Commentary

Most days I work out of my home office near Philadelphia on a 5 year old Windows 2000 machine. Most of what we do at Junction Networks is virtual. We use Salesforce.com for lead tracking and trouble tickets and Google for document sharing and e-mail. I tried an experiment this week to see how virtual I could be and see if anyone would notice.

I bought a new MacBook Air. My first Mac. I have to say I LOVE IT. Buy Apple stock now. I copied over usersnames/passwords and bookmarks from my Windows box to my new Firefox install on the Mac and left town. I drove 600+ away on a 'working vacation' in Indianapolis (where I grew up and my family still resides) so my kids could hang out with their cousins for a week. I only brought with me my Mac and my Polycom VOIP phone. I wondered if anyone would notice. I didn't tell anyone what I was up to.

First problem: SSH. We use SSH to log into our servers and I didn't have my key on my Mac. I created a new key and e-mailed it to John and asked him to upload it to my .ssh directory so I could log in. I thought my cover was going to be blown right there. But I explained it as 'away from the PC' and trying to log in with the MAC. John got me hooked up and I was logged into our servers. Phew. Over the first hurdle.

Plugged the Polycom phone into the DSL line and it came right up. My username and extensions all 100% intact. I called ext. 7008 to talk to Tim in Chicago and it worked perfectly. The MacBook Air effortlessly connected to the WiFi connection and e-mail was up and running.

I have to say the week went well. I was 100% on the Mac except for one instance where I needed to manipulate an Excel file with some serious string concat functions that aren't in Google docs yet. Other than that, eight hours a day on the MacBook keyboard (including this not-short post) and there were no issues. It is an amazingly comfortable keyboard and easy to touch type on. It didn't crash once and Firefox was lightning fast even with all the tabs open.

I think I made it. No customers or other employees know I'm not in Philadelphia. I was 100% effective here being able to access servers, customer records, e-mail and documents without issue and with the phone, I was accessible via my extension and was logged into both the sales and support phone queue the entire week.

Tomorrow, on the weekly conf. call on Friday, I'll spring it on everyone that I'm 12 hours away from our NYC office, not 1 hour as they assumed. I'm actually pretty shocked that it turned out this well, but I'm sure for our engineering team it will be a case of, 'yeah, we planned it that way.' Which, of course, they did.

I'm not sure how many people can do this in their day job, but I'm happy that I can. I can 'secretly replace' the 'near' me with a 'far away' me and no one notices. Pretty cool.

Now I need to go on vacation where I leave all this stuff at home...

In a well reasoned article entitled The case against VOIP author Carl Weinschenk makes three cases against VOIP:
1.) Companies looking at VoIP primarily as a way to cut costs on voice services should be careful.

I agree that in VOIP, as in all aspects of business, you should explore the full cost of any product or service prior to purchase. In the case of VOIP, the customer who we have seen with HUGE savings are those who think outside the box and take advantage of VOIP to its fullest extent. For example, worry less about the per-minute savings from VOIP and look at the savings you can obtain by sending the entire help desk staff to work from home thereby saving rent on an entire floor of people. One of the major advantages of VOIP is that it is not tied to a single geography like land lines. Users can be anywhere and still have full phone system access.
Reality: The real cost cutting comes from leveraging VOIP to meet your business needs, not just saving per-minute costs.

2.) The underlying plumbing counts. Organizations must do pre-deployment assessments, and those antiquated or inadequate infrastructure should not deploy VoIP. Upgrading substandard networks can wipe out any savings from VoIP.

I actually agree with this. But, if your network is some ancient token ring, then a little YouTube is going to bring you to your knees as well. Any decent 100Mb LAN is more than adequate for VOIP. Upgrade now and use collaboration tools like WebEx and other great business tools.
Reality: If your network isn't ready for VOIP, it's not ready for most of today's multimedia intense Internet applications and you need and upgrade anyway.

3.) There are many organizations that can get by quite nicely without VoIP. IT and finance should have a clear understanding of why VoIP is being deployed and a detailed and clear-eyed costs/benefits analysis should be performed.

You should always have a clear understanding of why any initiative is being deployed and a detailed analysis should be performed.

Bottom Line
VOIP is a perfect choice for any size company in a greenfield (new office, new network, new pbx) environment.
VOIP is a great choice for small companies looking for more functionality from their phone system. With VOIP they can do more (auto attendants, voicemail) with less.
VOIP is a great choice for companies with branch office and/or remote workers. VOIP is not tied to a location and allows for easy collaboration.
For large companies all in a single office building with no remote workers and no plans to let anyone work from home, VOIP must be evaluated carefully. If the only thing a company is doing is unplugging the phone lines and replacing them with a broadband connection, then the value of VOIP is diminished.

Lucky for us, most companies fall in the first three categories.

Douglas Crockford¹ of Yahoo! has just published an excellent new book titled Javascript: The Good Parts.

Another Book On Javascript?!

The nice thing about this book is that it is not just another manual on ECMAScript, but rather a terse description of JavaScript that "scrapes away the most horrendous features to reveal a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable, readable, and maintainable". The book covers more than the obvious topics like syntax and "global variables are evil" (though that is mentioned ad nauseam) - so you can be assured that this one isn't just a kiddy read.

Crockford's major theme of the book (and an excellent one IMHO) is that behind all the crust, fluff, and awkward features of JavaScript there is an elegant subset of truly excellent features in the language. The point being that by strictly adhering to only this subset we can make usable, extensible, manageable software that will have much greater durability than software produced using the ugly parts. I felt Crockford did a very nice job at hammering his points home about his take on the bad parts without sounding preachy in regards to coding style. Only in one of the appendices does he go into detail regarding his preferred style of coding, and even expressing these opinions he does so with sound arguments.

Who's it for?

If terms like "inheritance" and "closure" invoke images of coming to grips with your wealthy aunt Sally's passing, then this probably isn't the book for you. The book's value lies with the seasoned programmer that is experienced mainly in classical OOP or procedural programming. That programmer is the one who will find this book useful in coming to grips with the paradigm shift necessary to work with JavaScript rather than struggle with it. If you're one who finds yourself using JavaScript libraries like jQuery and Prototype but are confused as to what Object.extend and jQuery.extend are actually doing behind the scenes then you'll definitely want to purchase a copy. Plus, unlike those 1100 useless pages of Sams: Teach Yourself J2EE in 21 Days that have been sitting on my bookshelf since mid 2003², this book is sure to be one that you'll actually read. At a mere 100 pages or so (plus 40 pages of appendices), the book is quickly digestible and even more importantly, it's immediately applicable. You will notice your code improving in front of your eyes from the moment you get through the chapters on object literal notation and functions - chapters 3 & 4 respectively. Even if you are one who already know the basics of the language, simple things about JSON, and function scope - then you will still most certainly find use in the Crockford's demystifying coverage of a few of JavaScripts most popular object inheritance patterns.

So if, like my former self, you use JavaScript on a regular basis without a strong notion of how to do it "the JavaScript way", then I highly suggest giving this book a quick read. I promise that it will be time well spent.

1. For those who don't know who Doug Crockford is, he's the guy who wrote JSLint, along with many other invaluable JS tools
2. I should probably consider myself lucky that I never found those 21 days to give to J2EE

Andy Abramson in VOIP Watch is enthusiastic about new legislation to equate VOIP calls to land-line calls relative to access to E911.

It is a noble effort and certainly VOIP carriers should not be blocked from placing E911 calls, but my problem is that VOIP calls are not at all like land-line calls. It's more like trying to attach 911 to Instant Messenger. When I log in to IM, I could be at home, at the office or at some Wi-Fi hotspot somewhere. But, at each location, it's still me. IM is not tied down to a physical location.

Neither is VOIP. I have three phones all registered as "me". I have a phone in our NYC office, a phone in my home office and a soft phone on my laptop. That's three different physical locations. Two of them are relatively stationary, but my laptop could be anywhere. I could make three different 'users' for my three phones and make people call different extensions to find me, but all that hassle just to 'fix' 911 doesn't seem worth it. In order to do 911 properly, you need to tie down the phones to a single, never changing physical location, but that, in my opinion, kills one of the major selling points of VOIP.

Another major obstacle to VOIP 911 deployment is a notion of one phone number equals one location. For many, many of our customers, that is just not the case. Most customers have just one or two (a local and a toll-free) phone number but that represents handsets strewn around the globe. Specifically, we require the ability for a E911 service provider to provide service based on handsets or users, not on phone numbers.

Companies running their own PBX are another special case. Either the pbx needs to send the service provider all of the same E911 information or they need their own direct access to the PSAPs. Direct access would be best as it takes one of the links out of the chain. But, that would require an overhaul of the VOIP PBXs to directly support E911 and for PSAPs to accept calls from almost anywhere.

Fundamentally, I feel it is flawed to force VOIP to provide a destination when a call is placed to 911. Should dialing 911 reach a PSAP? Yes. But, it needs to be a different PSAP from what we have today. Ideally, there would be a national clearinghouse of 911 calls which could off-load the non-emergency calls and route the high-priority calls to the proper geography to be handled by local emergency responders.

For the most part, it's a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. There is no simple solution but there needs to be much more research and analysis done. Sadly, that's not the legislation I see being passed.

Junction Networks' OnSIP Hosted PBX users now have four ways to make/receive phone calls.

Firstly, you can use your SIP-based soft phone/hard phone. This is how the majority of the calls are made today. You simply dial your phone.

Secondly, you can use our "Click to Call" Firefox add-on. Then, any phone number listed anywhere in a WWW page is 'clickable'. When you click on that number, we place a call to your desk phone. Once you answer, you hear "Outside transfer" and then the 'ringing' of the phone for the phone number you clicked on.

Thirdly, use our "Click to call back" Ajax API, you can place some HTML into your WWW page which displays a form for entry of a phone number. The user puts their phone number into the field. When they submit the form, you receive an immediate phone call, again with the prompt of "Outside Transfer" followed by the ringing of the phone for the phone number they entered.

We now have a fourth way to make phone calls and the flexibility of this application is what excites me. I just used it this morning to call a SIP address directly because calling a SIP address from my SIP-based desk phone is laborious. Log into the OnSIP Hosted PBX user portal (as a user, not as an admin, if you are an admin you have to go to your 'user' page directly by editing the URL to: https://admin.onsip.com/users/xxxx/info/, where xxxx is your User ID number.)

Now, at the top of the portal is a link to "Place a Call". Clicking on the link creates a "call box" where you can type in a phone number or SIP address. Click on "Call" to place the call. Immediately your desk phone will ring and you will hear "Outside Transfer". You then hear the ringing of the phone on the other end. I love it.

Last week on the subway, I saw an unintentional but interesting social experiment. I was outside the turnstiles where you swipe your ticket to pay for your ride. Someone had left the emergency exit door wide open and there were no transit employees around. Here was a perfectly easy way to get a free ride off of the subway, but it would involve breaking a minor law.

As I watched my fellow New Yorkers scope each other out to figure out who would be the first to go through the door (because as we all know, it's not really breaking the law if it's done in a group), I walked over to the turnstiles and paid for my ride. Most people did the same thing as me, but finally, one person walked through the open door.

After that, everyone walked through the open door. After all, the door was left open.

One thing that surprises many of our customers at Junction Networks is that we have a policy of calling to verify financial information. We do this to protect ourselves, of course, but we also do it to protect our customers. With the anonymity of the Internet world, security is such a strong concern that every employee of Junction Networks is responsible for keeping an eye out. When we find stolen credit cards being used, we follow it up and alert the owners of the cards. We've helped people discover when they've been the victims of identity theft, which does make us feel good. We can't keep the baddies from stealing credit cards, but we can create at least one network where they can't use them.

We like to make sure our doors are locked - it's better for us, of course, but it also makes a better Internet.

Is Video over SIP the 'Next Big Thing'? Andy Abramson seems to think so. Andy states, "By offering and delivering video, along with voice and text as the new universally used platform for real time communications voice gets to come along for the ride via a real standard, SIP (session initiation protocol.)"

As long as the video is using the SIP standard, we at Junction Networks are all for it. Our OnSIP Hosted PBX already supports video codecs using the SIP standards. Today, any customer with a video phone can make video calls.

Oddly, however, I have the capability and most of us here at Junction Networks have video cameras, but I do not make it a habit to make video calls for business. My kids call the grandparents on the video phone every now and then, but as a business tool, at least here, it has not caught on. Does anyone have an industry where they use the video phone all the time? If so, I would love to hear about it.

The good news is that by supporting the SIP standards, we are ready to support anything that comes along.

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.