It’s that time of the year again. Everybody is trying to finish the projects started along the year or at least bring them close to the end. Meetings, forecasting, budgeting, strategy revision and of course planing. Some people want to try new things, to get new ideas that will eventually improve their business revenue. Others simply want to cut costs and improve efficiency inside their companies.
AMQP is an open standard for messaging middleware. It was developed by a working group interested in creating a standard for business messaging, because in the past only proprietary, expensive solutions existed. AMQP is now used in many software solutions, from Banking Sector to Cloud Computing. Its main advantages as a messaging protocol are its reliability, performance and flexibility. This means that two entities can send messages between them and it is possible to guarantee not only the actual delivery, but also the delivery time.
SIP presence is a tricky subject, mainly because there are some different ways to achieve the same thing. VoIP users are interested to know if “something” has happened in their network. They don’t care how this is technically done, or how many RFCs describe a simple scenario. The truth is that there are indeed many RFCs that handle various aspects:
Over 130 years ago, Graham Bell managed to get ahead his competitor Elisha Gray with just a few hours and fill in the paperwork required to patent the telephone. Even then, speed was essential in creating a technical advantage over the competition.
Every now and then I hear questions on how to secure servers and especially how to secure voice traffic. We hear lots of myths from our customers :).
Most people feel more secure if they have a simple firewall installed.
While firewalls are good, having a firewall to protect closed ports usually doesn’t help. I mean for VoipNow you will probably leave opened all ports for VoIP services and close most of the others. My question is: what is the point of doing this at server level, if the ports are closed anyway? This makes sense on a consumer desktop, but on a server it usually does not help much.
I’ve been answering to sales inquires for many years. Most of the questions are of course related either to Unified Communications or to the hosting world and sometimes they can be very funny. For example, a couple of days ago, someone asked me why we’ve chosen orange as our brand color.
The changelist for the next major version of VoipNow Professional 2.5 will be announced on 23 June 2010 in the VoipNow group. You can join the group now
We wrote much of the material below in 2008 for a whitepaper, but things haven’t changed much. That’s why I want to give some advice to small companies that want to choose a hosted Unified Communications service; hopefully they will make a better choice.
The key is to always ask the service provider before taking any purchase decision. There is no perfect software or perfect  solution, but the vendor must be aware of that and he must know how to get closer to perfection. Enjoy the following questions and do not hesitate to ask them before choosing a hosted service. Although they look quite simple, you might be surprised about what kind of answers you will get.
Some quick end of the week updates đŸ™‚
1. We have published the roadmap of VoipNow Automation
Quickly after the first version, we released a new version that features extended compatibility. We got many requests from customers complaining that they run Plesk 8.6 and they are not able to use 4PSA OXtender. Starting with version 1.0.1, you can use OXtender with any Plesk version higher or equal to 8.3.0. We also fixed some minor bugs and introduced new functionality, maybe the most important being that the new version can work with email passwords that are encrypted in the Plesk database (it requires IMAP auth module on the Open-Xchange server).