From VoIP to Unified Communications and WebRTC
If you are a system integrator or an IT company, these forecasts affect you directly, and, as they say, there is good news and bad news.
The good news is that the forecasts for the sector over all, are comforting. Gartner predicts an overall growth in the technology sector.
The bad news, is that this growth could affect only a small part of IT professionals and companies.
In this blog article I will provide some best practices for deployment planning that our UC platform will need, to work as expected.
When a new UC system is installed, users will need to spend a considerable amount of time and resources learning how it works. It is crucial to reduce the impact of adopting any new technologies by avoiding user problems.
The most common issues I have witnessed are “regressions” in how the system works, particularly when compared to the previous system. Some examples include:
How frustrating is it when you hear your wonderful ad on the radio and you intensely watch your phone on your desk waiting for it to ring… but the phone never rings…
How funny is it to read the many odd requests made by people intercepted by those expensive AdWords campaigns…(the laughs are at the beginning and they end as soon as you see the invoice at the end of the month)…
How many times do we go to trade shows and are annoyed because out of the 10 people who come by our stand, 9 out of the 10 only want the freebies and only one (maybe) is on target… Continue reading “Advising the gold digger to go look for gold in a bank!”
What follows is an incomplete list of leading vendors who are using the main protocols described in one of the previous blog articles: SIP and XMPP. This list is based on my personal knowledge. I apologize in advance for any exclusions.
The goal is to provide material for further analysis by the reader.
Cisco was one of the first to embrace the potential of Unified Communication systems and open standards.
Cisco historically selected MGCP and H.323 as VoIP protocols. SIP was later introduced, first on endpoints and then on servers.
Jabber, Inc., is a provider of presence and messaging software. It’s important to note that Cisco has acquired this company not the open standard Jabber (jabber.org). Jabber, by that point, had already been renamed to XMPP.
Continue reading “Overview of Platforms with SIP / XMPP Support”
In this blog article I will describe some essential characteristics that should be taken into consideration to evaluate UC platform.
Some UC solutions are still developed and managed without foreseeing a need for backwards compatibility. So, after a major upgrade of the platform, features might be removed.
A product should strive to protect the investment made by those people using the product, especially to minimize the work needed to maintain the product. After any major or minor upgrade, the old features should remain functional.
This logic must also be extended to hardware components (such as phones). For example, when the UC server platform is upgraded, support for existing hardware should continue.
It is acceptable for any IT solution to put an end-of-life date on a part of the system, but this information must be clearly published.
Whether you want to build a UC platform or choose one, pay particular attention to backward compatibility.
Continue reading “What You Should Know to Evaluate UC Platform”