Graves On SOHO Technology

Our friends at OnSIP this morning sent an email invitation to attend a free webinar that they are giving about the new Polycom UCS firmware. The session is Thursday, June 21st at 1pm EDT.

The latest Polycom UCS software has a lot of new features that can improve your productivity. If you make use of the OnSIP provisioning server then you can easily upgrade your phones. The UCS firmware also includes many of the Polycom Productivity Suite features that were optionally licensed into the older v3.x firmware, but at no extra cost.

This latest release is also the shipping firmware on the outstanding new VVX-500. I’ve had a VVX-500 on my desk for about nine months, having participated in the beta program last fall. It’s my regular daily ride. I’ve been meaning to describe it in detail, and will yet do just that. Real soon now.

I certainly hope to be on this weeks webinar. In fact, I’ll be joining it using my VVX!

Last Friday Mike Oeth, CEO of Junction Networks appeared on the VoIP Users Conference to make a pre-release announcement of a new, free voip service called GetOnSIP. It’s not often that the VUC gets to scoop the rest of the voip world on some kind of news, but since OnSIP is a long time sponsor…why not, eh? GetOnSIP certainly seems like a great idea.

GetOnSIP is built upon the same SIP and XMPP foundation of their existing OnSIP hosted PBX service. However, GetOnSIP is a stripped down offering that has a much sharper focus. Anyone can register an account completely for free. Each account is issued a set of sip credentials, and has a corresponding SIP URI. Once your SIP phone or soft phone is registered you can start making and receiving calls to any other SIP URIs.

The free accounts provided by GetOnSIP don’t require the use of a credit card, making them very approachable indeed. Of course, there is a limit to what can be done from a completely free account. You will not be able to make calls to the PSTN. Nor will you get a DID to receive calls from the PSTN. Even so, I’m sure that GetOnSIP will be a welcome and popular addition to the SIP user community.

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The past week or so my attention was wholly consumed by the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters. Held in Las Vegas each April the NAB exhibition is the major event in the year of a broadcast equipment maker. This was my 18th NAB, which makes the more a test of stamina than anything else.

Happily, the show was for my employer a considerable success. Attendance has returned to reasonable levels. It seems that broadcasters are feeling better about their existence. Globally broadcasters are starting to move forward with long stalled projects. New channels will be launched and existing services enhanced. It all bodes well for the manufacturing sector of the industry, presuming that manufacturers have toughed out the recent slow period and continued to develop products that improve the operating efficiency of customers.

For our company the one major annoyance of NAB 2011 was the complete failure of wifi on the show floor. From the last day of setup to the close of the event wifi was essentially useless. This was not a huge problem, but a considerable inconvenience. In our case it meant that the many sales and executive staff present could only access email via a wired network connection.

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This past week Junction Networks phone lab posted a review of the Polycom VVX-1500 Business Media Phone. They make note of the devices’ many fine qualities. The VVX is truly a joy to use. It’s build quality is outstanding, and you simply won’t find a better sounding phone anywhere.

That said, I remain curious about the use of one-on-one video calling. It’s remains unclear to what extent companies are making use of desktop video calling. It’s not the kind of this that springs up organically since one must first seed the organisation with a number of suitably capable phones.

I wonder if this tends to happen within companies that are already making use of traditional video conference installations? Do the Business Media Phones merely extend the reach of such facilities to to the desktop or SOHO users? Or are desktop video phones something completely different?

If you make use of such devices please leave a comment about your experience.

The folks in the phone lab over at Junction Networks / OnSIP earlier this week posted a review of Counterpath’s Bria v3.1 release. They note a number of improvements, including more reliable support for video and G.722 based wideband calling.

I appreciate their reviews as there simply isn’t enough time in the day to try everything myself. Further, as an OnSIP user, if they have experience with a particular SIP client then they are better positioned to support our company if we should decide to use that program or device.

As to Bria itself, it certainly appears that Counterpath is on the move, issuing new releases for Mac, Windows, iPhone and Bria over the past six or seven months.

As a Windows user I find that look & feel of the Mac version is much nicer than it’s WPF-based counterpart on Windows. I wonder why the Mac version color scheme is light grey while the Windows version is very dark?  It’s like the the light vs the dark sides of The Force.

You may have noticed the widget that I added to the sidebar about a week ago. Inspired by hearing about Voxeo’s Phono on a recent VUC call I decided that I’d like to provide a mechanism for readers to leave comments in the form of a voice message.

This seemed like it would be really easy, even though I’m not a developer. I was particularly happy to see that there is a WordPress plugin called WordPhone that makes this practical for the complete newby.

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