Home PBX thoughts

In researching my recent VoIP articles I have been playing around with a version of Asterisk designed specifically to run within a VMWare environment. I will expand on this is much more detail in part 3 of the Telephony article series, but I have been encountering what appears to be a common problem in this particular type of setup that seems difficult to resolve. Specifically, Asterisk in VMWare...

Telephony pt.2 – VoIP

In telephony pt.1 I talked about the reasons why companies might consider installing their own PBX (Private Branch eXchange). Truth be told, this was typically a decision that was easily made when a company reached a particular size (where the cost of having one external line per internal phone was prohibitive). And usually a company would start with a pretty small, simple and, above all, cheap...

Who sets the standard?

I read an article by Davey Winder on the ITPro website today about the recent announcement by IBM that it’s Sametime server will support both the XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE instant messaging protocols, out of the box, allowing free access to interoperability with Yahoo, AIM and GoogleTalk users. This is, apparently, set to create the world’s largest business IM community. However, the...

PC Licencing?

The Ferris Research blog carries a story about a woman in Denver (Colorado) who had a visit from the local Sheriff’s office to forcibly remove her PC. Why? Because Ms Winkler’s PC had been infected and been used to make fradulent purchases online. This got me thinking. Should we require people to have a licence to own a PC? After all, in the wrong hands it can be used to cause a lot...

IT – it's all a blur

IT is changing. “What’s new there?”, you say. “IT is always changing. It sometimes seems at though it deliberately changes every 6 months in order to extract more money from me to keep up to date.” I sympathise. Really, I do. From my side of the fence it can be really frustrating to see something that has taken years to put together have a shelf-life measured in...