Aastra and Linksys support added

At CEBIT I met up with Product managers of Aastra and Linksys phones. With their support we have been able improve our support for both phone brands of phones. Build 4393 of 3CX Phone System now includes provisioning support for Aastra phones as well as BLF support.

Linksys provisioning support will be added by next week, whilst Linksys has announced BLF support in its new firmwares out in about 1-2 months. (BLF support is already available on Linksys 962 phones, but we need to make changes to support Linksys BLF) We are busy working on supporting Linksys BLF in version 6 of 3CX Phone System - due out some time in May.

The good thing is that companies now have more choice of phones they can use with 3CX: Aastra, Linksys, Grandstream, Polycom and of course SNOM.

CEBIT 08 – some observations in regards to VOIP

Just got back from the yearly ‘CEBIT trip’. It was the first time we represented 3CX at the worlds number one IT fair. We exhibited in Hall 13, and I joined my Colleagues Chris, Kevin from 3CX and Andreas from our distributor Ebertlang.

I must have spoken/demo’d 3CX to at least 100 people – and noticed a number of trends in the VOIP business:

• Hall 13 – more or less the ‘VOIP’ hall, was one of the strongest visited sections of the show. There was constant and strong traffic. It would seem that VOIP is gaining in popularity and the market is ready to start mass deployment
• The use of VOIP gateways rather then PCI add in cards is clearly more advantageous – people are seeing the advantages of taking the Analog/ISDN to IP conversion off the box and making the gateway independent from operating system versions. Especially in the linux area where a kernel update can effect the device drivers of the voice cards.
• Virtualization of the PBX seems to be well received. Rather then using a separate IP PBX appliance, virtualize the PBX under Vmware, or Hyper V of Windows 2008 server.
• VOIP equipment is becoming more mature and more widely available. I picked up a Siemens DECT IP phone for 80 euros at the local Media markt in Hannover – something that was unthinkable a year ago. It worked out of the box with 3CX Phone System

3CX Phone System v5.1 with tunnel feature available!

We finally got it ready – 3CX Phone System V5.1. A lot of hard work of the 3CX team went into that one, and I think it shows. We have made numerous improvements and fixes, and introduced the much awaited 3CX Tunnel feature. The 3CX Tunnel allows for remote extensions and branch offices to be connected via a single TCP port.

You no longer need to open a range of ports for RDP and SIP traffic but you can tunnel it all over a single, configurable port. That means you can use port 80 (if you are not using a web server in your office location) and be sure that remote extensions can connect from anywhere, even if they are in hotel or airport wifi networks which sometimes block higher ports in order to block VOIP traffic.

The 3CX tunnels regular SIP traffic, which means that you can use popular SIP hardware phones as remote extensions. They simply use the 3CX tunnel as an outbound proxy. See a configuration guide here. This in contrast to other tunneling protocols such as IAX which require the remote party to implement the IAX protocol and thus limit the devices/software that you can use. Download 3CX Phone System V5.1 here.

Google strikes with unbeatable hosted anti spam and anti virus product

I recently wrote about the excellent Google domains product. Well, now its possible to use just the security 'component' of Google domains and combine it with any mail server. For only $3 a year per user, you can outsource your entire anti spam and anti virus to Google. For a 50 user company, that’s only $150 per year!

Unbeatable, knowing how good Google anti spam and anti virus is and how much work managing spam and virus can be. Exchange and Lotus users no longer need to buy and manage expensive add on products.

So whilst Microsoft is busy burning 44 billion dollars (Only dollars, true), Google is busy gaining access to that vast and profitable Exchange Server customer base. Check out Googles offering here

Mr Ballmer! Two times zero still makes zero....!

These financial ‘analysts’ make me laugh some times. Microsoft’s intended purchase of Yahoo is supposed to ‘loosen Googles grip on ads’, ‘rock the foundation of online search’, to name just a few of the quotes I have seen. Truth of the matter is that both Yahoo and Microsoft have negligible market share in online ads, and for a very good reason: Their platforms are both very bad and have very little presence. No one uses the Yahoo or Microsoft search engine – only first time internet users that use IE's default and basically don’t know what they are doing. Not a great target market. The Adwords platform is light years ahead of Yahoo or Microsoft, has the *entire* market and is backed up by excellent support from a basically excellent company. Just how two losers uniting is supposed to beat Google is beyond me. Or am I missing something? Microsoft is $44 billion down and has just doubled its online market share to Zero. Mr Ballmer, you won’t beat Google on search and ads. Make Windows and Office better, and you might have a fighting chance to survive the Google onslaught and avoid that smart little Apple right behind you morphing into a Windows, Office and ultimately Microsoft killer.

ODF Alliance - Microsoft OOXML 1-0

The ODF alliance, the organization proposing an open standard document format, hit back brilliantly at some "research" performed by the Burton Group (aka the Microsoft Propaganda Department) , in which it claimed OOXML was superior. Not surprisingly this "research" by the Burton group was provided free of charge - of course because it had been entirely funded by Microsoft in advance and is to be used as another piece in the Microsoft FUD strategy.

The answer of the ODF alliance provides a good read, check it out here. Its well written and i think a clear win for ODF! Not surprisingly the Burton Group also published some free "research" in which it warns against Google Domains. What a coincidence. I wonder who paid for that free "research". The Microsoft propaganda machine is obviously busy, but are people still listening?

Sending Exchange & Outlook to the digital trashcan.....

I recently chucked the Exchange / Outlook Fatware combo for Google Apps. And i havent looked back since. Google Apps comes with the best anti spam & anti virus in town, 6 gigs per mailbox (and counting), and is super easy to administer. You can access your mail anywhere and its backed up by Google. No need to worry about a backup mail service or about moving ISP. And its free too. What more can you wish for? Even Santa Claus cant improve on that.

Whats more, now I can actually search for mail efficiently (and find stuff). Truth is, Outlook hasn't really progressed since Outlook 97 - which wasn't very good to start with. But if you want to continue using Outlook, you can - Google recently added IMAP support. So you can replace those cumbersome public folders with Google IMAP enabled mailboxes. To top it off, Google Domains has calendaring too, as well as a neat little user portal.

If you want to start 2008 without mail hassles, check it out! Meanwhile, have a great New Year celebration :-)

3CX Phone System V5 stable beta out

It took some time, but today we finally uploaded a really good beta of 3CX Phone System V5. The reason it took so long is because we packed a lot of new functionality in there. We also made significant changes to our phone system in order to prepare for new features and scale even better.

3CX Phone System V5 adds 3CX bridges, allowing for easy connection of remote branch offices. It has a built in VPN to allow external extensions to connect with a minimum of firewall configuration. It features phone provisioning, call recording, an inbound fax server, sip forking, BLF (so that you can see busy status of other lines on the phone), SIP trunking and G729 codec support. Many other the hood features too, such as a fully configurable SIP templating system. Check out version 5 by going to our version 5 beta forum

Oracle volunteers for a hammering in the virtualisation market

Just read a post by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of eweek titled 'Is VMware a dead duck?'. I assume that article was not meant seriously, but in deed last week Vmware shares went down on the announcement that Oracle had 'entered' the virtualisation business. As if VMware with a technology lead from here to the moon and 95% plus market share, should have anything to worry about??

Oracle makes databases and knows nothing about virtualization. VMware on the other hand, has been doing virtualisation for more then 10 years and has fought off attacks on its core market succesfully. Microsoft's attempts have been pathetic (centered around its purchase of Connectix, a second rate technology it bought cheaply years back). Citrix just flushed $500 million down the toilet buying Xen Source (at least it knows its plumbing is OK). Well I'm off to buy some more VMware shares whilst they are still cheap (relatively)......

McAfee buys ScanAlert

McAfee announced today it bought ScanAlert for US$54 million. ScanAlert sells a web site security scanning service. After a number of bad buys, McAfee seems to be on to a good thing this time. US$54 million for 75,000 paying customers is a fair price.

There's a US$24 million earn out, but if that is worded and devised similar to most earn outs, at the end it's either going to add significant value or not end up being paid at all ...

It seems McAfee plans to couple ScanAlert with their excellent SiteAdvisor service, purchased in early 2006, which rates websites for their safety. I think McAfee has made an excellent move and with this acquisition is putting itself in a good position to take advantage of the emerging web
security market.