, etc. The possibilities are endless; deploy paging speakers and horns that connect via WiFi, deploy IP cams or remote door locks for security or employee clock-in devices and enjoy the benefits and simplicity of putting other services over IP. It’s not just for data and voice anymore!

I’ve talked about several benefits of IP based phone systems, some well-known some not so.One important benefit that multi location companies get from rolling out an IP phone system is the location connectivity over IP feature.We internally use this feature and so do most of our clients with multiple locations. The beauty of this feature is the ease of connecting your branch offices for voice communications so users can seamlessly connect with users at other branches.If you already have a data network in place for branch office connectivity, then you can use the same connection for voice. You can even configure your phone system to make the call go over the IP connection to the branch and then dial out from the local branch, making your calls to the cities with branch offices, essentially free. Combine this feature with presence, awareness and other features, and you can see how powerful such seamless connectivity option can be for user productivity and customer satisfaction. 

Many enterprises have already deployed OCS 2007. I’ve tested it and it’s a great product, I like the proprietary codec that offers excellent voice quality, the ease of voice/video conferencing and one platform that delivers IM, audio and video.The only thing that was missing from OCS 2007 that was stopping us from deploying it internally was the requirement of a VoIP gateway to connect to the phone company. This is no longer an issue! OCS 2007 R2 supports SIP trunks along with a host of other features:

• Dial-in audio conferencing
• Desktop sharing
• Persistent group chat
• Attendant console and delegation
• Response group
• Mobility and single number reach

OCS 2007 R2, like most Microsoft products, offers ease of access from any device, any where. Clients can be connected via hard phones, software clients on PCs, software clients on handhelds, there is even a web based client software to use without installation.So what is holding back most of the other enterprises that have not deployed OCS? I think it’s the heavy resource requirements that OCS has. Microsoft documentation says a dual core CPU is recommended, this says a lot. In addition to the hardware, OCS requires several other software modules to be in place like IIS, .Net framework, in some cases SQL. 

Since hurricane Ike, the home town of our parent company, Houston, TX suffered major power outages. Glad that no one was hurt, the next big thing to overcome was to find fuel to keep the generators going for weeks on end. This proved to be the tougher than we anticipated as gas stations quickly ran out of fuel and there were long lines of cars waiting to fuel up (I believe tankers full of fuel were stopped outside of town.)

Through this ordeal, we did learn some intricate details about disaster recovery.

Most companies that had services through companies like Cbeyond (who tie SIP trunks to their internet lines) were affected to some extent. The beauty of the Cbeyond circuits was that companies could login to their web control panels and forward their critical numbers to alternate phone lines that were operational. So in total disaster, you can keep working, although in a crippled mode.

This is great, but got me thinking. SIP trunks through a SIP trunk provider (that didn’t care about connectivity) would prove more beneficial as users could simply take their phone systems anywhere that had high speed internet connectivity and get back to normal business within hours if not minutes. This would have meant, no change in process and your phones ring like normal, critical for companies that take orders via phone.

Maybe Cbeyond will open up at some point and allow users to connect to their SIP trunks no matter how the user is getting to the internet, that will be an excellent capability to have during a disaster.