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I don't currently have an official home office, but I've had an office phone at home for years now. This home office phone mirrors the phone on my desk at work. Both phones are registered as a contact for my SIP address so they both receive all my calls an otherwise behave exactly the same - all very easy to do with OnSIP Hosted PBX, but that's another story. A few weeks ago I swapped out my home office phone for an Aastra 57i CT which comes with this nice little cordless handset that syncs with the main station.

While it has never been an issue for me at the office as I'm pretty much at my desk most of the day, having the phone at home hardwired to my DSL router has always been a little bit annoying as I kinda like futzing around the kitchen and whatnot while talking. This is no longer an issue thanks to the cordless handset.

The main unit appears to be identical to the 57i and works as expected. Overall the Aastra cordless has been great, but I found installing the battery for the handset non-obvious - it took a little head scratching as to which way it was supposed to go in and I was also afraid that I might break the battery's connector/wire in the process. Another nit pick is that it took me a while to remember which button was to answer and which was to hangup. While the buttons are in logical places, they confused me for some vague reason and I found myself occasionally hitting the wrong one during the first week. But once I managed to get myself past those issues, it has been smooth sailing.

Excellent post in Gigaom today: Web 2.0, Please Meet your Host, the Internet. The point of the story is that too many of the Web 2.0 companies are caught up in the software and not concerned about the 'host', in this case the Internet.

In my 'spare' time I coach my 10yo daughter's AAU basketball team. We have a great team with a lot of talent. Our travel season ended up with two championships and a 26 and 0 record. Pretty impressive. Our AAU season has not been as successful, so the head coach, Coach John, has instituted a 'back to basics' practice regimen the last two weeks. He, and any good coach, will tell you that a team with good fundamentals will always beat a team with pure talent. We're going back to the basics to re-establish those fundamentals.

The Gigaom article is similar. You can have the coolest Web 2.0 application, but if you can not handle the fundamentals of providing a service over the Internet, the equivalent of shooting and passing well, your application, whatever it is, will fail.

I feel that this is one of the reasons that Junction Networks has had so much success with the Web 2.0 version of our OnSIP Hosted PBX platform. Yes, it is Ruby on Rails, javascript and Ajax, but most importantly, it is built on a very firm foundation of servers, routers and BGP connections. To date, we have nearly a dozen BGP connections to ISPs both big and small. We have multiple, redundant servers interconnected to a mesh of routers. We have a very solid foundation upon which to build our next generation applications.

This spring, I started seeing an ad campaign on the subway about how using public transportation reduces your carbon footprint. And then last week, when I was reading the last edition of the This Old House magazine, I saw the phrase again. As gas prices rise and the summer heat (and haze) set in, I suspect we're going to continue to hear more and more about it.

A carbon footprint, if you haven't run into it, is the measure of carbon dioxide produced by human activity. It's a method of figuring out how much an activity contributes to global warming. If you want to measure your carbon footprint, which is mostly caused by transportation, you can find one of many online carbon footprint calculators to figure it out.

Before I lived in New York, I commuted 20 miles each way to work by car, putting about 10,000 miles/year on my car and, more importantly in terms of carbon emissions, emitting 4.3 tons of carbon dioxide into the environment. I happen to drive a tiny car, but if I were driving a SUV, my carbon emissions for the same ride would be 5.9 tons per year.

Although there's still a lot of talk about whether or not global warming is actually caused by human activity, it's certainly a lot more pleasant to be somewhere without car exhaust, so the less carbon dioxide that we put out into the environment, the better we'll all breathe. Working from home even just one day a week can contribute to the effort, which of course, our service makes easy. On days where I work from home, I fire up Eyebeam on my laptop, log into my OnSIP account and it's just like I'm sitting in the office.

And hey, in the spare time you're not spending on the highway, you can spend some time in your garden - after all, plants are some of the biggest carbon dioxide consumers on the planet.

Today was an exciting day at the Junction Networks lab - we put the Astra 5xi series phones through the Junction Networks interoperability testing and are very pleased to give them our official stamp of approval!

Aside from supporting all of our OnSIP Hosted PBX features, these phones were easy to use and configure. We tested a 53i and a 57i with interoperability to a Polycom 501 and had no problems at all during our many tests. We even upgraded the firmware to the latest available from Aastra's website, which does require that you provide a TFTP server, but was a otherwise fairly simple and well documented process. And for extra points, we also rather enjoyed the LCD of the 57i for its geek chic appearance.

Our preference was for the 57i over the 53i for user interface, but with a little custom configuration of the programmable buttons (done via the phone's webpage), we were able to make it do everything the 57i could. Still, for out of the box use, the 57i may well be worth the extra money -- and it does have that snazzy LCD.

Considering an Aastra 5xi series phone? We've updated our Knowledge Base Aastra configuration article and hope that you'll find it useful.

Have you seen the Polycom Productivity Suite?

For those of you that are using Polycom SIP phones, you may be interested in testing it. It offers some interesting features, such as four-way visual conferencing, a LDAP tie-in, local call recording, voice quality monitoring and third party call control. MarketWire did a nice write-up back in March of the functionality.

For conferences over four people, you'll still need a conference bridge (and I hope you've seen our newly launched OnSIP conferencing service), but it's a nice capacity upgrade for Polycoms, which previously only offered built-in three-way conferencing.

The LDAP tie-in is an exciting feature, since it allows you to create a corporate directory that is accessible from your phone and lets the user dial without ever punching in numbers. This is one of the best features of Cisco's proprietary (and pricy!) Call Manager solution and now it's available on a very reliable SIP phone. (And it's difficult not to mention the fact that our OnSIP Hosted PBX is much cheaper and simpler than running CallManagers!) We haven't tested this feature yet ourselves, but can easily imagine how our customers could use it to increase productivity.

Local call recording is also an excellent feature, but it's only available on Soundpoint IP 650, which is something to be aware of. Still, this is a great tool for industries where external call recording is required or for creating a record of voice conversations for historical purposes.

Polycom is listing the licensing fee for $11.99 per phone, which certainly seems well worth it for the additional functionality. We'd certainly love to hear your experiences and how you're using it in your business if you do give it a try.

One of the reasons why I love VOIP so much is its ability to unify technology and simplify my life. I've gotten used to the conveniences of getting voice mail delivered to my e-mail and being able to turn my laptop into my desk phone and work from my pajamas, but I still want more.

One of the newer features that has really spoiled me is our Firefox Click-to-Call Add-on, which allows me to dial any number listed on a web page from my configured SIP phone with a single mouse-click. Why waste time typing in a phone number? VOIP can save you the effort and you can spend your time doing what a human is really necessary for -- actually having the conversation.

Where does the Firefox Add-on become particularly useful? Any web page with numbers on it now becomes a dialing directory, which means that your Intranet with the phone directory of all of your employees is now a time-saving tool. If you use a web-based CRM, like Salesforce, calling a customer is as simple as clicking on the phone number in their account. (We like this feature a lot.) Want to order a pizza? Call a restaurant and make reservations? You're likely to go to the restaurant's web page to find the number, so why not let your computer also dial the number for you?

Cell phones made it unnecessary to punch in a number years ago, so why still do it on your desk phone?

I was listening to the radio this afternoon and the topic being discussed was how to save gasoline. There were plenty of suggestions; practical ones like keeping your tires properly inflated and driving at the speed limit, and bad ones; like driving in the slip stream of big rigs! But the suggestion that made most sense to me was work from home at least one day a week.

By working from home one or two days a week you can save 20% or more on gas, reduce travel congestion and lower green house gases. A win-win situation. I work out of my home office as often as possible and cutting out the trip to downtown Chicago saves me more than gas money. I am able to be more customer focused, be less stressed, and get to spend more time with my family.

Being connected to the office via my VoIP phone means I can fully participate in all the work calls. Customers need never know that they have reached me at my home office and I can easily participate in conference calls or transfer callers to remote colleagues.

Working smarter saves me time and money and makes me a more productive employee.

Inc. Magazine has a great article in their current - May 2008 - edition. In it they discuss how a company can cut their IT budget by outsourcing services like e-mail, CRM and their phone system.

Yes, Junction Networks is mentioned in the article including a glowing customer review. We are very excited to be singled out by a magazine that is such a great resource to our target market, namely entrepreneurial business.

The main focus of the article is well reasoned. Outsource what you can, and allow your company to focus on what I call 'the center of the plate.' For example, we here at Junction Networks, we use Salesforce.com for CRM, eFax.com for our faxing and Google for application sharing and e-mail. Especially since we have so many people working outside of the corporate offices, by sharing applications and information via WWW-based applications, it allows us to more quickly and efficiently share information across the entire organization.

Hopefully you like the changes to our marketing WWW Sites, http://www.junctionnetworks.com and http://www.onsip.com. Our marketing department is right on track with our messaging. We are using the Drupal content management system which should allow us more timely updates to the site, our knowledgebase and our Blog.

In addition to the new marketing WWW sites, we have also launched a new User Portal. The User Portal allows all OnSIP Hosted PBX users to log into the system to see their settings. Previously, only account administrators were able to log into the interface. The User portal only contains information pertaining to that user and does not show any account-level information. The new User Portal also contains a newly revamped and updated knowledgebase.

While we were at it, we launched a new application: Conference Bridge for OnSIP. OnSIP users pay $19.95 per month for unlimited conference bridge use for up to 10 (ten) simultaneous callers. Any callers coming in via the PSTN would still pay the regular 2.9c/min.

As an update, we recently changed the pricing on our ACD Queues to $19.95 for the ability to have up to 5 callers in a queue simultaneously. Around the same time we launched “Announcements” under the “Apps” tab. Announcements allow you to play a recording to the caller and then send the caller to a new destination. This is useful for ‘business hours’ or ‘directions’ announcements within an IVR application. Lastly, we launched the “Inbound Bridge” application which allows a customer to purchase phone numbers (DID) for any other VoIP provider and ‘bridge’ those DIDs into the Junction Networks service.

The next big release for us will be the User Dashboard, but more about that later.

Please let us know what you think about our new WWW Sites and our new applications.

Junction Networks is a software company and our Hosted PBX product, OnSIP, is 100% software based. Therefore, software patent reform is a high priority for us. Even though we are based primarily on in-house software and OpenSource software, we are not immune to software patents.

In my opinion, software patents are akin to patenting ideas. One my favorite business books is The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski. In one chapter the author traces the history of the patent of the paperclip. If we had software-like patents in the late 1800's, then the first person to patent the "idea" of fastening two or more pieces of paper would have received that patent and today we'd be stuck with fastening paper together with hat pins.

Instead of encouraging innovation, software patents stifle them. It makes it difficult for any software company to write anything new as some low-level part of the functioning of the software may already be patented.

Luckly, there is a legal case coming to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's (CAFC). This case, if won, could cause the end of software patents and the return of billions of dollars to the economy and out of the legal system/patent troll's coffers.