Thursday, July 31, 2008

Product selection, product selection, product selection...

One of the most important decisions that must be made early on in an implementation is what products to utilize.

Traditional PBX vendors have been able to dictate which hard and soft phones you have to use and thus are able to control feature set.

Part of the bugaboo of a standards based solution is that all products do not support all of the standards. You can expect that all products will not have equal functionality. Even if a vendor does support the standards you are looking for, they may have errors in their code or they may have interpreted the standards differently than other vendors.

Testing is critical to the process. Make sure the equipment you select will match the requirements you have.

So, what are your requirements? Low cost, certain features?

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Asterisk may be older, but sipXecs is better

Found this interesting blog entry from Tony Rybczynsk of Nortel...

Asterisk may be older, but sipXecs is better

You have probably read about Nortel's Software Communications System 500 (SCS500), a Unified Communications (UC) SIP-centric software solution for SMB (30-500 users), and that our go to market includes IBM and Dell.

What you may not know is that the SCS500 is based on open source from SIPfoundry, and blends the best of both the open source framework and Nortel's experience and expertise in voice, data, multimedia and unified communications. Why did we choose sipXecs from SIPfoundry as the basis for SCS500?

Read More


Linksys SPA941 and sipX

Got a chance to work with some Linksys SPA941 phones and sipX.

These phones were connected to an Asterisk system originally and we were moving the customer over to sipX due to a system failure.

Ran into a few problems with the phones... First thing I did was a factory reset on the phones (needed to be done right on each phone in the setup menu).

I upgraded each of the phones individually with the most current firmware. I could not find good information as to how to automate it so i used the manual method (http://ip.of.phone/upgrade?tftp://ip.of.sipx.pbx/spa.bin). I did use the sipX device file manager to load the .bin file to the pbx.

The next challenge was getting the phone to pickup the config generated by sipXconfig. Finally figured out to go to the Admin / Advanced / Provisioning page on each phone and change the profile rule to read '/spa$MA.cfg'.

Still having issues with call pickup from park orbit and attended transfer of calls.

I created a new wiki page documenting what I had found: Linksys sipX Configuration

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

3.10.2 Update

Version 3.10.2 was released on July 23rd.

There were several bug fixes as well as repairing some upgrade issues from version 3.8 to 3.10.

I had done two 3.8 to 3.10.1 upgrades but had been holding off others due to reported problems (not that I experienced any). Now that 3.10.2 is out it's time to get systems upgraded. I believe most of the problems had centered around HA systems.

3.10.x provides some great call routing capabilities that we had to rely on gateways for in the past. This simplifies installs and allows the end-user an easier way of tweaking their routes.

I have done an upgrade from 3.10.1 to 3.10.2 on my test system and also done a fresh install of 3.10.2 from ISO (http://sipxecs.sipfoundry.org/pub/sipXecs/ISO/sipfoundry-3.10.2-centos5-i386.iso) without problems.

New Blog

I had kind of fallen off the face of the blogging world... trying to get back into the habit with something a little more focused around a product I spend a lot of time with... sipXecs.

sipXecs is "the other" open source PBX available to the masses. It takes a decidedly different approach to an office communications system.

I'll be posting product news, installation tips and tricks as well as different equipment I've tested and fought with.