(e)Mail Insecurity

In with the old, in with the new

I've had two technological experiences this morning that can be summed up thusly: I love living in the future!

The first involved the new VoIP PBX we had installed earlier this week. The installer kindly left the TAPI integration driver on my desk for me, so I loaded it up this morning. A few minutes of setting up my new dialing rules for this location and I was placing calls directly from my Address Book:

Call options within Outlook

When you select the call, you get the following window:

The New Call window

Click Start Call and your PC contacts the PBX and establishes the call. Once it's dialed, the PBX activates the phone set on your desk, placing it into speakerphone automatically. How cool is that? It's not bleeding-edge technology; I've seen the same configuration with traditional PBXs for several years, but now that I have access to it, this is one piece of technology that will continue to make Outlook my most critical app.

I already live and die around my email, and my choice of mobile device was dictated by the desire to have my calendar and contact data work seamlessly with Outlook; this telephony integration just reinforces that tendency. (And wait until we get Exchange 2007 UM deployed, so I can listen to my voicemail from within Outlook...or from my mobile device, thanks to the wonders of Exchange ActiveSync.)

The second was definitely far more old-school. I wanted to play some music on my desktop system and take advantage of no one else being around to really crank it up. I was about to whip out my 1GB thumb drive and copy a few new songs over when I remembered that I'd packed my old 40GB iPod in my backpack. A minute scrounging around for a spare M-M 1/4" two-channel cable and my iPod was happily pumping my entire music selection through my desktop's Line-In port and out to my speakers, without me even needing to fire up an app. That was cool...how cool would it have been if my iPod and desktop both had Bluetooth so I could have done it without cords?

I love living in the future.

Print | posted on Saturday, January 27, 2007 11:56 AM