Business Phone Systems: VOIP PBX, Hosted PBX, Virtual PBX.

Microsoft VoIP Phone Announcement Is Serious Business

September 25th 2007 Posted to VoIP News

By Adding 15 OCS-compatible phones Microsoft puts Avaya and Cisco in its sights.

By Robert Poe on May 16th, 2007

Keep those blue screens of death jokes coming, but don’t be fooled. However funny it might seem to entrust your phone system to the software everyone loves to hate, Microsoft is on track to become a dominant IP telephony player. It surely won’t mind if people get the wrong impression about what it can or wants to do. After all, the more clear it is about its plans, the fiercer opposition it will encounter from entrenched IP PBX vendors like Avaya and Cisco, whose cooperations it needs in the meantime.

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Its VoIP phone announcement yesterday represented a significant step towards Microsoft’s IP telephony goals. Nine manufacturers unveiled 15 IP telephones that will be compatible with Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft’s software for providing IP PBX functions over a corporate network. The manufacturers included ASUSTek Computer, GN Netcom, LG-Nortel, NEC, Plantronics, Polycom, Samsung, Tatung and ViTELiXThis means companies using Microsoft’s phone solution won’t be stuck with headsets. The announcement came just a couple of months after the software vendor made a big deal about a study — which it had commissioned — showing that its soft phones provided better call quality than some Cisco desk phones. Taken at face value, that might give you the impression that Microsoft saw the future mainly in terms of headsets and soft clients running on PCs. Yesterday’s announcement proved otherwise.Microsoft has been touting OCS 2007 as a large enterprise solution, complete with predictions that 100 million Office users will be using click to call within three years. But at least one observer thinks it’s looking at another target in the meantime.Frost & Sullivan Analyst Krithi Rao notes that a number of the phone manufacturers in the announcement have been targeting small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S.”I see [Microsoft] with their announcement telling small business customers that if you don’t need a full sized PBX with all possible call control capabilities, our solution, which has some level of telephony capabilities, can be deployed with these end points which are already certified with our solution,” said Rao. “And you have a communications system up and running.”At the same time, any move towards the low end of the market would — in addition to distracting unwary competitors — give Microsoft time to get its act together for an assault on the large enterprise.”I think right now OCS is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn’t include all the necessary call control features an Avaya or Cisco or Nortel have in their PBXs,” said Dell’Oro Group Analyst Alan Weckel. “As a standalone product it doesn’t work, so in this round they have to cooperate with all the PBX vendors in order for this product to be successful.”But it won’t need to cooperate, or to deflect attention from its real plans, forever.”If I ask you in the future what’s in the next version of Office Communications Server, say in 2009 or 2010, you might say they’ve added enough functionality that you no longer need another PBX for call control,” said Weckel. “The basic call control resides in the Office Communications Server, and the PBX is a peripheral device to do international call control and a couple of complex things like that.”By then, you’ll have long forgotten how humorous it was to think of putting such a critical activity as talking on the phone in the hands of a maker of notoriously unreliable operating systems.

5 Cool Functions to Look For in VoIP Phones

September 25th 2007 Posted to VoIP News

Choosing the right features can make all the difference in your work day, and year.

By Robert Poe on May 1st, 2007

You may not currently have a huge choice in buying VoIP phones. After all, most companies buy phones that work with their PBXs, not the other way around. You’re often limited to your PBX vendor’s proprietary or third party vendor-certified models — at least until session initiation protocol (SIP) is mature and ubiquitous enough to become the standard (that might take a while).

1. Is this my phone, or is it my PC?

A lot of developments have come together to make VoIP desk phones capable of doing things your grandfather’s — make that your older brother’s — phone couldn’t begin to. Start with soft keys, those programmable buttons that change depending on your task at hand. Add big, bright color LCDs that show, in words or pictures, what pressing each key will accomplish. And display step-by-step instructions via intuitive graphics, rather than having to dig through a manual written by engineers. The result: a phone that can be as comfortable and familiar to use as some of the better PCs or consumer devices around.

Include one more development: the integration between increasingly capable and user-friendly VoIP phones, and applications running on enterprise servers. It means that (with the right IP PBX and network architecture) you’ll be able to do everything on your desk set from reading and answering email, to accessing corporate databases and viewing a video message from the CEO on that big bright screen. But the quality of the user interface and the application integration are crucial. If they’re more confusing to use than your cellphone, you might want to take a pass.

2. A whole gigabit, just so I can talk?

Since 8Kbps can be enough to carry a voice conversation, you might think a gigabit Ethernet connection would be overkill. It’s up-and-coming in desktop VoIP phones though. The reason: VoIP phones and computers are both data devices. Connecting both of them to the corporate LAN takes up 2 data ports. But if you can hook your computer to your phone, and your phone to your LAN, you halve the number of ports your office network needs. Until recently, most phones have been designed to connect at the 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps speeds that accounted for the bulk of office LANs. Now, GigE enterprise networks, and computers and applications that take advantage of such speeds, are becoming more commonplace. That means purchasing GigE-capable phones will earn you bonus points for future-proofing your company’s IP telephony system.

3. HD? I thought that was for TV.

HD Voice is a Polycom term, but it highlights a broader trend in desk phones. Manufacturers are doing a lot to improve the sound quality of conversations, on the theory that if you can work more efficiently, you don’t have to struggle to hear and be heard. One significant effort involves the use of wideband codecs, which sample voice audio 16,000 times a second, rather than 8,000 times, as telephones have done since 1915. This opens up all kinds of possibilities in terms of increased clarity. It might even make it easier for your supplier’s interactive voice response system to understand that you’re having trouble with your order, not that you want to double your order.

4. Give me them wide open spaces.

There’s call quality, and then there’s speaker phone quality. The big push these days is to make desk phones function as well as specialized conference room speaker phones, so you can work out of the boardroom while the SEC is examining your hard drive. But doing that takes some clever physical design. One trick is to put as much space as possible between the microphone and the speaker, so they won’t interfere with each other. That means widening the base as much as possible without making your desktop phone bigger than your laptop computer. Another trick is leaving a big empty space behind the speaker, to let the sound resonate like in high-end audio systems. Handy reminder: when phone vendors talk about audio cavities, they aren’t talking about putting a microphone in your tooth.

5. Look, Ma, no moving parts!

Siemens may be ahead of Steve Jobs in making touch controls cool. Their recently introduced line of OpenStage phones lets you control all kinds of things without moving buttons or levers. You increase volume, for example, by simply sliding your finger from left to right along a slot, a blue glow in the slot extending to show how loud you’ve made things. The soft keys and iPod-like navigation wheel are similarly touch sensitive.

The keypad uses conventional push buttons, though, which makes sense when you’re trying to dial without looking. Speaking of which, does the phone you’re considering have a nib of just the right size on the 5 key, so you can navigate the keypad by feel alone? Manufacturers take such things seriously, and so should you, if you spend a lot of time dialing numbers that aren’t in your online directory.

The importance of coolness

There are a lot of other things to consider, especially the various forms of wireless connectivity, but don’t forget to ask yourself one thing: Does the phone look cool enough? We mean, you don’t want to spend all day, every day of the year, looking at a device that looks like Bill Gates designed it, do you? We didn’t think so.

It’s no secret that ShoreTel’s success over the past few years has gone hand-in-hand with the growing interest of small businesses in VoIP. The Sunnyvale, Calif. based IP PBX vendor has done a good job of providing products that fulfilled that interest. But a new Infonetics report provides some surprising insights into the pre-IPO company’s success. Hint: it’s not just due to the fact that the PBX giants haven’t reached the low end of the market yet.

Business Phone Systems: VOIP PBX, Hosted PBX, Virtual PBX.

Microsoft VoIP Phone Announcement Is Serious Business

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1. Is this my phone, or is it my PC?

2. A whole gigabit, just so I can talk?

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4. Give me them wide open spaces.

5. Look, Ma, no moving parts!

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