VoIP

China Chooses Nortel

Well, at least the Ministry of Water Resources of the People’s Republic of China chose Nortel. After a two-year evaluation and selection process, The Ministry of Water Resources selected Nortel to enable increased collaboration and productivity by merging voice, data, video and presence information and providing a unified communications platform. China represents a huge market, and this is a fairly significant win for Nortel. More than that, it validates the value and capabilities of Nortel’s unified communications solutions that a customer as large and selective, and with critical communications need such as a Chinese government agency opted to go with Nortel over competing solutions.

Information Overload

Unified Communications helps companies to communicate more effectively and efficiently. It is also seen by many as being always connected and never being able to be unavailable. By phone, email, voicemail, instant messaging, from your computer, your cell phone, your laptop, or any web-based portal, workers can access tools and communicate. But, what happens when they don’t want to be available? This article from TechTarget’s SearchUnifiedCommunications examines the issues and some potential solutions. In my opinion, education is a key ingredient. Many organizations jump on the technology bandwagon, but don’t give their workers the information and the education they need to use the tools effectively. Tools like Microsoft’s Office Communicator (and its portable counterpart Office Communicator Mobile) enable workers to communicate anywhere, any time. However, users can also control that access. They can set their Presence to Do Not Disturb. They can configure the level of access for their contacts so that key people- team members, managers- can see their true availability, while the rest of the world sees their Away. When calls come in via Microsoft UC Voice, the worker can send them straight to voicemail, or right-click and port them to email or voicemail if they are not available to take the call. In order to realize the benefits of effective and efficient communications, organizations need to provide end-user training in the proper use of the tools and how to work with the more advanced capabilities as well.

Is Your UC Secure?

In order to provide comprehensive security, all traffic going into and out of the network should be monitored. Security applications and appliances have to scan and monitor for malware, data leakage, and other threats. With Unified Communications, the threat landscape is a little bigger and a little different. It is as important as ever to monitor traffic and maintain security, but unified communications demand higher bandwidth and QoS (Quality of Service) requirements than standard data traffic, making it an even greater challenge to secure and protect a UC environment while maintaining voice quality. Join Jason Ostrom, Director of the Sipera VIPER Lab, and Eric Winsborrow, Chief Marketing Officer for Sipera Systems and moderator, Erik Lanask, Group Managing Editor at Technology Marketing Corporation, on Tuesday, July 22 at 11:00am ET/ 8:00am PT.

Securing Unified Communications

Corporate networks and computer systems are faced with a variety of threats. Unauthorized access, malware compromise, data leakage, and other threats are fairly common and administrators are used to protecting against them. However, the phone system traditionally has been a separate issue, exposed to soe threats of its own, but a horse of an entirely different color. Even the various attack vectors in the computer system and network infrastructure have typically had a degree of separation. Michael Osterman discusses some of the emerging (or merging as the case may be) threats to corporate networks posed by the implementation of unified communications in this NetworkWorld article.

Filtering Contacts for OCS 2007

For most organizations, the fact that OCS 2007 can pull the contacts from Active Director is not a problem. However, situations can arise in larger companies with separate subsidiaries where one group is deploying OCS and another isn’t, or where multiple organizations within the company are deploying OCS, but they don’t want to share contacts in OCS. There is no truly elegant solution, but there are rudimentary options available to enable this sort of filtering. Evangelyze Communications Voice Program Services Director Mike Stacy explains how to do it on his blog site.

Integrating Avaya with Microsoft UC

One of the promises of unified communications, particularly Microsoft Unified Communications, is the ability to leverage the existing telecommunications infrastructure. Selling UC to upper management and proving the ROI is significantly more difficult if it means ripping out and disposing of the entire existing communications infrastructure to replace it with a new UC infrastructure. Avaya wants to make that integration and incremental adoption that much easier by providing detailed guidance for making it happen with Extend the Value of Microsoft Office Applications with Avaya Unified Communications.

Sipera Enhances UC Security

In the Press Release from Sipera, it explains that “For enterprises utilizing SIP trunks to connect to their service providers, Sipera not only offers comprehensive security for these SIP trunks, but also addresses key deployment issues by offering additional Session Border Control (SBC) functionality.” SIP trunking is one of the hot trends within the hot trends of VoIP and Unified Communications. Updates to the Sipera IPCS appliance include:

• Certificate provisioning proxy for improved access control
• HTTP/TFTP proxy for web services and configuration, and LDAP proxy for
  directory services, for faster and easier deployment of remote phones
• TLS/SRTP proxy for encryption, further ensuring communications privacy
• Network, device, user, domain, and time of day granular policy
  enforcement.

Cutting Edge Microsoft UC

Microsoft has put a fair amount of marketing muscle into their Unified Communications offering. Many organizations are busy architecting, deploying, and implementing the various components- Exchange Server 2007, Office Communications Server 2007, the OCS 2007 Mediation Server, etc. The standard, supported configuration involves separate server hardware for most of the components, and an on-site PBX solution. Evangelyze Communications however, working with VoIP provider NGT (New Global Telecom) has built a fully functional Microsoft Unified Communications deployment running almost entirely virtualized in Hyper-V, and connected remotely to a hosted VoIP service. You can learn more from Mike Stacy’s blog: Hosted Gateway/SIP Trunk with OCS. The result is a Microsoft Unified Communications deployment with significant cost savings in terms of hardware and infrastructure.

Unified Communications in the Call Center

Microsoft has a unified communications offering for small and medium businesses (SMB) with Response Point. They also have a more robust solution for enterprises providing even more features, functionality, and power for unified communications with Microsoft UC. What they do’t have, or at least didn’t have, is a unified communications solution for call centers, or other businesses that rely on communications more than standard businesses at an almost exponential level. The have formed a partnership with Aspect, a company that focuses on delivering innovative solutions for customer service and call centers. Combining the power and flexibility of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 with Aspect Unified IP delivers next-generation communications for call centers. There are still some hurdles to cross. Aside from delivering unified communications capabilities to the call center, the solution also has to offer high availability and resiliency to ensure communications are not disrupted even in the event of a server, or complete site catastrophe.

Planning Capacity and Bandwidth for OCS 2007

One of the most important factors in a successful VoIP or unified communications implementation is ensuring that adequate server processing horsepower and network bandwidth exist to handle the load. Streaming audio and video are less tolerant of latency and packet fragmentation, and the infrastructure has to be capable of meeting the demands of unified communications. Mike Stacy, Director of Professional Services for Evangelyze, has created an OCS Capacity and Bandwidth Calculator. The calculations to determine the number of users a given server can support, or the bandwidth capacity necessary for those users to use unified communications technologies are contained in an Excel spreadsheet which Stacy makes available for free.