Can't we all just get along....

The answer is of course we can. At the Open Telephony Training Seminar we find that many of the vendors attending a getting along just fine. Representatives from Digium(Jared Smith), Sangoma(David Mandelsten) and Rhino Equipment(James Finstrom) are seen here being very chummy indeed. They were not the only vendors supporting the show. i9technologies, Aastra, Snom, and other have shown incredible support for the seminar and we think this is a great sign of things to come.

Three Reviews on the Way

As I am getting ready for the Open Telephony Training seminar ( which consists of getting house chores done ) I also am preparing three reviews:

1) The Intertex Surfinbird IX67 -Router, Firewall, SIP Proxy and Wireless AP device that was sent over from ABPtech.

2) The 2N VoiceBlue Enterprise GSM to Voip Gateway.

3) The Aretta "PBX in a Flash" hosted solution.

Somewhat of a tech overload as I also plan to blog the Seminar as it going to be ground breaking. So, we will see how quickly I can finish my evaluation. At this time I have the VoiceBlue attached to an Asterisk 1.4.18 system and have inbound calls working. It is an interesting device to say the least. I am going to try a VMWare PBX in a Flash on a MacBook Pro and using the ethernet port connect a Polycom Phone and the VoiceBlue Gateway to the Polycom and see if I can have a stand alone PBX with no Internet or PTSN. Just GSM.

Zimbra's, Yahoo's and Microsoft's... Oh my.

About a six months into the VoIP passion bug, I was looking for an enterprise level messaging for a large school district which has a 80/20 Mac/PC mix. So, I put the question out to the world... well, the ubergeek world anyway: Mac Calendaring Solutions ?

A fairly good discussion was aroused and out of it I chose Zimbra to investigate and ultimately deploy a few months later. I am still administering this deployment of Zimbra 5.0.1 and of'course still the one who "chose."

What is VoIP about Zimbra? There is an ( as far as I can tell ) unfinished Zimlets[read plug-in] connector for Asterisk. It seems development stopped. Sad and not really the story here.

Why should I be concerned about choosing Zimbra?

Well, because I got some funny looks when Yahoo bought Zimbra. I have no choice but to reassure that Yahoo is not Microsoft and our little Exchange replacement "Zimbra Collaboration Suite" is safe.....

The other shoe dropped and it sounds like I wasn't the only one to hear it hit the floor. Reprinted without permission is the email from Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra Co-Founder:

Dear Robert,

I am writing to communicate and discuss the unsolicited proposal that Y! got from MSFT. This is a proposal that our board is considering and this may or may not be completed. This is a very early unsolicited preliminary proposal and even if the board did decide to go in that direction there is a long road ahead.

At Zimbra, nothing has changed. We will remain utterly and thoroughly committed to making our customers successful. We will continue to innovate at a great pace. We will continue to disrupt the market with products that are years ahead of our competition. We will continue to embrace open standards. That's our DNA. And we remain committed to doing that.

Many businesses, partners, Higher-Eds and ISPs have committed to Zimbra by becoming paying customers. And there is an even larger set that is part of our open source community. We just made an irrevocable contribution of Zimbra 5.0 to the open source. No one can take that away. We will remain true and faithful to our contractual obligations and will do everything possible to make sure that our biggest assets - you - remain confident that we are here to stay and execute. Thankfully, I can confidently say that the Zimbra movement is bigger than any one company.

We are going to raise the bar exceptionally high next week with the announcement of Zimbra 5.0 and the release of Zimbra Desktop which consolidates many different mailboxes into one user interface. It's the first client-only play by Zimbra where we allow you to use our client to talk to gmail, yahoo! mail or any IMAP/POP source. We are pretty excited about this because it will be ages ahead of its other desktop companions while also being open source.

Thank you so much for allowing us to serve you... we are not planning to stop serving you. I will pro-actively communicate as and when I hear something official and tangible.

Satish Dharmaraj
Zimbra Co-Founder

Satish, all I can say is I hope you had an out in your deal with Y! because I doubt MSFT is going to want to keep an Exchange Killer alive.

For me the great irony of all this that in a cost saving move this school year I deployed "Google Apps for Education" for HS students use. I partially justified this move by suggesting that it would give the Instructional Technology department familiarization with Google Apps in case things go south with the current deployment.

So, not wanting to deploy Exchange had us deploy Zimbra, which was bought by Yahoo and if Microsoft buys Yahoo... is that going to drive us to Google?

I guess I need to prepare for more odd looks when I return to work Monday...

Intermission. Space Age VoIP

Gabcast! The VoIP Experience #50 - Intermission. Space age VoIP via OTTS

Thats right... Space Age VoIP for attendees of the Open Telephony Training Seminar who will walk away with phone technology that will allow for call initiation and in call voice commands. DUNDi also gets a bit easy to use via FreePBX. This was recorded with a WIP330 as a test.



Some links of note:

Get Official FreePBX Training

PBX in a Flash Forum

Asterisk® Commercial Viability