Today's post serves as a sampling of several topics and I hope your summer escape nets you the desired relief from whatever ails you.
* ADTRAN Bluesocket NV160 Wi-Fi--After returning from a brief visit to the beach, Wi-Fi was on my mind. The new NV160 802.11n access points are due to be available sometime in August. I was lucky to earn a spot in Beta for one of our customers in health care and we deployed at all sites. The 5 minutes of fame came when all the nurses were standing around the nurse station at the end of the day with their Androids, iPhones and other gizmos and wanted to know what I was doing. "Just testing Wi-Fi," and that moment was kind of cool, watching their faces light up and smile and then ask, "How do we get Wi-Fi?" I admit I momentarily felt like the DirecTV guy portrayed in commercials. Later in the equipment room I noted the number of clients connected in the Wi-Fi DHCP pool--word had spread pretty quickly.
Whatever growth factor you consider before deploying Wi-Fi, seriously consider BYOD, because employees do bring in numerous devices. I emailed an engineer at ADTRAN that, "The NV160s ROCK! My iPhone is now acting like an iPhone; it has zip." As for the overall installation process, I'll report back once we finish our rounds of meeting with users.
* CounterPath Bria 3--After signing up with a trial account using Sonetel's hosted PBX back in May, I purchased a copy of Bria 3 for my Mac desktop. I experienced the same issues that I reported on with Lync. The Plantronics headset Voyager PRO UC V2 would not properly integrate and I could not use the Mac desktop hands-free.
I used the forums at both CounterPath and Sonetel and could not isolate the cause. Next, I emailed the diagnostics log to CounterPath and Sonetel. Sonetel replied and we exchanged their requests for configuration changes several times over 23 days. In the end, Sonetel added a feature to their network that resolved the issue.
CounterPath has issued 3 software updates to the Bria 3 client and I can say that the Bria 3 keeps improving. CounterPath includes a logging tool to collect start-to-finish calls that are reported on and pushed out to CounterPath with one button. The reports are also stored on the desktop in a folder for archiving or reference. But what I really noticed is that CounterPath figured out that iTunes and the Mac audio somehow interfered with the client just like Lync did. This was fixed in the next release. While I'm not ready to state that Mac users have a PBX-free solution, I am ready to state that CounterPath's Bria 3 client is in many ways superior. For one, it works on a Mac with a Bluetooth headset of my choice, unlike Lync.
* Skype Connect--Our company was finally "verified" after 7 weeks of waiting. Skype Connect for business is a flaky process and experience, because you find yourself in and out of consumer Skype mixed with Skype for Business webpages and never really knowing where you should be on the Skype website. Being "verified" nets the privilege of being able to set the Skype trunks outbound CLID to your company MBTN. Next, I set both trunk groups: Skype and Broadvox to use first choice codec G711 and second choice G729. Then, I moved Skype to first choice for outbound calls for all extensions. As I reported earlier, Skype calling costs 60% less than our calls on Broadvox and the trunks cost 55% less. Outbound Skype is a great way to beat down costs. As for call quality, I'll report back once we have a good sampling of both.
* Un-Mac my Mac--Just because I like Apple doesn't mean that I buy into everything Apple. I admit sometimes I am slow to move but when that certain urge hits, I don't waste time. Apple Mail continued to annoy everyone with little issues and quirks. We decided to activate our Outlook for Mac. We use IMAP email on Google and we still point our MX record over to McAfee to sanitize our email before delivering to Google. Outlook desktop clients are slower to synch all the folders. Apple's iCloud is really becoming unimportant, at least to us. Why bother when we have Google? And Apple Mail on the desktop seems to be a pain point of numerous small issues and sometimes availability. We're now reconsidering the Calendars too, since Apple iCloud has bombed key events on our shared calendar that just evaporated. Apple also dropped website hosting and that really annoyed many SMBs like ourselves.
Steve Jobs wrote, "Thoughts on Flash" and discouraged continued use of Flash, in favor of HTML5, outlining his reasons of openness, full experience of the web and technical shortcomings. When we were tasked with moving our website we ventured into three offerings and two of them were too complicated and quickly lost their appeal. We ventured into an offering from Wix and found that HTML5 was way too cool to pass up. During the lull period of the July 4th holiday period, we built a new website and abandoned the idea of moving the old.
Then, after returning to the office from vacation and having read Eric's post, "Is the Browser Your Next UC Interface?" it reminded me about Safari, a tired old web browser that we put off addressing and not wanting to bother with changing. Mozilla Firefox is often the top choice for Mac users, and the speed and feel was a welcome change. But in getting back to Eric's observations about WebRTC, I think, we are seeing as he stated a game changer. To me, packaging UC into Outlook makes more sense since Calendar, Notes, Email, Contacts and Tasks are already there. But this doesn't preclude WebRTC in offering some pretty cool features with voice.
Mozilla has focused on HTML5 big-time, and in 2013 their rebranded mobile OS will be HTML5 based, that they hope will hit on enhancing the experience for these mobile endpoints. Remembering what Apple did and continues to do with most of their products--make them fun to use and the devices become attractive--they also have the potential of becoming terminals for many things. I think we will see some fun and cool stuff emerge and as it does, I also think we will reluctantly change how we do business, and in the process of adopting what makes it fun for customers to use, at some point we'll look back and laugh.
