Unified Comms - Part 1

What a coincidence! The start of UC Expo has conveniently conincided with us finally getting our own Unified Communications platform in full working order. Back in early January we cracked open our Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS for short) CDs and set about trying to build a UC platform to test and possibly integrate into our IP phone system then perhaps using it on our live helpdesk.

After reading (or should that be skimming) through the planning and deployment documentation, we quickly realised that this wasn't going to be done in an afternoon. What we also didn't realise was that spring would be emerging before we would even get it to a point that we could possibly use in a business scenario.

It took a couple of weeks to get the servers (yes, that's plural, OCS requires Front End, Edge and Exchange 2007 to get any of the interesting features working and they cannot co-exist on the one system) built and the various OCS roles deployed to them. The process was repeated at least twice due to a tendency not to read the manual and to plough ahead regardless, but hey that's how we all learn isn't it? Working late into the night over a couple of weeks, the various components were installed, configured, tested and retested. Literally every step presented issues and we quickly chalked up 50 hours and it was still quite literally in bits.


Finally, with persistence and patience the various servers and services clicked together. I am unable to impart any valuable technical information for the use of others and everything we learned was gleaned from those valiant people who had been there before and still had the mental energy to document their findings - Thanks to you all! Our OCS was working in so far as we could connect to it with Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC - see picture inset - think MSN Messenger but tightly integrated with Outlook) and send messages and make calls between users both in and out of the office. MOC was installed on our PCs and Phones and we quickly started to make use of the 'presense' features. All users regsitered on OCS have their location and availability details presented in MOC and Outlook. We could see when one another was in a meeting, on a call, busy with a client or available for chat or call and from where, e.g. Mobile or Office. Cool!

The next phase was to integrate this with our phone system. Internal calls between people in the same room (which we generally all are) is not that useful so we set about hooking it up with our Asterisk VoIP PBX. This was a complete nightmare to say the least. Without getting too geeky and discussing SIP over TCP/TLS instead of UDP (still with me?) lets just say that Microsoft, in their wisdom, decided to implement VoIP on their UC product in a way that wasn't generally compatible with the rest of the world.

In order to get our trusty phone system to even talk to our OCS system, we needed to rebuild it to a new and completely unreleased version. This was done on a test system first, of course, and after MANY, MANY hours taking snippets of info from various sources, a working call was made from our computers running Office Communicator to a phone handset on the public telehpone network. Hurrah!

What followed was hours of testing to make sure calls in various directions were working and call quality was acceptable. Meanwhile, use of the messaging system in OCS was quickly preferred above MSN especially the ability to txt whilst on the move. James, the MD, was very pleased with it whilst walking between appointments in Green Park, London simultaneously firing instructions on his Windows phone to colleagues in the office and on the road.

It was only at an advanced stage in the project and just as we were considering using it for live calls to customers that we realised that we actually hadn't tested voicemail on the system. This opened a completely new can of worms. The Exchange 2007 e-mail and group collaboration server that Russell had loving built, configured and migrated all of our mail system across to as part of this initiative is also what is known as the UM (Unified Messaging)server and would allow cool e-mail/voicemail message integration such voice-to-email translation of messages and the ability to dial in and have emails read out to you. When we wired this part into the OCS system, it simply didn't work. Despite following instructions to the letter, we simply couldn't call up the mailbox attendant or divert calls to voicemail.

This setback cost us another 3 or so weeks and resulted in Russell building a completely separate Exchange 2007 server just for the UM (or voicemail) service. We never did find out why it didn't work nor do we care at this stage. Voicemail is now working sweetly and all of the components are in place and we will test for another few weeks before making the decision to use it in a what geeks call a 'production environment'

OCS is without doubt the most complicated and bloated of Microsoft's products that we have ever come across. To put this together has taken over 100 man hours and requires 6 servers:

1x Front End (Main OCS Server)
1x Edge (Enables external access)
1x Mediation (Enables integration with IP phone system)
2x Exchange 2007 Standard (One for mail, one for messaging)
1x IP PBX (for in and outbound calls to PSTN and non OCS handsets)

Of course, we do not have 6 dedicated servers for this system. They are 'virtual' servers spread across 3 physical computer systems but still this is overkill, especially where we have deployed it for a team of 7 people to 'communicate'.

Certainly, the time we have invested has been worth it to enable us to understand what goes into a UC platform and the potential benefits it can offer our clients. The OCS product promises a lot and the glimpses we have seen of it suggests it could really transform the way people work.

We look forward to putting it to use ourselves in the coming months and we will report back on these pages with an update. Stay tuned...

Femtocell - eliminated our rural blackspot

ITbuilder HQ is great is many ways. It's in a peaceful rural location on a farm that nestles on the banks of the river Lea. Myriad flora and fauna welcome us to work each day and our black barn office with its red-clay pantile roof and exposed beams has character and charm. Parking is never a problem and the only time we queue on the 10 minute commute in (mostly all of us live close by) was when the river burst its banks with melt-water last winter. Add to this the cheap as chips rent and rates and you would think that we have it made, wouldn't you?

Not quite. The one disadvantage of an office in the sticks is communications. We are sat in the bottom of a valley where broadband internet is strung together over several kilometers of interconnected copper so we can only get a 1Mbps connection if the wind is blowing in the right direction. Also, despite being only a couple of miles from Hetford and Welwyn Garden City with a mast literally only a few hundred yards along the road and the enormous Epping Green radio tower half a mile up the hill, we occupy a complete mobile phone blackspot. Probably not ideal when you are an IT company, right?

When we signed the lease for our office, we already had a plan hatched to solve this little problem. Our friends at Skyline Networks are specialists in getting high-speed, business class internet to out the way places. It was a challenge but with theirs skills, some masts and adjustments to their neighbouring anntenae, they beamed in a 2Mb SDSL service to our office over Wireless Broadband (think WiFi on steroids) that, when tied in with a bog-standard 1Mb ADSL service as fallback, was sufficient for our needs. We worked around lack of mobile coverage by simply setting our mobiles to divert to our Voice-over-IP phone system, the numbers for which were registered on our business call plan for free calls so that we wouldn't have to pay for the diverted calls.

This has served us well up until now when the long awaited Femtocell was released. We got wind of the Femtocell back in 2008 when we googled our black-spot plight and discovered that some clever bods in Cambridge had come up with a small GSM/3G device that could provide a mobile signal to handsets and devices and use the Internet as a backhaul link to route the call to the mobile operator's network. Yes, the name sounds like a battery upgrade pack for a LadyShave, but we wanted one badly. So, we got in touch with Vodafone and made inquiries but their customer service agents hadn't a clue what we talking about, thinking us mad for enquiring after female depilatory accessories. Clearly this wasn't going to be on the market anytime soon.

Roll on to October of last year and Vodafone had released their SureSignal device. For £200 you get a box about the size and shape of a home wireless broadband router to which you could connect four handsets with full and clear 3G coverage. At the time, that kind of money seemed a bit steep to fix a problem that we had been comfortably working around for several years. Surely, as a device aimed at the home market, it could not stay at that price point for long. And lo, last week we discovered on Vodafone's site that it was now being offered for £45 ex-VAT. That's much more like it we thought and placed an order.

Our Femtocell, branded the SureSignal by Vodafone, arrived yesterday and we dived onto it. We unboxed it, plugged it into the mains and also to our data network then stared at it a bit. Some lights flashed and we looked at it a bit longer. Then we checked our handsets and funnily they were showing no bars of signal. Hmmmmmm. Then Russ went and fished the manual out of the recycling bin and discovered that you have to go to Vodafone's website and register the device and your handsets. 15 minutes later we made our first, crystal clear call from a mobile phone from within our office walls (it was previously only possible by running outside and down to the lower field).

Whilst we will probably continue to divert our mobiles to our deskphones during business hours, its going to be handy to nip off and take a private call when necessary or receive text messages instantly. Now we can safely say that our place out in the sticks is perfect.

At last - proper Blackberry mobile sync for us small folk

Blackberry has been a dirty word in our office for quite some time now. The mere utterance of it would result in shouts of derision aimed at any person that dared mention it. This blatant hatred of a handheld device, which outside of ITbuilder HQ is incredibly popular and much-loved, is borne out of our disgust for the BIS synchronisation service that has caused us untold hours of frustration.

BIS (Blackberry Internet Server) is RIM's (RIM is the company who produce Blackberry hardware and software) solution for people who want a Blackberry but do not have a large, corporate messaging infrastructure with which to sync their device. It's the little brother to BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), the service that large companies with equally large IT budgets and large teams to spend them, deploy to keep their company email systems in perfect sync with their Blackberry handsets out in the field. The BIS service on the other hand is bundled free with any Blackberry that is taken on a personal or small business contract. It enables the Blackberry owner to sync their e-mail by way of a server and web portal operated by the mobile network (Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile all provide this) into which the e-mail settings are entered and .. ta da .. your messages are delivered to your handset as well as your inbox.

 "So, why are you getting all worked up about that?" I hear you ask. Well, the problem is that the BIS service is complete and utter rubbish. For the past few years, our valued clients have been nipping into the high-street stores of the mobile networks and picking themselves up a Blackberry. We then get the dreaded call  "I have just bought/been given a Blackberry, can you please set it up for me?" Now, setting it up isn't too much trouble. It's the series of support calls that follow when the inherent problems in the BIS service start to appear that ruffles our feathers. The BIS service has a number of peculiarities which include simply disabling the mail sync if it cannot access the user's mail server for ashort period of time, which is great when you have to do maintenance on an client's mail server and then have to re-enable all of the Blackberry accounts associated with it. Another one we quite like is if you choose to use the option in the BIS service to use Outlook Web Access (Microsoft's webmail included in Exchange server) to access messages for delivery to your device, the service disables every 4-6 weeks 'automatically' and requires that your mailbox password is re-entered in the portal. Another problem most users will encounter if using POP3 is the one where messages that are unread are marked as read when the BIS service has accessed them. If you aren't happy with this, you can of course set BIS to use IMAP to access your mailbox but this then creates duplicate messages to your handheld because new message IDs are generated when a message is accessed by BIS.

Thanks to the many flaws of BIS and the increasing popularity of Blackberry devices (owed, we think, to that annoying 'Sent from Blackberry Handheld' tag it puts on all messages) we have spent way too many support hours troubleshooting them.
Combined with the ease at which a Window Mobile or iPhone handset syncs directly with company systems with the need for no additional servers, software, services or fees this all goes to explain the utter contempt which has been boiling at ITbuilder Towers... until now.

Just before Christmas last year, we were alerted to the introduction into the UK market of a product called Notifysync. It promised to provide equivalent Blackberry sync services to BES, but without the exhorbitant sofware licenses fees, the requirement for an additional server to run it on and the need to almost double your monthly mobile tariff; in fact all of things that make BES unthinkable for your average small business owner. Yes, Blackberry released their Professional Edition sync product last year which doesn't need a dedicated server and was a bit cheaper than BES but still needed a mobile contract upgrade and is a complete b**ger to install (repeated calls to mobile providers to delete and resend service books). No, Notifysync installs onto the handset itself and uses the free, built-in Exchange Mobilesync that the large of majority of business already own and which we know works because of our love of Windows Mobile handsets. It also works on the basic data tariff bundled with any Blackberry handset to allow web surfing.

We received the news of Notifysync with equal measure of joy and trepidation. It sounded like the answer to our prayers but our past experience of 3rd party mobile sync tools has been poor. We downloaded the trial edition with high hopes but low expectations. The task was assigned to Dylan, our junior team member, who was selected simply by virtue of the fact that he uses a Blackberry handheld (more out of necessity than choice) it being the only handset lying around when his preferred Nokia packed in.

Dylan installed the application onto his Blackberry, did a little bit of configuration and he was away! Not only was his Exchange Inbox in full, real-time sync with his handheld but so were his Contacts and Calendar. This is something that the BIS service could never do. We asked Dylan to see if he could break it or find some fault, but it just worked seamlessly and ultimately received the highest accolade any piece of trial software can receive, a sigh of disappointment when the trial eventually ended.

Notifysync has received a 5 star rating from team ITbuilder and we will be singing its praises from the rooftops. Are the dark days of supporting BIS finally behind us?

Smartphone Museum Officially Open

When we recently refurbished our meeting room we wanted some artwork to put on the walls to cosy it up a bit. Nothing at Ikea or the usual home furnishing retailers looked the part so we decided to create some of our own. During the refurb, we had the customary clearout of boxes of accumulated IT hardware that we have squirrelled away over the years in the hope that it will come in useful one day. Amongst this hardware was a rather fine collection of old smartphone handsets dating back to about 2001 and to what is the considered the original Smartphone, O2 XDA.

Since James changes his handset annually (sometimes bi-annually if a particularly exciting model is released) we had such an impressive collection of devices that we thought they needed to be exhibited in way that befitted our love of these gadgets. Yes, we could have traded them in at one of the companies that bore us to death with their tedious adverts promising to shower us with cash in return for old mobiles. But a mobile phone, particularly a smartphone is personal thing and we grow very attached to them (until the latest one come along of course :).

So this is why we created our first exhibit in our own homage to the smartphone. A wall-mounted, glass case to display our beloved smartphones of yore to guests and visitors as well as to cast an admiring glance ourselves from time to time. Please see below for a photo of the finished product.

Are we sad, pathetic individuals that are placing too much significance onto a PCB encased in a plastic shell? We think not. We think that we are preserving the memory of technological innovations that have transformed not only our lives but those of many millions who could suddenly tap out a quick email on the train or be able to receive an urgent document when they were spending valuable time with the kids rather than sat at a desk. Long live the smart phone and we look forward to building exhibit 2 in 10 years time (although we expect to require a much smaller case).

Clockwise from left: O2 XDA (HTC Wallaby), O2 XDAII (HTC Himalaya), VPA Compact (HTC Magician), QTEK 9100 (HTC Wizard 200),VDA V (HTC Vox), v1510 (Asus Solaris), v1605 (HTC TyTN), v1615 (HTC Kaiser)

Source: http://pdadb.net

ITbuilder in the blogosphere!

It's taken a while, but the ITbuilder team has finally entered the blogoshpere. This blog is a place that will enable us to post thought, comment, ideas, news and other scraps onto the Internet for the consumption of our customers, friends and the wider web-world.

Blogs are now the way forward..or is it Twitter? Or has some other online media platform usurped them both. Who knows? It moves so fast these days and we are so busy with our heads down trying to keep our tiny bit of the Internet working that even we sometimes fall behind with what people are using it for.

Until the next post...