When you want to IP enable your current phone system, there are not many options. Replacing the entire system maybe cost prohibitive and your phone system may be old enough to where you cannot add IP adapters to it.

This is when Microsoft’s Unified Communications strategy might be able to aid in rescue. Instead of having to rip and replace your existing phone system, would you not use software to simply IP enable your voice infrastructure? Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 is designed with that in mind.

You can integrate your current phone system, with whatever type of Telco connectivity it has to OCS. You can then have your users connect to OCS and unlike regular VOiP systems, you get enhanced IM functionality with presence information embedding in office products (Outlook, Excel, Word), you get VOiP connectivity from handhelds, you get video conferencing capability and Microsoft has tweaked the audio codecs so they perform really well in low bandwidth situations.

To read up more about Microsoft’s Unified Communications strategy, you may want to visit http://www.microsoft.com/uc if you are interested in finding out more about OCS 2007, you can visit http://www.microsoft.com/ocs or reply to this article with questions.

Office Communications Server 2007 or OCS 2007 is a venerable platform for providing communications connectivity, be it voice or video, keep in mind Exchange takes care of mailbox side of things for both voice, email and fax.

Currently, there are a limited number of devices available for direct connection to OCS, there’s even less number of gateways. So can OCS replace your phone system? Well it’s really not designed to do that, but with a gateway, it can and if you are already using softphones with your current phone system, you may be pleasantly surprised at the quality of the codec OCS uses, even on low bandwidth connections.

The beauty of OCS is the ability to embed presence information in items like documents, emails and spreadsheets. Imagine, you receiving a Spreadsheet of a colleague and immediately you can see in the Spreadsheet that your colleague is available via IM or voice, you can quickly and easily connect with the colleague and update the Spreadsheet. This resolves the issue of phone tag and allows for quick resolution and connectivity. Now, imagine you sent the Spreadsheet to a client and the client now has the same capability. I can see customer satisfaction soaring and everyone being able to get more done. Only catch is, the client will have to have OCS deployed on their side as well.

For an enterprise, an OCS deployment can entail 2, 3 or even more servers and gateways. For small deployments, all roles for OCS can be deployed on the same hardware and you can integrate it with systems like 3CX to provide the gateway capabilities. There is currently no documentation from 3CX about how to accomplish this, but if you understand the workings of OCS, you can integrate it and make it work. One company that is using OCS 2007 is Gibson Guitar.

Gibson uses Polycom CX700 IP phones, providing users with access to Exchange and Active Directory contact lists right from the phone! Very nice.

This is very easy in 3CX client, you simply uncheck the option under DTMF under connections. for Xlite client, it is hidden away in the advance menu. First you need to access the advanced menu, you can do this by dialing ***7469. Now filter for 2833, the first option should be rtp:2833:enabled, change the value to 0 (default is 1). Also while in advanced menu, filter for DTMF and make sure system:dtmf:force_send_in_band is set to the default of 1.

This will set Xlite to use INBand DTMF and your touch tones should now work.

Then we have SMB class of VoIP phone system that run day in and day out on Microsoft Windows platform. In a sense, these systems are actually more demanding on the base OS as instead of breaking up different aspects of a VoIP system into different hardware platforms, everything is run on an off-the-shelf PC.

The proliferation of Windows based VoIP systems shows that Windows can be used for mission critical systems, it may require reboots after updates but at least it’s consistent and comes with support from the developer.

Don’t get me wrong, the Asterisk on top of Linux is a venerable setup but setup and device compatibility can be a chore.

Technology is something that we focus on here at Voipwonders.com but most small to medium businesses don’t really care about technology. These companies may already have someone in-house for the IT infrastructure support and they normally turn to a traditional phone company for VoIP implementation, this does not work very well.  Traditional phone companies normally push a single vendor to their clients. There may be a company that traditionally used to sell Samsung systems, well if approached about VoIP they would still push a Samsung system with some add-on cards to use the data network.

To have a successful implementation and take advantage of all the benefits of VoIP, you need to look beyond the traditional phone system suppliers. You need to look at hybrid service providers, specifically someone that started out in the IT infrastructure side of things and then moved into VoIP. Such companies can make sure the IT infrastructure, required to support your VoIP deployment is already in place and will be able to handle the traffic loads.

You need to look for someone who can source a variety of systems to avoid vendor lock-in, some of the major pure VoIP systems come from 3CX, Fonality and Cisco. Companies such as PC.Solutions.Net (PCSN, http://www.pcsn.net/) can provide analysis and implementation services on a variety of VoIP platforms without the worry about trying to push a specific system on you. Such a company will need to be contacted at the assessment phase to determine the correct system for now and for future, you’ll need to share your company’s growth plan, rate of growth and then sit back and enjoy your phone system that just works all day every day and grows along with your business to support all your users at every branch, even remote users.

First of all, it was the simplest easiest SIP Conversion I’ve ever done. We were done in about an hour from start to finish. Keep in mind my 3CX system was already running, extensions were already setup, the only thing I didn’t have was a connection to the PSTN.

In 3CX you should see Cbeyond as a VOIP provider, if you don’t see this option, then first thing you should do is upgrade your 3CX to the latest version. Once you do that, you can use the wizard to add Cbeyond VOIP.

You’ll notice that the wizard auto fills in the SIP proxy addresses, these may be different for your area. Since this option is dimmed out, you need to leave the default addresses, click Next, then click Back, now you’ll notice they are not dimmed anymore! You can now enter the addresses you got from Cbeyond.

Follow the wizard providing your primary phone number as the authentication ID and username along with your Cbeyond provided password. Once configured, go back into the SIP settings for the connection you just created and make sure you have g.711 Ulaw codec selected.

At this point you should be able to register with Cbeyond. Once registered, if you are not able to make outbound calls but your call rules are setup correctly, go into VOIP provder settings and go into Gateway/Provider Outbound Parameters. Now change the “from: user part” to “LineNumber” external number of line. You should now be good to make outbound calls. Reasoning for this is, by default 3CX sends you extension to Cbeyond as the number trying to make the call, and as Cbeyond does not know or care about your local extensions, it denies access. Changing it to the external number lets the call go through.

I will be testing the system over the next few days and will report back. On a side note, sound quality is impeccable over SIPConnect.

The capability required to do this is the ability for users to seamlessly switch from landline at the office and move out of the office while staying on the call. This would mean then, that the handheld or cell phone becomes the primary business phone as well. This is not your regular UC, this is mobile UC!

This setup obviously requires some infrastructure, WiFi coverage inside the office and the systems to handle handover from WiFi to cellular without user intervention.

All this technology is here today and just waiting for companies to make their users more productive.

You want to sign up with a company that is easy to work with and where every once in a while you can get hold of a human being if you need support.

Voipreview has a review along with customer ratings here: http://www.voipreview.org/service.all2.aspx?serviceType=1

The list is not in any specific order, so don’t go by the order of a company in the list but look at the stars representing how users reviewed each provider.

Top customer rated companies are as follows:

Phone Power 5 star rating
ITP 5 star rating
VOIP Your Life 5 star rating
Mylowphone 5 star rating
Tincantalk 5 star rating
Sunrise 5 star rating
HyperDogDigital 5 star rating
UnifiedDirect 5 star rating

In the enterprise, however, where the data network may also be carrying voice and video traffic, sooner or later you will have to prioritize traffic and at some point you’ll run into the issue of either throttling or totally blocking P2P, especially file sharing applications that end users may be using without management approval or even without knowing they are running such applications.

There are several applications that allow P2P sharing, Limewire, BitTorrent, Azureus, Kazaa and eDonkey are a few that come to mind, I have my own favorite but that’s an article for another day.

The problem with P2P applications is that they are designed to worm their way through firewalls. Unlike IM software that can use port 80 (which is required for web browsing), P2P applications will usually use a specific port other than the ones normally used for DNS or web browsing.

The trick to blocking such applications is to first identify which applications may be running on your network, then putting filters into place to block the specific ports the applications use. There are some P2P software that will use port 80 for transfers. Blobster and Piolet use port 80 for transfer, the way to block them on your network is to block the initial connection they try to download the peer list from. For Blobster and Piolet the IP you want to block is 128.121.0.0 with subnet mask of 255.255.0.0, block all port 80 traffic to this segment and you’ll render Blobster and Piolet useless.

eDonkey is pretty easy to rein in, simply block TCP port 4662 at the firewall and you’re done. Simple enough right?

Now let’s talk about trickier applications, the ones that use the FastTrack network like Kazaa, Grokster and iMesh. FastTrack is the most popular P2P network around and uses any open TCP/UDP ports to search and download files. This behavior makes it impossible to block them by IP or by blocking specific ports. To block this type of traffic you need a Network Based Application Recognition mechanism, like the one that can be implemented on Cisco for their IOS software. Here is a sample code that will block such traffic for IOS software release 12.2(13) T:

class-map match-any p2p

   match protocol fasttrack file-transfer *

policy-map block-p2p

   class p2p

      drop

int FastEthernet0

   description PIX-facing interface

   service-policy input block-p2p

Gnutella network is another network that requires NBAR for filtering. You can block Gnutella traffic by adding the Gnutella-matching line under the same class-map, the rest of the code will be same as blocking FastTrack traffic:

class-map match-any p2p

   match protocol gnutella file-transfer *

So if you are thinking you can get a UC500 for your phone system and use the wireless access point separately at another location, forget it, it’s all bundled together in one unit!