Phone Stuff

OCS, why are you breaking my heart?

Tim Robichaux — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 09:38:04 GMT

Well, after a bit of time spent on Microsoft's campus, I have 8 Tanjay devices with the latest and greatest firmware. I used a Tanjay device (a Polycom CX700 IP Phone) for a number of months, and while I didn't have a ton of voice communications with it, I loved the ones I had. There are a few complaints that I have about the device, but they deal more with the form-factor than functionality. What I wanted to note was something more tangible (pun intended) than complaints. What I wanted to mention is a reminder that the Tanjay devices are Enterprise Voice extensions. They are devices that are supposed to sit on your desk and replace that silly little phone you have there with a Office Communicator client that provides the rich client experience that OCS 2007 is supposed to provide.

What does this mean to the average Joe User? Well, to give a real-life example, I was just talking about how I have 8 devices with hot-off-the-press firmware and a desire to get them up and running. Even before my co-worker and I went to Microsoft to get the update, we were having a debate about why his devices were not able to connect earlier today. After banging the issues about for a while, he was convinced that it was a certificate issue. I was a little bit more skeptical, simply for the fact that it didn't "feel" right. I was willing to come back to the office later, with the upgraded devices and look into it.

After trying to log in with the fresh devices, I was willing to admit that something was wrong. After poking around, I found that in some cases, autoenrollment of domain users and devices was disabled, and so I enabled it using GPO. Thinking hard about it, what this does is tells a device that is logging in with a domain account that it's okay to request a certificate from the domain CA and where that CA is. Sadly (at least for Devin), this didn't correct the issue. I sat and thought about it while I worked on something else, and when I finished with that, I decided to start back at square one and walk through setting up a Tanjay device for the first time. A quick web search and I ran across the problem (I didn't really "run across it.." It was more of a "the answer slapped me in the face and called me stupid"). Reading this post on a blog, I noticed that you have to enable the user for Enterprise Voice. Right now, we switched all of our users to Remote Call Control so we could use the connection with our Mitel 3300 ICP phone PBX.

Long story short, now our users have a choice between a Tanjay device and RCC. This is actually kind of a tough one for me, since I really like how RCC keeps track of my phone communications. I've been having trouble with some phone companies, and having the automatic tracking of who I call when is really helpful. I'll just have to see how things play out once I build our new OCS environment.

A new e-mail idea...

Tim Robichaux — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:36:46 GMT

Last night a co-worker and I were having a discussion about some of the things that we'd really like our e-mail clients to be able to do. One of the things that I was lamenting was the fact that there is no really easy way to have Microsoft Outlook tag e-mail so that you could build views that were built around tags rather than folders. This got us thinking and I think that I came up with a nifty way to do some e-mail-fu using metadata in a file system for some neat things.

The first idea that I had was that if you just were able to keep each e-mail item as a separate file, you could then use the built-in metadata features of some file systems to tag each item. If you did it this way, you could have a really light-weight e-mail client that would just build a view based on what tags you gave the e-mail. It would also be really simple to have the system (either server-side or client-side) tag e-mail as it came in. Then once it is looked at, it would get tagged as something else.

For example, one of the things that we talked about, was the idea that you could give your client the logic to thread and tag e-mail based on things like:

If it is a reply to someone in particular, it gets tagged for one view
If it is a reply in a thread, it gets tagged for that conversation
If it contains keywords that you have designated as important, a special tag gets added
On and on, in the same vein

The real beauty of this system is that all three cases could be applied to one e-mail that came in and all you would have to do is select a view or type of view to quickly sort through all your incoming and existing e-mail, based on those tags.

Another really cool idea that was brought up (I think he brought it up, but I can't remember at this point), is that you would be able to do some visualization that is not possible in a standard e-mail client. You could create views and viewers that would group your e-mail and messages and all that jazz as a tagged cloud. Then it would be really easy to analyze and comprehend things about your e-mail that it's not always easy to find. I know, personally, that I have a better time understanding complex relationships if I can draw them out or put them into a visual paradigm.

Another area that I think that this would make for some really neat features is in security, backups and speed. Instead of keeping all your data in databases, all of your information is in files. This way, you wouldn't need to have a client that was able to read or access a proprietary data format to access all those messages. Most of the file systems in use today support strong encryption and file-level security, so the integrity of the data is less at risk as well.

I think that this is a fun mental exercise and I would really like to see some changes to the way we look at messages, but I also know that this would require a lot of work and know-how that most people wouldn't want to sink into such a fringe concept. I think that with the changes we've seen in how messaging is approached (as in, the unification of multiple messaging formats and the convergence of information access devices like computers and cell phones), we'll see a lot more expansion into areas that are different in concept than we're used to. I would like to believe that changing the way we look at information was a quick process, but I know that there are many people who think that, "this is the way it's always been done and it's the way it'll always BE done."

This is getting to be a long post, so I'll wrap this up by saying that I really like the way that messaging of all types seems to be converging. I love the way that I can have a central place for all my communications. I like the fact, most of all, that I'm at a place where I can have these kind of discussions and really feel like I've come away with an idea that really fits who I am.

How To Set Up Phone Paging on a Mitel 3300

Tim Robichaux — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:53:36 GMT

Our Story So Far

I am not an expert in traditional telephony. I am at peace with this, but there are times where I need to step up to the plate and take one for the team. I've been managing and maintaining our Mitel 3300 ICP for a while now, and I am constantly struck as to how difficult it can be. For a large number of years, telephony of the traditional type, has been full of terms and concepts that may not be quite comprehensible to someone who is not well steeped in the lore of the big Bells.

Earlier today, I was working at my desk and I was asked if I could page some people to help move some equipment from the office across the hall. I'll admit that I was actually stumped. This was something that I had never thought about, and I had no idea how to go about it. With all of the phone systems that I had worked with, previously, there was normally a button on the phone that would page everyone else with a phone. This worked well in a small office where people were often not at their desks. Since just pushing the button seemed to work (and I was not responsible for the PBX), I washed it from my mind. Now that I am in charge of making our PBX sing, it's a bit of a different matter. Delving into the (meager) documentation that I have on the 3300, I found what seemed to be the thing to do. There was already a paging group set up.

I added myself to the group (there were a few members in it, but none since we took over the PBX from our vendor), and then looked to see how to add a button to my phone. Navigating to the Multiline Set Key Assignment, finding my set than then finding an open button, I was presented with a large number of options. I selected the "Paging" option, saved and preceded to fail at paging people.

Looking into the help files, I was only able to find information on Loudspeaker Paging, which I was to find out, is very different from paging directly to the phones. After much searching around and digging, I found a refrence to a concept called "Direct Paging." I didn't see it when I was searching the help files (I actually found it in a 3300 User Guide, under the Advanced Features). I tried the steps contained in the instructions, but it looked like they weren't working.

Thinking that this might be a problem with how I set up my buttons, I looked back through my key settings and, lo and behold, I found an actual option to assign a button the "Direct Page" function.

With everything saved, I was able to pick up the handset, hit my new page button, dial the Page Group number, and send my shining voice out to the masses.

Back to the Good Stuff

It looks like in the telephony industry, there is a big difference in using the phone to send a message to an actual paging system and just sending a message to all the phones lying around in the company.

It looks like there are quite a number of parallels between the two, however. The way the Loudspeaker Paging works is through an actual port or card that connects to a loudspeaker system. Depending on the level of complexity of the system, the 3300 can support up to 16 zones (well, it can really support 15 zones with one [00] reserved for the dreaded "Page All Zones" type of function). On the Direct Page side of the fence, the administrator has the option of setting up multiple Page Groups and all management and pages are handled by the 3300, instead of outside hardware. I'm not sure of the maximum number of Page Groups, but it seems like it is probably quite a few.

I don't want to spend a lot of time becoming an expert on Mitel. There are people who work with the hardware much more than I do, and I would rather focus on the specifics of integrating it with OCS 2007. Now, having said that, for the record, I love learning the little ins and outs of these systems. It's quite interesting and I've learned a lot about how PBXes work, and that's help me understand the link between the telephony world and VoIP.

Well, back to the phone closet!