Microsoft Action Pack: Vista and Office 2007

Sooooo....the Microsoft Action Pack Q1 shipment arrives with Office 2007 Enterprise and Vista Business Edition upgrade. I spend 90 minutes digging bits of the Office 2007 beta 2 Technical Refresh out of my workstation before it allows me to install Office 2007.

Conversley, the Vista install has to be done over an existing XP install. WTF? That means if you want a clean install, you first have to install XP, then install Vista on top. This has to be a mistake, I'm sure that Bill's boys and girls will be fixing this momentarily, right?

So I skipped Vista for now, and went with the Office 2007 Enterprise. This not only includes the usual suspects but a few others, like Groove, Expressions Web (The replacement for the unlamented FrontPage), Visio 2007, and a bunch of SharePoint stuff.

By my count there are at now at least three different technologies for "shared workspaces" offered by Microsoft; Groove, Sharepoint, and within some versions of Vista. Actually, four, because you can share OneNote notebooks in real time as well.

Before investing too much in the Microsoft versions, check out the Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet. I had a two-hour shared telephone conference with budget spreadsheet using Google Spreadsheet this morning, which worked out fine. It is a little funky when downloaded back into Excel, but it worked. And of course, we still like Backpack, I mean Basecamp.

Access 2007 Runtime

Well, I wish I was pointing to the Access 2007 runtime, but I'm not, however, this Microsoft page, discusses several points of interest:

1. The runtime will be available "shortly after the release to the general public of Microsoft Office Access 2007
   
2. The runtime and developer extensions will be free downloads.
   
3. The Extensions will include a packaging wizard, similar to the one for 2003, which optionally includes the runtime files, and any other files, necessary to create an MSI
   
4. The Developer Extensions will include hooks for Source Code Control
   
5. The Extensions will not include the Property Scanner or Customer Startup Wizard that were previously available in earlier versions.
   
6. Links to the download locations will be posted on Office Online and the Access Developer Portal on MSDN.
   

Chron This Week:

This week the Chronicle of Philanthropy includes their 2007 Technology Guide, which is a special advertising section for technology consultants, and fundraising software companies. An article by Scott Westcott attempts to make the connection between social networking sites like YouTube and MySpace with online charity fundraising, and attracting volunteers.

VolunteerMatch has attracted more than 1000 people who link to its online profile since joining Myspace in July.
[A]s of this month, MySpace listed 15,587 non-profit organizations. The largest is People Helping People, a group of people who want to work together in promoting the common good, which has 17,000 “friends” on MySpace.

There are additional articles on virtual communities, video games, and using cellphone text messaging for fundraising.
Another article discusses the relationship between charities and the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress.

Charities and foundations, which have devoted much energy in recent years to defending their organizations from charges of wrongdoing, and to trying to persuade Congress not to impose onerous new regulations, are hoping for a friendlier climate now that Demoocrats are in charge on Capital Hill.  

Techfornonprofits Gabcast Channel #1

Gabcast! Techfornonprofits Gabcast Channel #1

Trixbox Webinar

Just got off the Trixbox webinar, conducted by Kerry Garrison and Andrew Gillis and thought there were some interesting ideas that came out of it. Here are some rough notes.

Call Queues
You can set up call queues which are not to be confused with ring groups. A call queue is where you stack up calls and where the caller can be told "You are caller number 5. There are four callers ahead of you. The average wait time is 2 minutes". and so on. You can have a call queue point to a ring group. (A ring group is a set of extensions that are called by some kind of rules, in a specified sequence, say, or based on the amount of time since an extension was last connected on a call.

Bandwidth and Latency
DSL typically has lower latency than cable, even though cable typically has higher bandwidth.

TDM Hardware connections vs. Internet SIP/IAX phone termination services
Many of the example installations they gave involved hardware connections. T-1s. ISDN PRIs, etc. This supports the notion of having conventional hard connections for important inbound and outbound calls to your company, rather than rely entirely on a VoIP termination provider.

DTMF Tones
There are at least three different ways that phones can send DTMF (the numeric tones that are generated when you press numbers on the phones). They are not all compatible with each other.

Seminars and Training
There are starting to do seminars. March 5-6 they are offering a two-day course in Los Angeles for $1495 for Trixbox beginners. In the second quarter of 2007 they will offer two more courses; Advanced Trixbox Administratrion, and Advanced Troubleshooting. More on their training site.

Asterisk documentation:
VoIPSpeak.net (Kerry's Blog)
AsteriskTutorials.com - A set of free screencast tutorials for Trixbox, FreePBX, etc. These are great. You can see demos of how to set up some of the basic and advanced functions like inbound and outbound routes, how to do a follow-me function, etc.
Book: Trixbox Made Easy
Web Documentation: Trixbox Without Tears
#FreePBX IRC channel


Vendors:
VoIPSupply.com
VoIPLink.com
ATAComm.com

TDM cards
Sangoma
Rhino
Digium

Using Trixbox under VMWare (software emulation)
VMWare drivers are required when emulating, so you can't use hardware cards. That said, emulation works great for training, and I see that is the plan for their traning seminar; you are to bring a laptop capable of emulating trixbox and you'll walk away from the seminar with a fully configured system.

Compare Trixbox Training vs. an Asterisk Boot-Camp
Boot camp concentrates on the Asterisk configuration files
Trixbox training goes into how to use the Trixbox configuration tools (FreePBX, etc.)

Recommended way to Upgrade from 1.2.3 to 2.0
Upgrade 1.2.3 from 2.0
1. Download and upgrade FreePBX
2. Do a backup using the FreePBX backup functino
3. Do a clean install for 2.0
4. Then do a restore (using the new FreePBX)

n.b. I manged to upgrade by running the upgrade script from the Linux command line, and also running an update of modules from FreePBX. This seems to have worked OK, from my end, but they suggested the above steps as being more reliable.


Relationship between Asterisk and Trixbox
"Asterisk is the engine...Trixbox is the car."

Should you editing Trixbox Config Files
How does FreePBX treat the Asterisk config files... can/should we ever update the config files themselves, or will they get overwritten?
Example of the extensions file:

Extensions <-usually only overwritten when upgrading ASterisk
Extension_Additional <-overwritten from FreePBX (don't edit directly)
Extension_Custom <-changes that are never overwritten by the system - use for customization

DUNDI
There is no web interface for DUNDI, but you can edit the DUNDI config file manually

HudLite - "Heads Up Display"
HudLight - OutLook Integration and Heads-Up display

Distributed PBXs
Remote extensions (single phones in a branch office connected over VoIP0
Remote Trixboxes, (whole trixboxes in branch offices, federated together).
DUNDI - Sort of a DNS which points to IAX and SIP peers. Totally distributed. Created by Mark Spencer of Digium (inventor of Asterisk).

Voice Recognition
Voice Recognition in the IVR - They are working with a couple vendors to make this available, Right now there isn't anything in open source available.

Additional multi-language support is coming.
Trixbox 2.0 has multi-language support

The webinar was a kick. They had 800 participants (!) Both the slides and the commentary will be available later today.

Gizmo Project - web based calling

The Gizmo Project now has a web-based version of their soft phone which works with Firefox or I.E. I was a little confused about this, as it requires the Adobe 9.0 Flash plugin. So if you go directly to the Gizmo Call website and get an error, download and install Adobe 9.0 and then try again. You'll also be asked to install a Firefox plug in if you are using Firefox.

You can test this with up to 10 minutes of free calling each day. It works also if you already have a Call-Out (pre-paid) account for 2 cents per minute.

Not quite sure when I'd use this...since I already have the normal Gizmo softphone installed on my laptop. But if you want to make calls from a "foreign" computer, in an internet cafe, for example, this would be a way to do it, and be able to connect to your own account.

Vista: Hold Off

Microsoft is planning the officially introduce the successor to Windows XP this evening, Windows Vista. There is little in Vista to justify the hassles of upgrading a working XP system. Better to deal with it when it shows up, inevitably, on new computers, which presumably will have the optimized memory and graphics capability.

Recommendation: Sit this one out.

SQL Command Box for Microsoft Access

Among the many things I miss in Access from Foxpro is the ability to enter SQL statements on-the-fly into the command box. So, as a first cut, I created a form with a textbox and a button. The textbox holds the SQL code, and a button that calls a subroutine to stuff the code into a scratch query defined in the .MDB Queries collection.

There are lots of possible refinements, error checking, parsing of other commands, etc, but already I’m taken with this as it eliminates half the clicking around when doing SQL queries. Thanks to Martin Green's Office tips for most of the code. Here is the VBA code for the command button.

Private Sub cmdExecute_Click()
' The following code processes an on-the-fly SQL command
' entered in the text box. The command requires a "scratch"
' query be included in the database query collection. The code
' takes the SQL string, passes it to the scratch query, and
' then executes it.
' Code cribbed from Martin Green's Office Tips at
' http://www.fontstuff.com

Dim strSQL As String
Dim db As DAO.Database
Dim qdf As DAO.QueryDef

strSQL = Trim(Me.txtQuery.value)

'Here is the code which will apply the SQL statement to the query:

Set db = CurrentDb
Set qdf = db.QueryDefs("qryScratch")
qdf.SQL = strSQL
Set qdf = Nothing
Set db = Nothing

DoCmd.OpenQuery "qryScratch"
End Sub

Hardware Notes - Dells and Home-Brews

Over on Slashdot there is a note that reminds us of the fact that Dell will sell desktop machines without an Windows operating system. These are called the 'n' series. They've actually been doing this for a long time; maybe in fits and starts; but my three-year old workstation was also an 'n'.

For non-profits, this may be something to look into. If you run Windows, and you are already eligible for discounted Windows licenses thorough Tech Soup or you can get academic licenses, do a quote with and without Windows, and see if you can save a hundred bucks on a machine.
Of course, if you are running any of the Linux operating systems, (current favorite is Kubuntu) then this might also be the way to go.

Robert Bruce Thompson, and Barbara Fritchman Thompson's Building the Perfect PC has come out in a second edition as of December 2006. It is also available for reading online on Safari. The second edition is another fascinating building-block appoach for putting together a variety of desktop and server computers from parts. The range goes from a $350.00 email-reading machine, to a full-blown server, to a no-holds-barred gaming workstation. Virtually all the hardware suggestions from the first edition (circa 2004) have been superceded by new motherboards, processors, memory and cases.

I built a "pizza box" "Pundit" machine using an ASUS case and motherboard and ideas from their first edition, and it came out very well. The box is in constant use as a terminal server and testing platform for both Windows and Linux. Details are in the TFNP archives.

Jeff Dunteman has just posted an update about the Dell SX-270 that he (and I) was enthusiastic about. Seems like there is a capacitor problem. Dunteman is the author of the Degunking Windows series.

Finally David Pogue has found a possible solution for lack of eye contact when desktop videoconferencing.

Tech Friday Daily = Daily Cup of Tech

If our Tech Friday feature could be published every day, it might look something like Tim Fehlman's Daily Cup of Tech. Tons of practical tech ideas over there; check out the discussion of making your USB thumb drive come up with a menu of tools and utilities. And, you might see the the occasional contribution by a certain non-profit technologist.

Economics: Home-Grown vs. Full-Service VoIP Providers

While wallowing around getting the Asterisk/Trixbox up and running, I’ve been wondering about the economics of this especially when placed against other possible solutions. For example, Packet8 offers a business phone plan as a service; they provide you with phones, but everything else is provisioned over the internet. No server required.

Packet8 is a full service IP phone provider with both business and home phone plans. They offer a business service with a required minimum of three phones at $40.00/per extension. This includes unlimited calling throughout the U.S. and Canada. Calls to Germany are 2 cents per minute. So, the minimum would be $120.00 per month. They’ll sell you phones for about $99.00 each which is a good deal. If you would rather not buy the gear, and you can commit to a minimum two-year contract, they’ll give an option for $49.00 per month.

That covers the outbound calls and provides you with one inbound number. Additional inbound numbers, which can be virtual numbers, are $5.00 /month. They have a calculator on their site which gives you an idea of what the upfront and monthly costs will be.

If you wanted to start up with an Asterisk box, you would still have to buy IP phones. You can’t get a phone for much less than about $80.00, so that part of the equation is comparable.

Now, as I said with VoicePulse, there is a charge of roughly 2 cents per minute, and it all depends, on the amount of calling you are going to make. Comparing with the Packet8 rate, of $40.00 per extension per month, you would have to talk for thirty-three hours for a single extension to use up the $40.00 bucks. Further, with Packet8 the 5th or 8th phone costs as much as the first phone; there are no cost breaks as you scale up. They have a calculator on their web site that shows the upfront and monthly recurring costs.

Inbound virtual numbers with VoicePulse are $11.00 per month. Of course with Packet8, you don’t have a server; everything is done virtually over the internet connection.

After reading several reviews, (decidedly mixed), on Packet8, I’m thinking that the idea of the Asterisk box is still a good one. For one thing, using an Asterisk server allows you to maintain a hybrid system; a mixture of VoIP and connections to a landline. It also allows you to mix and match your own IP phones and soft phones. And, for me at least, the monthly charges are negligible. I can add as many extensions as I want, for just the cost of the phone hardware.

More Links:

Here's an older review of the VoicePulse regular (non-Asterisk) service.

Test your network for VoIP. This service will place test calls between your location nd several cities including Sydney, Vienna, Boston, and Montreal.

A similar test for videoconferencing.

Finally, I ran into this great article about how to rewire the phone wiring in your home or business to use VoIP. Many systems, like the home service of VoicePulse, Packet8 or Vonange assume that you want to connect a single telephone to their servcie. This article explains how to work around that problem, and includes a great deal of general information about phone wiring. Get your dykes and screwdrivers ready!

Stuff That Works

So, a bunch of the boys 'n girls gathered round the screen to do some rootin' tootin' grant writin', and since we are all software developers and we are pledged to eat our own dog food, we want cool collaborative tools. So, we've got Backpack,(sorry, I mean Base Camp) we've got VoIP, we've got Sightspeed video, we've got.... whatever.

So what did we end up with, finally at the end of the day?

• Microsoft Word 2003 with the tracking function.
  
• eMail
  
• AOL Instant Messanger.
  

It worked. A little rough around the edges, the, um, workflow, but in the end the group has applied for $150,000 in round figures via two grants, and begun to develop a "swipe file" of paragraphs that can be inserted into subsequent grant requests.

Some observations:

• The Base Camp Writeboard is OK, as far as it goes, and indeed it is designed for collaborative writing, but is so rudimentary that it is better to just stay in Word. Writeboard is useful if you want to work on language and narrative, but not helpful for formatting, and we needed to include a budget spreadsheet. So a couple of times we ended up exporting the Writeboard copy to text (another mistake....we should have exported to html, of course), and then spent hours reformatting in Word. Once in Word, however, it was possible to upload versions to the Backback board, and leave comments. Note that if you want to do html tables in a Writeboard, you can...but you have to do it in code. They also have non-standard ways of putting in bullet and numberd lists, and headers.


• Change Tracking in Word works pretty well. You can leave comments. Each person who edits gets their edits shown in a different colour.


• In the end, after passing the document around like a hot potato, one person kept the master copy, and we used instant messenger to comment back and forth, and sent versions and snippets via eMail.
  

We might also have tried Google docs and spreadsheets. Another time maybe.

The 59 smartest Non Profits online

From Seth Godin, marketer extraordinaire, a pointer to the 59 smartest nonprofit organizations online.

Odds and Sods

Nice preview of Office 12. (aka Office 2007). This was from the early Beta 1, but if you want an overview of the feature set, this is a good place to start.

Over at Daily Cup of Tech they've talked about the PC Repair System which fits on a single USB bootable USB drive.

Just received a new book: Microsoft Access Data Analysis by Michael Alexander. This is a wonderful book that starts where almost every other Access book ends, and makes you think that yes, Access really can be used for serious querying, reporting and analysis. Part One is a basic description of Access and a discussion of why you would use Access instead of Excel for data analysis. Part Two includes basic analysis techniques with a thorough discussion of how to deal with dates. Part Three, Avdvanced Analysis Techniques has a discussion of SQL and SQL subqueries, descriptive statistics, and pivot tables. In all situations he also discusses why you would want to use these tools. Chapter 10 includes a discussion of Visual Basic for Applications, and indeed why you woudl like to use this. Chapter 11 comes back full circle and describes how to automate Excel from within Access.

All in all a great book. I'll be working through much of this one.

Do you really need to run processes that automatically look for updates to the QuickTime player, Adobe Acrobat and Quickbooks? Me neither, and the solution was in the latest PC Magazine. PC Magazine is almost the only dead-tree magazine that I pay for these days. Bill Machrone's column mentions What's Running, a free program which shows all of your running processes, programs, services, and IP connections. Fascinating, and a useful tool for ferreting out superfluous garbage.

I upgraded to QuickBooks 2007 Pro from QuickBooks 2004 Basic. This was precipitated by being forced to upgrade to maintain compatibility with the payroll function; Intuit, the creator of QB will no longer support QB 2004. This, even though I pay $199 or so for payroll "support" (they supply three numbers in the propriatary format so that I can accuratly calculate state payroll rates). It might be one thing if I had a payroll. But I usually use subcontractors, so my payroll consists of one person.

On the upside, the upgrade to Pro gives you job costing; which for fund accounting, or restricted accounting is an extra way for you to segregate income by project. This is not a bad thing and indeed is recommended, if not mandated by the Feds (US Federal Governement) when they fund grants directly to you.

My last upgrade to 2004 was a wrench which still gives me shivers; but this one went pretty smoothly, and the changes are not so radical as to cause a lot of problems. I still have that "over a barrel" feeling with Intuit though.

Trixbox/Asterisk Progress Report

Two steps forward, one step back. There has been some incremental additions and improvements to our home internet phone system project based on Trixbox.

I'm reminded of a foreman I once had who boasted that he had a vacuum cleaner in every room of his house so that he could take care of any spillage or dust immediately. This is the guy who lined his entire garage with ceramic tile; it looked like an operating room. S.O. is starting to compare us with him, only in our case we have multiple phones.

Anyway, click on the sketch to view the larger version. You'll see now that we have three SIP phones. All three are the Grandstream Budgetone phones. I've got two in my home office, along with the Trixbox server, and we've placed one of the phones in our upstairs study. I mentioned before that the power supplies appear to interfere with the television set, so the upstairs phone only gets plugged in when we're going to actually make calls. Too bad...I still have to yell up the stairs.

We have two Verizon landlines. I have my old two-line phone on my desk. One line is our "home" line and one line is the "business" line. The business line now goes into the Trixbox, so that I can take calls there and transfer them to any of the three SIP phones. Right now, I have any inbound call ring at my desk, but eventually I'll see about an automatic call director. ("Welcome to Microdesign. Press 1 for technical support, 2 for database and software development, or 3 for videoconferencing")

Outbound calls from the SIP phones can go out over the internet either via VoicePulse (the default outbound route), or, if you prefix the call with a '9', they'll go out via the business line. VoicePulse calls cost 2 cents per minute or less. The business line has eight cent per minute long distance via MCI. As a test we've been using the VoicePulse lines exclusively, and I note that even without a single call, I'm paying $10.00 per month for the MCI connection in monthly charges, FCC fees, and taxes. So, the MCI long distance service is certainly a candidate for dropping if my confidence in VoicePulse continues as high as it has the past couple of weeks.

The PSTN "home" line remains untouched, it is connected to a phone in our kitchen and an extension in the bedroom.

Why is this taking so long? It is a question of confidence. I'm moving incrementally because I want to be confident about the reliabilty of every step of the chain. If parts aren't reliable, then I need to know about that and either design a workaround, or decide to live with the limitations. Right now, "best practices" suggest that for client calls, the PSTN still has the edge over the internet, but for interoffice calls, and "casual" long distance calls, the savings in phone charges will add up substantially. The goal is to have a reliable, scalable, business phone system...and I think I'm on the way.

Debugging SIP in Asterisk/Trixbox

Here's the scenario:

Significant Other calls Mother. Gets a "ring no-answer"...which means of course, that it just rings and rings and rings. The assumption, then, is that Mother is not at home. Or she might be downstairs doing in the laundry room, or something, but she definitely is someplace else.

However, what is happening in reality, is that Mother is on the phone with Sister. So we should be getting a busy signal, but we're not.

My theory was that since my PSTN connection provider, Voicepulse, couldn't complete the call, that it just kept things ringing. However, they said that they actually send back a SIP message 486 [Busy here] to Asterisk...and Asterisk should then be dealing with that by changing the ring tone to a busy signal.

So, there is a SIP debug mode within Asterisk, and I'll set this up by going into the Asterisk Command Line interface. I'll log into this remotely using Putty using SSH (the secure shell). I'll also set this up to log everything that appears in the terminal to a file.

So, I place a call to a known busy PSTN line.

But, nowhere in the transcript is there any evidence of a SIP message 486 Busy. So, I placed an outbound call via my ZAP hardware line to the PSTN number for that number. This is the same as calling your own phone number from a conventional phone. In this case, I get an immediate busy signal, as expected. But, looking at the transcript of that call, there is no evidence of a SIP message 486 there either. So now I'm wondering about the phone. In the transcript it shows the following entry:

<-- SIP read from 192.168.0.161:5060:
BYE sip:98639587@192.168.0.180 SIP/2.0
Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 192.168.0.161
From: "Larry Keyes" ;tag=8d48abf7-9a54-5966-3784-6ae80bce9d87
To: ;tag=as5fa85f66
Contact:
Proxy-Authorization: DIGEST username="200", realm="asterisk", algorithm=MD5, uri="sip:98639587@192.168.0.180", nonce="1c3041c5", response="759f615b48878ff3d617936450ae3c8e"
Call-ID: fc430bce-606a-00c1-18aa-c326d5af2e1b@192.168.0.161
CSeq: 45540 BYE
User-Agent: Grandstream SIP UA 1.0.4.17
Max-Forwards: 70
Allow: INVITE, ACK, CANCEL, BYE, NOTIFY, REFER, OPTIONS, INFO, SUBSCRIBE
Content-Length: 0

I'm wondering about the Allow:. Does this mean that the phone doesn't accept any SIP message except those that are offered by the phone?

Now, my own opinion is that we can indeed live with this, just like we can live without E911 calling and all that. Still, it is just one more damn thing that is different between my VoIP implementation and the "real" PSTN. But, there is a safety issue there...if we can't reliably determine when the phone is off the via a VoIP call, then we may want to place a PSTN call to verify. Which seems to sort of defeat the purpose.

We could solve this by just getting her an answering machine.

Here is another viewpoint about the anomolies of VoIP. Men are from VoIP and Women from PSTN.

My wife has been using Vonage for the past 3 years with me and she complains at every little Vonage hiccup, every little "fast busy" when dialing, every little Internet outage that brings down the phone line. She used to complain about the sound quality on the VoIP connection all the time, but she has gotten better. Or perhaps she's resigned to the fact that I'm never going back to PSTN.

Me? I'm like "Hey, sounds great to me. I never have any problems when I'm making a call using Vonage. Sure, when the power goes off or the Internet connection dies, we lose our phone, but hey, we're saving a ton of money each month. And it's a cool technology to boot. Plus I write about this stuff all day long, so I should practice what I preach."

I don't think she bought it.

Blog discoveries

I think I was a little quick with the delete button the other day, when I deleted an entry pointing to "Confessions of a non-profit IT Director".

Mea Culpa.

If I remember correctly, this was accompanied by a comment to the effect that this was a blog by a person who is actually doing something. Too many of us are pontificating...I like to read about people who are actually trying to get something working.

Today I Cried was the other blog I had mentioned.

Chron This Week and other notes:

Seen on Smith on VoiP :
Free calls from the U.S. throughout the world from any phone (well, you have to pay to get to Iowa...). allfreecalls.net

Seen on David Seah:
And a nice web-based toolkit for looking the state of your network from Dave Seah who has also nicely chronicled his move from one server and domain to a new one.

Nothing technological in the Chronicle of Philanthropy this week, but there are several stories about NGOs that have created profitable services, products or businesses.



New blog: Web Worker Daily. I ran across this a couple weeks ago, and found it full of practical suggestions and ideas by people who are grappling with technology. Recommeded.

Finally, there has been a lot of noise about the Apple iPhone introduction, showing this picture. My question...what the heck is it? Goldfish In Bondage?, Invasion of the Round Green Blobs?

DialplanPro Beta - Windows GUI

Here is an Asterisk dialplan creation tool for Windows. Even if you don't use this directly, it includes all the bits and pieces of a dial plan including trunks, channels, inbound and outbound routes, and a visual planner for interactive voice response menus. Fun to play with as you try to understand the Asterisk configuration files.

From the description over at Asterisk and VoiP News:

Originally an exercise to learn Asterisk and have a GUI of my own to use, I developed a Windows based GUI to build dial plans and upload them to the Asterisk server. Currently in beta, it's aim is to abstract routine chores such as dialing an extension or playing a voice.

I also wanted to be able to implement custom code in a easy graphical way as well so I included a scripting editor with most of the core functionality you'd expect like syntax highlighting, Parameter Hints, etc.

Although the GUI is Windows based, it communicates with a Linux binary TCP socket server written in house to control basic Asterisk functionality such as uploading required or included files, issuing simple commands like reload, restart, etc over the network. I also have plans to write a function to remote debug an AEL script using the aelparse executable and it's output sent back to the Windows GUI.

While definitely still in beta, we are using the software to program our own Asterisk box here in our office and it's working very well for us. Although note that we have a fairly simple dialplan with just a little bit of conditional logic, FirebirdSQL access and some TTS stuff to tease our resellers when they call in ;).

Monthly Introduction January 2007

Welecome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. We feel that non-profit corporations and NGOs deserve the same advantages that technology can bring to for-profit business. To that end, we've dedicated ourselves to finding cost-effective ways to bring the benefits of wide-area networks, computer databases, IP videoconferencing and Voice over IP and free and open source software to our clients and friends. Check out our (mostly) annotated VoIP resource guide.

Ongoing projects this month will include our small office PBX using TrixBox and Asterisk. This seems to have gotten off dead center as the past three days it has worked flawlessly with VoicePulse, or internet call provider. I have joined the outreach committee of the Vermont Software Developer's Association, and we're working on grant applications early this month to get this group some paid staff. We're using Backpack for project management on this, and I wrote about Backpack a couple days ago.

It seems to be a personality quirk of ours that our default position is one of optimism and interest when confronted with a new product or new version of an older product. This is especially true if it passes the Five Minute Test(tm), i.e. if I can actually create or do something after fooling with the product for five minutes. The critical juncture is what happens immediately after the five minutes... Does it hold our interest? Does it get incorporated into our daily work? Is it something to recommend to others?

A little about our shop: If you look at previous entries, you'll see we've dated Linux, but are married to Microsoft. We have two Windows XP desktops, 1 Windows XP laptop and a Windows 2003 Small Business Server as our production machines. These have to work every day, and they do. We use these for programming, database development, web development and general office stuff like accounting. We depend on several entities located in cyberspace, including Intermedia.net for our web site and eMail, and as host for a couple production web-based applications, and Logmein for remote access to clients for whom we have ongoing network management or software development projects. Oh, and our ISP, Comcast, (only recently changed from Adelphia).

Comments and suggestions are welcome and are moderated, so they may not show up immediatly.

Is this is a review?

I've been reading Smith on VoIP blog for some weeks now and found it to be informative.

So then I have to ask a few questions when I saw the following entry about advertising rates for his blog.

Product Reviews

Many believe the best advertising does not look like advertising. The best advertising is interactive and informative. Product reviews (hardware, software, and service) are both interactive and informative. Not only do you get a robust product review, I will also work with you to better understand how you can get others within the VoIP blogsphere to review your product.

* Product + $500

So, this means that as a vendor, I could send my box to Mr. Smith, and a check for $500. He'll review the box. (robustly). Presumably he'll post the review on his blog Ok....fine so far. But:

1. Doesn't this represent a conflict of interest? Whose interests are being served here? Certainly not the reader's.

2. What if there is a superior product that competes with the one reviewed, and he knows that... would he include a dicussion of the superior product even though they hadn't signed up for a review? In other words, it seems quite possible that the "reviewer" could end up touting a piece of junk, just because the vendor paid for the review.

I dunno....when I find something that actually works as advertised, I'm so happy that I'm willing to praise it for nothing. Happens maybe a dozen times a year. Maybe some people need to be paid to try something, because it is indeed rare to find an item which does work as it should.

Update: Garrett Smith has commented.

TrixBox 2.0 updates

And while we're on the subject of VoIP... TrixBox now has a 2.0 version available. I downloaded and installed this on another machine, before realizing that, like Dorthy, all I had to do was click the heels of my ruby slippers together three times, and I could upgrade my current Trixbox to version 2.0. And indeed that is all it takes; running the upgrade script, letting it chug for an hour or so, and then going in on the FreePBX interface and running the module upgrade procedure for FreePBX.

2.0 includes new versions of almost everything, including a release candidate 1 of FreePBX 2.2.0. So, now I have TrixBox 2.0 with FreePBX 2.2.0 which manages Asterisk 1.2.13.

Over at the Digium they are touting the Asterisk appliance, which is intended as a Trixbox competitor. This comes with Asterisk 1.4.0, beta a notch more recent than the version provided with TrixBox. I flirted with this; installed it actually, but then ran into some problems. I was intrigued however, to see that there was some additonal support for H.323 video...does this means that Asterisk will someday compete as a videoconferencing multi-point control unit (MCU)?

While the new interfaces are fine, the great news from my perspective was that the update blew away my IAX2 trunk configurations for VoicePulse. It left, however the VoicePulse SIP trunks, and I've been using them for two days without difficulty, not a single reboot or missed call. Call quality seems to be consistantly good. If this continues, I may actually get confident enough to apply for a phone number for the VoicePulse trunks and use them for inbound calls as well as outbound.

I've been using VoicePulse for calls now for a little over a month. Calls within the U.S. have a rate of up to two cents per minute. Calls to Germany were charged 2.7 cents per minute. The one outlier was a charge of 75 cents per minute to directory assistance in the U.S. What a rip!

Fonality Whitepaper on VoIP

I'd like to post the entire contents, but I'd recommend everyone to go over to the Fonality web site and sign up to receive their whitepaper VoIP without Hype - What Busnesses Need to Know which contains a rather dispassionate discussion of the role of VoIP in the context of our "traditional" phone system. Of several migration approaches discussed, the most conservative, yet still effective is the "hybrid PBX", using IP phones inside the business, and connecting calls over the internet between branch offices, but retaining the ability to still make calls over the regular telephone network.

Whatever approach you decide on for migrating to
VoIP, a hybrid IP-PBX is an excellent first step. Hybrids
operate in three modes – PSTN, VoIP, and what’s called
PSTN-fallback – a mode which ensures that you’ll
always have phone service, even during Internet
outages. With a hybrid IP-PBX, you can also connect
and use analog phones (including cordless sets), IP
phones, or a combination. So you can convert select
employees to IP telephony according to their needs
and the capacity of your Internet connections.

A hybrid IP-PBX enables you to start saving money right
away, even if you choose to use the PSTN connections
to the outside world. With a hybrid IP-PBX at your
business, you get free VoIP calls between offices and
with all your telecommuters, but you can selectively
choose to pay more for calls across the PSTN where
the quality matters most. Think of it this way, your
employees get free VoIP calling between themselves,
but your customers are guaranteed perfect POTS
quality when they call you, or you call them.

Fonality is the vendor which snapped up the very wonderful TrixBox. So, the whitepaper is more useful than many, as it points out the disadvantages of VoIP, and it doesn't promise the moon.