December 30th, 2009 | Tags:

Just before the Christmas break I received an e-mail from Nortel, the subject was “Avaya has completed its purchase of Nortel Enterprise Soulution” – before I started to digest the content of this message, I hoped that the “Avaya” future might bring spell checking as “Soulution” is a Switzerland based high-end audio system manufacturer! (sorry couldn’t resist)

The body of the message contained the much expected marketing blurb:

The consolidation of these two great companies will expand Avaya’s global coverage, enlarge its portfolio of systems and services, and increase its expertise and specialization. By combining complementary skills and increasing research and development investments, the new company will bring better products to market more quickly.

Basically Avaya+Nortel=bigger, better telecommunications manufacturer! However it then went on to provide a new site “Avaya Nortel Information Center” dedicated to Nortel (or Avaya) customers, that de-constructs the changes taking place and the knock on effects. Furthermore a reference is made to an online event that will deliver Avaya’s integrated roadmap (to pre-register go here).

A full transcript of the e-mail is below:

We are pleased to announce Avaya has completed its acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions (NES) and Nortel Government Solutions (NGS), creating the most experienced and comprehensive leader in real-time business communications. The new Avaya is the global business communications expert delivering open and flexible communication systems that transform the way people collaborate to enhance performance and enable growth for companies small to large.

The consolidation of these two great companies will expand Avaya’s global coverage, enlarge its portfolio of systems and services, and increase its expertise and specialization. By combining complementary skills and increasing research and development investments, the new company will bring better products to market more quickly.

Avaya has long delivered exceptional services to the market and has been recognized for services delivery. Avaya will honour support contracts for all customers acquired in the transaction and continue to invest in bringing innovative services and tools to our customers and partners.

To begin addressing the questions that you likely have, Avaya has created the Avaya Nortel Information Center on avaya.com, a dedicated website where you can find links to the press release, frequently asked questions, and other integration-related resources.

Questions about the future of Avaya and NES products, services, and solutions are no doubt top of mind for you. Avaya will announce the integrated product roadmap in the next 30 days. An online event will be available for customers, which you can pre-register today.

Thank you for your continued business.

December 10th, 2009 | Tags: ,

Uncharacteristically the Exchange Team has announced official support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server in just over four weeks since the release to web.

Taken from the Exchange Team Blog:

I’d like to share with everyone some good news today— BlackBerry® Enterprise Server (BES) is now fully supported on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 and BlackBerry® Technical Support Services are readily available.

This is the earliest customers have been able to deploy BlackBerry smartphones with a new Exchange release – ever. Customers who rely on BES as an important part of their messaging and collaboration infrastructure have told us that more rapid support for RIM’s solution is critical to them. So we partnered with RIM earlier in the development cycle to ensure organizations moving to the new release experience no user downtime.

In order to enable full support, three updates are required:

All three of these updates are available to customers of Exchange Server 2010 and BlackBerry Enterprise Server v.5.0 with Service Pack 1 at no cost. BlackBerry Enterprise Server v5.0 Service Pack 1 and Maintenance Release 1 can be found here: http://www.blackberry.com/support/downloads

Additional information on the solution requirements, preparing the BlackBerry environment for Microsoft Exchange Server2010, can be found on the BlackBerry site here.

Today’s roll up also includes other minor updates to areas including calendaring, OWA, and transport. You can read more about Exchange Server 2010 RU1 here.

Paul Bowden, Exchange Release Manager

December 9th, 2009 | Tags: , ,

During recent discussions with a number of individuals within the OCS product group I have been told that “Remote Call Control” (RCC) will not be available beyond the current 2007 R2 release. When I asked why I was told that it was “a feature that had never really taken off”.

Whilst RCC is considered a more complex setup, it definitely delivers the most return on existing investments and assists in phasing out legacy PBX equipment over time (this time amount of time can only have worsened given the current economic climate). Remember the Microsoft marketing slogan “non-rip and replace”?

However it seems that RCC is not going to RIP yet! In a post made on the OCS blog earlier today the following statement was made, “Microsoft has announced the deprecation of the RCC feature for the next release of Office Communications Server, so new deployments of RCC will not be supported with the coming release.   However, customers who have existing deployments of RCC can upgrade to the next release and will continue to be supported through the lifecycle of that release – a good long time.”

Thanks guys, this is great news!

Source: here

December 4th, 2009 | Tags: , , ,

I recently purchased a Sony PSPgo, I liked the idea of gaming or purchasing movies without the procurement of physical media. There is of course an alternate more skeptical view that the world is not quite ready for “download only” consoles, this is evidenced by a complete lack of knowledge that this new PSP device exists (this can be witnessed at most gaming outlets).

One underrated piece of functionality is “Remote Play”, which is the capability of controlling or screen scraping your PS3 console via the PSP. This allows remote access to your movies, pictures and music (including BBC iPlayer and PlayTV for UK folks), therefore turning your PS3 into a pseudo Slingbox if you will.

However, to truly take advantage of this setup you need to enable “Remote Start”, this sends a Wake-on-LAN request to your PS3 thus bringing it out of hibernation and into a state where it can be controlled. This is easily configured to work over your local area network, but “Remote Start” over the Internet is a little more touch and go.

I could have probably just enabled uPnP on my router, but I don’t like to do this as it allows applications to punch holes in my Firewall (sometimes without permission). Therefore I decided a more manual approach was required, Sony’s recommendation was to port forward TCP/UDP 9293 (this is the comms channel used for “Remote Play”). Alas this alone did not make it work as my PS3 was set to DHCP, so next I assigned a static address, still no success…I then realised that the ARP table on my router was flushing itself as soon as the console went into hibernation.

Workaround: Most routers allow you to set static ARP or “Bind IP to MAC”, in my case I was using a Draytek (see below) – as soon as this had been set my problems disappeared!

December 2nd, 2009 | Tags: , ,

At long last Skype has extended it’s SIP trunking product out to public beta! This technology allows (in many cases) SIP enabled PBX’s to use the Skype VoIP platform for in and outbound calling. However it seems that the pricing is in my opinion a little steep, each “channel” (a channel is required for call concurrency i.e. 5 channels = 5 concurrent calls) costs €4.95 rental per month. These channel costs are of course in addition to Skype’s call rates.

I am still working on my Skype for Asterisk with Exchange 2010 guide (taking a long time I know – work and family life is not helping!) which in essence provides Asterisk pseudo trunking without the channel rental fees.

To give Skype for SIP a go head here

December 1st, 2009 | Tags:

Like most, I occasionally get frustrated with my mobile carrier. O2 is by no means an exception and my iPhone+O2 relationship has been somewhat rocky from the start.

I joined O2 specifically to try out the iPhone, for me phone+iPod sounded like a great idea, for the most part it was. But O2’s network (in my opinion) buckled under the strain of the iPhone – specifically it’s 3G performance. At work we use Vodafone’s UK 3G network and whilst it does not quite meet the “mobile broadband” status banded about by Voda marketing it does perform like no other mobile data network here in the UK.

When I joined O2 I decided to go PAYG, it didn’t make sense for me to sign my life over to O2’s extortionate iPhone plans so forking out the £399 for the 16gb model was a no brainer. 12 months later I decided to ring up O2 customer services and request my phone be unlocked (whilst pessimistic I wondered how Apple’s policies could deviate from other manufacturers who allow simlocks to be removed when out of contract).

As expected, the simlock removal was not possible, even though the O2 exclusivity deal was announced to be coming to an end. I was told to check back after November 9th, so I did and for £15 smackers (pay monthly are unlocked at no additional charge) I am unlocked and jailbreak free!

See the O2 message announcing my freedom below and head here if you want to be untied from your O2 shackles!