sip5060.net / en es

RSS Atom

Planet SIP

August 11, 2020

• Digium Top 3 Lasting Benefits of a Video Call and Collaboration System

  By now, most of the readers of this blog have been on countless (yes, I bet you can’t really keep track anymore!) video calls. I certainly have been almost living on Sangoma Meet. By the way, I just did a podcast with Mo Nezarati, EVP of Products and Strategy, about Sangoma Meet, if you want to listen to it.

  I definitely see the benefits of the video calls, especially in today’s environment. But someday, hopefully relatively soon, we’ll be back to normal. Are these video calls we’re having today bound to continue, or are they some ‘fad’ that in 10 years we’ll laugh about?

  My perspective is that they are going to become a part of our business environment, just like email or voice phone calls are. There are benefits that are just too hard to ignore.

  From my almost 5 months of experience, these are the top 3 benefits of video conferencing:

   

  First: seeing somebody establishes much more of a ‘connection’ than by having a voice call.

  I (used to) travel a lot, especially to see customers and to visit employee locations. Right now, seeing people on a video call is definitely better than just a voice call or voice conference call. And even when business travel resumes, you can’t be everywhere all the time. So, even if I visited a location last week, and this week I want to do a conference call with my colleagues there, I would definitely do it via a video call. 

  Second: most video call systems now include video sharing, where you can share documents on the screen and everyone can see them. 

  This collaboration element of a video call is huge! For example, recently I went over the marketing plan with my team. Doing this via sharing the document on Sangoma Meet was much more interactive and collaborative than if I was saying “go to page 27 now” and then saying “in the upper right we have “xyz”. I simply circled what I wanted to highlight and discuss. I also think this keeps people engaged better on a call like this. Maybe my team faked me out really good, but I felt like they were better engaged than if we just had this on a large conference call.

  And third: from an economic perspective, this certainly will help keep travel costs down. 

  While there is no substitute for a face to face meeting, sometimes there will be reasons where meeting on a video call would be better. I mean sometimes there are meetings where you fly in, have a 2 hour meeting, and then leave. If you haven’t seen the person in a long time and/or if this is a deal closing, sure there are reasons to do this. But if it’s a check-in meeting, maybe you check in half the time in person, and half the time via a video call. Or what about the sending 4 people to a meeting. Maybe you send 2, and the other 2 people that are there for specific support just attend via a video call. This enhances productivity because the 2 people don’t have to travel.   

  Anyway, my point on all this is that businesses now are seeing the T&A expense line drastically down, and business continuing “OK”, so it likely won’t come back to what it was for a long time, simply because the CFO can now make a case that that level of spending is not necessary. 

  If you haven’t been using video collaboration, or just want to try a new one, please visit https://meet.sangoma.com.

  The post Top 3 Lasting Benefits of a Video Call and Collaboration System appeared first on Sangoma.

August 06, 2020

• Digium Creating the Best Video Conferencing Experience for your Team

  Consider how your video conferencing experience has been so far. Do you like the solution that your company uses, or do you wish it had features tailored to how you do business? You may even be adapting to using video conferencing so well that you are starting to consider updating your hiring practices to include more remote employees.

  By this point, most companies are using some kind of face-to-face video service and, frankly, they all do similar things at their basic function.  

  So, what’s the best video conferencing solution out there? 

  This depends on a few factors, such as the type of business you are and what you use video conferencing for. 

  Does it Have the Features You Need?

  For example, if you are a small business and simply want to discuss how the team is doing, you’re not going to need any fancy features beyond sharing video and audio. But if your team gets together to collaborate, then you will want features like screen-sharing and maybe chat too. 

  If you are a larger business you may be looking for:

  • Large participant capacity
  • Strict security to protect sensitive information shared on the calls
  • Email integration for quick meeting invitations
  • Ability to video conference with your external customers who require support for your product or services
  • Dial-in for participants who are unable to open the video conference service

  After Features, It Comes Down to Ease of Use

  You may find that many video conferencing solutions available today offer quite a few of these features, but then it comes down to their ease of use. 

  Are you required to install a dedicated app? Do you have to log in each time to use it? Is it easy to screen-share or enable a different audio/video device?

  The more time spent working around the particulars of a solution, the less efficient your team is – not to mention the growing feeling of frustration to get on another video call. These tools need to work for your team, intuitively, because we’ve all learned, all too fast, that business video conferencing solutions have become mission critical.

  Have You Tried Sangoma Meet?

  If you are looking for a video conferencing platform better suited for your business needs, take a look at Sangoma Meet! It’s easy-to-use and simple and lets you start a call right from the website, meet.sangoma.com, with the click of a button. And if you want to invite someone to your call, simply share a meeting link, which automatically launches the conference from the browser on whatever computer they are using or from the optional desktop/mobile apps.  

  Its features are intuitively designed so that you have an optimal video conferencing experience with your team. Sangoma Meet is:

  • Secure: Offers end-to-end encryption on 1-to-1 calls and high encryption for multiparty calls, without storing any of your information on any servers when routing your calls.
  • Reliable: Based on WebRTC technology, Sangoma Meet works over WiFi and cellular network and adapts to your network connection
  • Multi-Party: Have up to 50 participants on a single video call
  • Multi-Platform: Launch from browser, dedicated MacOS or Windows apps or iOS and Android apps!

  Other features include Google and Outlook integration make meeting invites a breeze, as well as screen-share and chat to optimize productivity and collaboration on calls.

  Sangoma Meet is free to use, including all its features and with more coming too. Learn more about it, or better yet, start using it today by navigating to meet.sangoma.com .

  The post Creating the Best Video Conferencing Experience for your Team appeared first on Sangoma.

August 04, 2020

• Digium AstriCon 2020

  AstriCon typically takes place in October. And this year we had a great one planned. However, as announced two weeks ago, we have decided not to do an in-person event this year. I think we all understand it’s just not feasible in this environment.
  Instead, we will do a virtual event on October 21 and 22. We’re calling it AstriCon Plan(9) to differentiate it from regular FTF AstriCon. We’ve received a bunch of inquiries about the weird name. But when we again have a regular FTF AstriCon, you can ask me how we got to that name, but let’s keep that for a FTF meeting in a real OpenSource Lounge we set up at the regular AstriCon ☺.

  After much debate, we decided to structure the online event as if it were happening in real-time at a location. Day one will be workshops, and day two will be conference talks at specific times. And there will be structured Q&A with the talks, and we’ll have lounges to meet and talk to people. Like you’re at an event, but you’re not. So if you want to join, for example, three talks, you’ll know when they are, and you can join the webinar at the appropriate time.

  We’re looking forward to seeing you at AstriCon in October. You can register here.

  The post AstriCon 2020 appeared first on Sangoma.

July 30, 2020

• Digium UC in Times of Pandemic

  By now, we have all been impacted by the pandemic situation, whether directly or indirectly. You or someone you know has probably contracted COVID-19, lost a job, or cancelled this year’s vacation. There have been many difficult situations to work through this year.

  This article is available in Spanish. ¡Lea este artículo en Español!

  Ecuador, a small country in South America, was among the first countries to suffer from the effects of the virus, with dramatic spikes in the number of infections and casualties. Today, I would like to share with you the story about how the UC system from one of our customers in Ecuador was employed in a meaningful yet completely unexpected way to connect people to the help they need.

  

  Back in late January—after finally getting the green light to move away from their legacy system—our customer Universidad de Especialidades Espíritu Santo, a private university, had just completed the implementation of their brand-new phone system. Shortly after, COVID-19 hit. 

  Luckily, the business phone system and its capabilities nowadays has greatly evolved since the days when the operator billed you for internal calls between branches or even different buildings.

  Thanks to this, the university’s response to the virus was swift, rapidly enabling faculty and staff to work remotely when the mandated quarantine began and travel became legally restricted. This was possible for the university because our solutions allow you to take your business phone number wherever you go, so that you can answer regular work calls, conference, chat, and collaborate with coworkers by using the UC client app on your laptop or mobile phone.

  Want to know the best part? The university did not incur any additional licensing costs to enable these features and start working remotely. The faculty and administrative staff, even the chancellor who was abroad at the time, were all able to connect and communicate as though nothing had changed. 

  As a next step, they migrated the call center operation, so that no calls from current students or potential applicants would be missed. This soon sparked an idea: If our staff can be set up to connect remotely so easily, what if we expanded the advantages of the system to do our share for our fellow citizens?

  Think about it for a second. It was the first few weeks of the lockdown. Local health systems and regular emergency lines had collapsed due to unexpected high volumes. Uncertainty and fear was the order of the day, since even the experts struggled to understand the virus. This was the environment in which the university decided to host a COVID-19 hotline, providing anxious callers with access to medical professionals qualified to screen for coronavirus symptoms. 

  

  Over 80 doctors from around the country decided to join the initiative, connecting to the university’s phone system via the Zulu UC app installed on their mobile phones. By the end of the teleservice’s first day, the system reported that over 12 thousand inbound calls had entered the queue.

  Over the last two decades, new and exciting technologies have emerged in the telecom field, and our communication needs have developed correspondingly. We now need more and better ways to interact in our business world. It certainly hasn’t been easy for anyone to deal with the crisis, and the path to recovery and regaining some sense of ‘normalcy’ is long. Duly prepared or not, companies have had to manage to offer their personnel with the appropriate resources to push on. We can only hope that the versatility and increased flexibility prompted by the situation will prove to be lasting, positive change in the work ecosystem.

  As for the university, they have moved on to support those affected by the crisis by broadening their activities in health relief, such as opening new biolab testing and clinic facilities. Surely, little did they suspect when they first implemented their UC phone system, that it would turn out to be such a relevant and crucial organizational decision, enabling them to more rapidly and completely lend a helping hand to their community. 

  As a UC vendor, we at Sangoma have always been strong advocates for mobility and remote work enablement. Still, I can personally say that it has brought us great satisfaction to see our tools used in such a purposeful way.

  If you want to find out more details on this implementation, download the UEES University case study!

  The post UC in Times of Pandemic appeared first on Sangoma.

July 28, 2020

• Digium The Merging of Contact Center and Unified Communications, Part 2

  Business owners today are now understanding that having a basic contact center as part of their UC system enables much better customer service, and are asking to add multimodal contact center features to the UC system. Why have another specific expensive contact center unit (either on-prem or another monthly cloud expense) if the UC system can handle the basic contact center features that would help a small business?  Because why not – the UC system already includes multimodal communication potential.   

  Some basic phone features include music on hold, callback when available, call queues, having inbound callers hang-up while in queue and still retain their position in line, built-in queue priority so specific customers can be prioritized above others in the queue, automated appointment reminders allowing your team to schedule calls and allowing recipients to confirm, cancel or reschedule, and routing rules (such as time of day routing or department routing). These all-important call center or contact center features enable better customer service and even make the small business look bigger to the outside world. All of what is described above can be routed to a business phone number, which as described above can be your desk phone and/or your smartphone and/or your laptop.  So you can handle customer service calls remotely as well.

  And some businesses also want their phone system to integrate with other commonly used business tools, such as CRM, help desk, property management or practice management software. This is an aspect of expensive dedicated contact center software that is also being brought into the UC realm, as UC starts to merge with CC. For example, customer information can easily be accessible to whoever answers the phone, even if it’s not a dedicated agent, in a small business, saving valuable time for the customer. The customer phone number can help pull up prior customer information so when the small business gets on the phone, they may already know what the customer is calling about. Also, if a customer service rep needs to find an expert in the company, then a UC tool with presence can help the rep get an answer fast.  

  We are seeing more and more contact center features start to become part of the UC phone system. There are many businesses that need some contact center functionality, but not like those required for large gigantic contact centers like large airlines or financial institutions might need. So we’ll see offers for smaller businesses emerge, where the features they need are just part of the overall system.

  If you are looking for an affordable business phone system that includes all the features you typically need, even contact center features and a desktop and smartphone mobile client, Sangoma’s UC platforms are for you. 

  To read the first part of this two-part Machi Minute series, click here!

  The post The Merging of Contact Center and Unified Communications, Part 2 appeared first on Sangoma.

July 23, 2020

• Digium Essential Features for your Virtual Contact Center

  In case you missed it, the business world is going through some growing pains as organizations grapple with the unique challenges of staying in contact with employees and customers, without any close contact. The recommendations of the US Center for Disease Control and other public health organizations have forced businesses to rapidly roll out policies and technology to continue to operate “business as usual,” while our lives feel anything but usual. 

  The question for these businesses is how to accommodate both the increased contact volume from customers quarantined at home and the need for employees to address these customers while working from the safety of their own homes. And that’s where a trend that was already gaining popularity perfectly addresses at least some of the challenges of the “new normal”: virtual contact centers.

   

  What is a Virtual Contact Center?

   

  As Jim Machi mentioned in a recent Machi Minute, the concept of a contact center arose out of the old-school call center when customers began to contact businesses in ways other than a telephone call (especially after the advent of email and other web-based communications). While adding a variety of new contact methods, contact centers still looked like call centers with dozens (or hundreds) of employees commuting to offices to do their work of addressing customer needs. 

  While this might still have been necessary even a decade ago to ensure network security and quality of service, the reality of modern life and network technology is such that most people have the high-speed Internet necessary to take care of their work, from home. This has enabled a radical reenvisioning of the workplace and the rise of virtual contact centers, which can save businesses money while boosting employee morale. Rather than commuting to an office, agents in a virtual contact center simply login from home to complete their work, with no change in service for customers contacting the business.

  Essential Features for Virtual Contact Centers

   

  So, let’s say you’re a business who may not have realized before that they operate a contact center in some capacity (and that can be any business that receives enough contact to require a dedicated employee or team to handle the calls, emails, and more), what should you look for in a virtual contact center solution? Here are some of the essential features for virtual contact centers:

   

  Reliable Web Client – the Central Hub of the Virtual Contact Center

   

  What separates virtual contact centers from “regular” contact centers is the flexibility for agents to work from anywhere. Naturally, that means that the web client for virtual contact center solutions is the central hub of operations for agents and managers and must be reliable and intuitive, to allow streamlined, remote onboarding and ensure the trustworthiness of the solution.

  The best virtual contact center solutions feature easy-to-use, browser-based user interfaces that enable agents to simply login to access the full suite of communication tools available to them.

  To see examples of this type of intuitive web-based user interface, check out the Switchboard and Switchvox Softphone for Switchvox Unified Communications contact center solutions or Zulu UC and Zulu Mobile for PBXact contact center solutions.

   

  Call Queues – the Heart of the Virtual Contact Center

   

  Contact centers exist for the sole purpose of boosting revenue and providing better customer service by more efficiently handling customer communications. The crucial element in achieving this is a well thought-out system for contact distribution. In modern contact centers, this is accomplished through call queue functionality, which provides virtual lines for customers to wait as short a time as possible to receive attention.

  The best virtual contact center solutions feature advanced call queue features like queue priority and global arrive time that allow any number of important parameters to determine the right order to address incoming customer contact. Other useful call queue features include the ability to assign overflow agents who can seamlessly handle customer contacts when queues become too full for those responsible for it.

   

  Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Technology – Intelligent Automatic Call Distribution

  On a side note, you may be wondering how incoming calls and other forms of communication are assigned to the right queue. Long ago, this task would have been handled by an army of receptionists, but now that would be an unheard of expense. That’s because current technology enables automatic call distribution, a cornerstone of the modern contact center. 

  And what’s more, not only can customers indicate the call queue they believe addresses their needs, advanced Interactive Voice Response technology (commonly known as an IVR) allows callers to be qualified conversationally, using their voices instead of listening to endless directories of numbers to press. Sometimes, these IVRs are so well-designed that it can be difficult to tell, as a caller, whether or not you are speaking to a human being or an artificially intelligent contact center solution.

   

  Statistics, Reports, and Analytics – the Brain of the Virtual Contact Center

   

  Just as the web-based user interface is the central hub and call queues are the heart of the virtual contact center, the communication platform’s ability to provide detailed reports, real-time statistics, and actionable analytics serves as the brains of the contact center.

  The best contact center solutions provide robust reports instantly, while giving the option to schedule reports to be generated and sent automatically for review. The reason for this is simple, especially for virtual contact centers. Agent performance can easily be monitored, and contact center workloads can be more flexibly managed. If there is a consistent spike in activity, more agents can be assigned to a queue. And for random flare-ups or declines, agents from other queues or job responsibilities can be reassigned as temporary overflow agents, and vice versa.

  Real-Time Wall Board

  One very useful feature of Sangoma Contact Center solutions is the ability to display valuable switchboard statistics on a dedicated “wallboard”. This is useful for agents trying to stay on top of workflow and for managers looking to most efficiently staff their call queues. And this is just as true for virtual contact centers, with agents and managers having access to the Wallboard functionality from their home offices.

  Sangoma Virtual Contact Centers and CCaaS

   

  Looking for an affordable contact center solution for your business?

  Many organizations, even small businesses, are finding that contact center functionality is a vital component of their next business phone system. Luckily, Sangoma is proud to offer the best value in Unified Communications (UC).

  Sangoma’s award-winning UC platforms, in addition to merging many different methods of communication into a single platform and interface, include advanced contact center functionality built-in and available to users for no additional cost. Plus, these UC contact center solutions offer businesses the advantage of using the software hosted in the Cloud (contact center as a service or CCaaS), making it that much easier to enable virtual contact center operation.
  

  Click here to schedule a personalized demo of Sangoma’s premier contact center and CCaaS solutions! A friendly Sangoma product specialist will be happy to help you determine your business needs and offer pressure-free solution advice.

  The post Essential Features for your Virtual Contact Center appeared first on Sangoma.

July 21, 2020

• Digium The Merging of Contact Center and Unified Communications, Part 1

  Once upon a time there was something called a “call center.” That’s because you would make a telephone call to it. It was a central place where agents were located that you would communicate with via a telephone call. That was the only real way to communicate with them. Over time, fax was added so it wasn’t just phone calls, and then emails were added next. Fast forward to today, and there aren’t really call centers anymore. There are contact centers, and you can communicate with them in different ways – websites, various social media platforms, apps designed to specifically interact with the company (that even proactively ‘push’ information to you), text, video, and, yes, still even phone calls and emails and fax.   

  This evolution towards a contact center was driven by many things – technological advances in networks, for example, that made this possible. But even beyond that, it was driven by people wanting to communicate in different ways – ways that were easier and more efficient for them. And it was also driven by companies wanting to reduce costs because if communication could become more structured towards self-help and less towards people and real time communications, costs would be reduced and customer satisfaction could also potentially go up. Put together, these combined to enable enhanced multi-modal communication to become reality in today’s world.  

  There are still changes occurring in the world of contact centers, especially as it relates to small and medium businesses. Many small businesses have done so already or are looking to update their existing phone system to a modern phone system that includes Unified Communications capabilities. These capabilities include instant messaging to colleagues, even on their mobile phones, having your smartphone also be an extension of your office business phone number (i.e. your smartphone would ring on a call to your office number), and email and fax integration.  

  During this Work From Home, or Remote Work period we are now in, companies with UC systems have been able to fare better. One important aspect of UC is the mobility angle – since the communication is on IP, it can be via LTE or WiFi, which means you can be connected remotely relatively easily. So you can work remote, or work from home, or even on a boat. Anyplace with an LTE or WiFi connection. And with an expected 628 million public WiFi hotspots by 2023 (up from 169 Million in 2018), this trend will continue for sure. Video conference calls with teammates and customers, phone numbers ringing to your laptop or smartphone, a single place to look for customer messages or emails, etc. enabled companies to have employees work remotely and seamlessly continue to drive the business forward.

  But getting back to the UC capabilities that are in the business phone system. This sounds familiar, right? Yes, this is multimodal communication as describe above, but in the business phone system.

  Next week, I will explore this topic in more detail.

  The post The Merging of Contact Center and Unified Communications, Part 1 appeared first on Sangoma.

July 16, 2020

• FreeSWITCH What to expect from ClueCon Deconstructed

  Every year, the FreeSWITCH team hosts ClueCon, an awesome developers’ conference in Chicago. Things are looking a little bit different than usual, but 2020 will still have its own version of ClueCon online: ClueCon Deconstructed. It’s free to attend this three-day-long event, and many of the things that make ClueCon special will still happen in this new virtual format, which will be hosted in our very own virtual office space. Whether you’ve attended each year or this is the first time you’re hearing about it, we want to give you an idea of what to expect on August 4th-6th, because so much of what there is to love about ClueCon will still be happening, from insightful presentations and the Coder Games hack-a-thon, to Dangerous Demos and the Gigabit Reception. Not to mention we will still be offering amazing raffle prizes, like the custom engraved MacBook Pro!

  The conference will officially be taking place from Tuesday-Thursday, however, on Monday, August 3rd, we will be hosting a pre-conference coffee chat from 10am-12pm CST where the team will be hanging out and answering questions. If you want to meet the team or ask us anything, you should grab a cup of coffee and join us! 

  The conference will kick off on Tuesday with a day full of open source workshops you can attend for free. Pick one, a few, or all to attend: SignalWire, Janus, Kamailio, OpenSIPS, and FreeSWITCH. Each workshop will last for about an hour and will be led by industry experts. Of course, the day will include little breaks between each workshop, so if you do want to attend them all, you’ll have plenty of time to recharge. And something extra special will also be taking place overnight during our timezone – a FreeSWITCH workshop will be available at 5 am CST just for the convenience of our attendees on the other side of the world. We have both team members and attendees from all across the globe, and so we’re stepping outside of our timezone to make ClueCon Deconstructed accessible to everyone! You can check out the schedule here.

  Then on Wednesday, get ready to game – we’re hosting an online version of our Coder Games hack-a-thon! There are two challenges this year, one more suited to our attendees who want to code and build their way to amazing prizes (like an Oculus Quest and a Nintendo Switch) and one for our puzzle-solvers and riddle-lovers! Our Game Theory Challenge requires you to start working now, so if you’re interested in competing for these prizes, you can read more about the challenge here. At 10am CST on Wednesday, these games will be demo’d for the enjoyment of all attendees. Then at 11am, everyone will break up into teams to participate in the Get a Clue challenge – a virtual version of the classic Clue board game. In this version, Dangerous Demos have been hacked, and you’ll have to figure out which FreeSWITCH team member committed the crime, in what room, and with what weapon! Get more details about Get a Clue here. 

  ClueCon always has Dangerous Demos, and ClueCon Deconstructed is no exception. Dangerous Demos are a fast paced show of hacking excellence. Everybody loves to watch demos at tech conferences but few are brave enough to actually do them. Things can and do go wrong and who wants to risk it? On Thursday morning attendees can watch the most dangerous demos, where the danger is part of the fun!  If you’d like to participate, you can fill out a sign up form. Those who demo have the chance to win one of the highly sought-after Dangerous Demos 3D laser etched trophies. Awards will be offered in several categories, and anyone who can take home a trophy can rightly class themselves as a pioneer of open source and an Original Geek. Even if you don’t want to demo yourself, we need audience members to vote, so you can kick back, relax, and watch some demos crash and burn!

  The insightful presentations are one of the biggest parts of what make ClueCon so memorable, and we haven’t left those out, either. During the afternoon on Wednesday and Thursday, you can catch a dozen half-hour long speaking sessions from brilliant industry professionals. These speakers will also be around later to answer any questions, hang out and chat! You can read about the 2020 speakers here. From the comfort of your own home you’ll get to witness all kinds of conference-worthy presentations about telephony, WebRTC, VoIP, and more, with built-in breaks throughout the day.

  Exciting raffle prizes, including the custom engraved MacBook Pro, will be awarded throughout the week. That’s right – it’s free to attend, AND you’ll be entered to win all kinds of prizes and swag just for showing up. Then after a week full of presentations, demos, coder games, and raffles, we carved out time for networking and fun. The Gigabit Reception is a great way to meet your peers and get to know industry heads in a relaxed and fun atmosphere. On Thursday afternoon, grab a drink or a snack and join us for games, an underground guitar jam session and the highly anticipated ClueCon Karaoke, all in a virtual format! 

  If you haven’t already, you should register now! 

  The post What to expect from ClueCon Deconstructed appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

July 15, 2020

• FreeSWITCH What to expect from ClueCon Deconstructed

  Every year, the FreeSWITCH team hosts ClueCon, an awesome developers’ conference in Chicago. Things are looking a little bit different than usual, but 2020 will still have its own version of ClueCon online: ClueCon Deconstructed. It’s free to attend this three-day-long event, and many of the things that make ClueCon special will still happen in [...]

  The post What to expect from ClueCon Deconstructed appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

July 14, 2020

• Digium Why an SMB Needs a Unified Communications System to Grow

  As I’ve written about quite a few times, the drivers for buying a UC phone system that you might typically hear are:

  • Efficiency improvement
  • Productivity gains

  These are typical since, with UC, there can be other forms of communication beyond phone calls all tied into a single system. Therefore, there does not have to be context-switching to communicate. This saves time. For instance, instant messaging can happen during a conference call. Or you are connected to your smartphone outside of the actual business environment so you can “expand” your office hours. Or as I’ve written about recently you can work remote or WFH. Or because all the calls are on IP, the business can save mobile phone and PSTN trunk charges. Add this all up and the business obtains efficiency and productivity gains.

  Due to the inability of many businesses right now to actually see their customers face to face, phone calls are becoming more important than they have been in recent years. Some business can only be transacted on the phone or on the internet, and for a phone call, the physical office may not actually be even open.  

  Those businesses with Unified Communication features such having a business phone number ring right to a laptop or smartphone (so you don’t even have to be in the office and can be remote or at home to get an office phone call) and instant messaging so you can collaborate better with your colleagues (even when you are on the phone) have fared much better than those with a basic phone system.  

  But that’s probably even not enough. Some small businesses are now understanding that having a basic contact center would enable so much better customer service. These small business owners know that features such as music on hold, callback when available, call queues, call recording and routing rules (such as time of day routing or department routing) are also important. You can look bigger, you can get the call to the right person at the right time, and you can keep your customers happy.

  And that’s all part of the growing trend in Unified Communication systems – add basic call center functionality to the UC system.

  And Sangoma has all that, that’s why we are an excellent choice if you are in the market for a new UC phone system. We offer one easy to understand price, all the products you need to complete your system (Phones, Headsets, Desktop and Mobile collaboration client, Video collaboration, Gateways, SBC) are from us, and we include basic call center features. In one word, we offer VALUE.

  The post Why an SMB Needs a Unified Communications System to Grow appeared first on Sangoma.

July 09, 2020

• Digium Resellers: Building Your Customer Base

  For most small to medium- sized businesses (SMBs), the continuous search for new customers is essential to meet or exceed growth targets. As a reseller, the extent of available prospecting options for your business is often influenced by the size of the organization, and whether there are dedicated resources for new customer acquisition. Larger organizations typically have the human capital and the budget to invest in multiple avenues for finding new customers. Regardless of company size, one factor is particularly applicable to all organizations.

  It’s extremely important for any business owner to understand and properly manage customer acquisition costs. For example, it is less expensive to keep existing customers as a means to maintain current or incremental levels of revenue, but acquiring new customers is imperative if you want to achieve significant growth. When it comes to finding prospects (and customers) that are ready and willing to purchase, there are many options available, with varying impact on your customer acquisition cost.

  It’s often a no-brainer to start by focusing on retention. As a source of revenue, returning customers should be the least costly (and easiest) form of maintaining and possibly growing revenue. In SaaS models, retention is key, of course. But for any type of business, such as resellers who focus on managed services, the sales process for adding on additional products and services is often met with less resistance. The customer has already purchased at least once, and research proves their experience with a business will determine if they return.

  Great products and excellent customer service, during and after the sale, are paramount to the customer experience. But you still need new customer growth. Let’s take a look at some new customer acquisition strategies:

  The Power of Reputation: Word of Mouth & Referrals

  If you are doing a good job with retention efforts, then referrals from existing customers could be the least expensive option for new customer recruitment. Referrals require little effort if you have a strong history of quality product/service offerings, a solid reputation for solution implementation, and excellent customer service. Attracting customers, targeting business opportunities, and finding work or new business is one of the top challenges among U.S. small business owners, and for many, word of mouth referrals are often one of the best sources of revenue after returning customers.

  There are standalone solutions that help you develop, promote, and manage a more complex referral system- but small businesses looking for a simple route can promote referral opportunities on their website, in email campaigns, or by just picking the phone and making the ask. It’s worth noting that referral programs are usually more successful if your existing customer is rewarded with some incentive, such as a future discount or cash.

  Staying Visible: Social Media

  A more recent prospecting tool available to savvy resellers is the use of social media, sometimes referred to as social selling. If done correctly, it can have a huge effect on spreading the word about your business and in actual lead generation. With the rapid rise of business-specific social media activities and the increasing audience acceptance of the approach, use of social media is only expected to continue rising. Plus, there are pay-to-play options available, such as sponsoring a post to make it display in target audience feeds, placing low-cost ads, and more. Every platform is unique!

  In addition to (and sometimes within) the traditional social media sites, there are online communities and topic-specific groups (such as LinkedIn Groups) that provide incredible access to your target audiences. Participating in these social communities can be another valuable asset for reaching buyers. These also sometimes have pay-to-play options, but even if you choose not to put lead gen dollars to these paid options, it is still a good (no cost) avenue for finding and conversing with potential prospects and demonstrating your knowledge as an expert in your field.

  Getting Active in the Local Chamber of Commerce

  Another time-tested avenue for promoting your business is participating in or sponsoring local events. The first step is to join and become active in your local Chamber of Commerce. Many prospects will use the Chamber to network with other members for peer referrals in an effort to validate a business’ integrity. Many local chambers hold networking events, host committees you can volunteer on and have other events that provide great opportunities to meet and greet your future prospects. Chamber-related events will require a bit more time and effort, but the more involved a business is, the more fruitful the outcome can be with finding prospects.

  Taking Advantage of List Purchase Services

  If you have trouble building your own list of prospects, a proven method for finding potential prospects is to buy targeted lists that match your ideal customer profile. There are many agencies that provide such services, and the lists can usually be filtered and regionalized with great effect. There are several methods of marketing activities that can be implemented with these lists from email campaigns, cold calling, and traditional card or brochure mailers. Obviously, these prospects are very cold and may or may not be currently seeking the solution you offer. While the effectiveness of the activities vary, pre-purchased lists (price typically based on the number of contacts you buy) can provide a significant return on investment. Keep in mind: the quality of the vendor and their lists should be researched and validated.

  Networking at Trade Shows and Conferences

  Whether regional or national, trade shows can still be an effective method for evangelizing your products and services to a large audience. Participation can range from only having a booth for displaying products and services to participating in the additional sponsored events or speaking opportunities offered. Participating in trade shows can end up being one of the most expensive and time consuming activities, but it does allow you face-to-face interaction with potential prospects. Ensuring you have seasoned employees available for the event, especially with some shows being multi-day events, is imperative but may be a trade-off that isn’t worth the effort depending on your staffing level.

  Prospecting new customers can be done in several different ways, each of which involves a varied amount of time and money. If you have the available budget, you may also choose to hire third-party marketing firms to assist with prospecting activities, from campaign development to managing online pay-per-click programs (such as Google AdWords). The comfort level lies solely on business stakeholders and their willingness to be involved in prospecting.

  Curious about how Sangoma supports its partner network with marketing, leads, and deal registration? Learn more about the Sangoma Partner Program!

  The post Resellers: Building Your Customer Base appeared first on Sangoma.

July 07, 2020

• Digium Data Traffic Trends and the (WiFi) Impact on Enterprise Communications

  Around this time of the year, I usually read the Cisco Annual Internet Report to see if there is anything interesting relating to the business communications market.  And there are usually a few good nuggets. This year, one of the things that stood out the most is something that also stood out last year – that Public WiFi Hotpots are going to be almost everywhere. And that the average WiFi connection speed will triple to 91.6 Mpbs in 2023 as compared to 2018.

  All this will have a profound impact on your business, because it means you’ll have more people coming to our business, either via phone call, website, social media, or video via WiFi.  So you better be ready.

  And if the last few months taught us anything, it means you’ll have to adapt to mobility. But this not just adapt to it for a while, but to embrace it. So even when this pandemic is over, it means employees working anywhere, anytime, and customers and prospecting coming to you via all kinds of means from all kinds of places. And it likely means even more video.

  Been on too many video collaboration (Sangoma Meet) calls lately? Get ready for more. Been on video calls in a nice shirt and shorts? Get ready for more. Been on Sangoma Meet calls with 40 people? Get ready for more.

  Ultimately, it means you cannot ignore using a UC system. It means your business phone system better have a mobile / smartphone / tablet capable UC client that can handle voice, presence, collaboration and video.   

  As I wrote last year around this time… “make sure your business phone system supports mobility”.  Little did I know what that really meant.

  Sangoma, in case you didn’t know, supports mobility.

  The post Data Traffic Trends and the (WiFi) Impact on Enterprise Communications appeared first on Sangoma.

June 30, 2020

• Digium A Modern Approach to Wholesale SIP Trunking

  SIP Trunking is important for any enterprise these days – this is the connection into your building that carries phone calls to an on-premise UC platform, or is the underpinning of any cloud communications service.   It must be robust, be resilient, be able to offer a wide array of DIDs, and comply with local telephony laws such as location service.

  However, in today’s world, that is not enough, especially if you are a wholesale SIP trunk provider.  More and more, additional services are expected of the wholesale SIP trunking provider.  Services now expected include:

  • Fraud Prevention
  • Texting
  • Emergency Services 
  • Cloud-based Management Portal, so the client can perform self-service on common functions

  Frost and Sullivan’s whitepaper on this topic outlines what a modern SIP Trunking business needs to provide.

  The post A Modern Approach to Wholesale SIP Trunking appeared first on Sangoma.

• WebRTC Hacks Using getDisplayMedia for local recording with audio on Jitsi

  I wanted to add local recording to my own Jitsi Meet instance. The feature wasn’t built in the way I wanted, so I set out on a hack to build something simple. That lead me down the road to  discovering that: getDisplayMedia for screen capture has many quirks, mediaRecorder for media recording has some of its […]

  The post Using getDisplayMedia for local recording with audio on Jitsi appeared first on webrtcHacks.

June 25, 2020

• Digium Customize and Track Call Campaigns with Unified Communications

  With today’s technology and analytics tools, businesses have more visibility into lead sources than ever before – to the point that it can quickly become overwhelming. You can measure everything from email open rates and promo codes used, to YouTube views and filled-out forms. But what about phone calls?

  For industries outside of basic e-commerce, the vast majority of leads and sales come in via phone, so customizing and tracking their journey is vital. Implementing a Unified Communications (UC) solution is an easy, effective, and affordable way to do this.

  Here are some of the UC features that help the most with your call campaigns:

  • Intelligent call routing allows your employees to route calls to specific departments based on which campaign the customer is calling about. If you have separate numbers for each marketing campaign (for example, you have one for a digital billboard display and one for an email campaign), you can set up automatic routes to get customers where they need to be, without asking.
  • Interactive Voice Response (IVR) lets your business record and play back additional information to callers as they reach your system. You can customize the message for each phone number used. If a customer sees your billboard ad for a free lawn evaluation and calls the number listed, you can tailor the message to appeal to that specific promotion.
  • Caller ID control allows a business to customize the caller ID that the employees see, which lets them know which ad campaign likely triggered the call. For example, your employee will see something like 555-555-1212 billboard ad on their computer and phone when the incoming call is received. This enables the employee to answer the phone and be prepared to address the messaging in the ad.
  • Mobility allows your employees to receive campaign calls from their mobile device and still see the proper Caller ID information. This means your traveling sales team has the same control as your in office team.
  • CRM Integration makes it easy for employees not only to reference customer information when receiving calls but also to ensure that all details of a call are noted in customer records.

  In addition to the features UC facilitates for your call campaigns, it goes even further by measuring the results of your efforts:

  • Call Reports allow your business to run reports by incoming phone number so you can see exactly how many calls the custom call campaign generated, including which days and times were the most popular. This is valuable data for your next call campaign.
  • Queue Reports allow managers to understand the performance of employees. These reports give metrics such as customer wait times, talk times, answered and abandoned calls, and much more. These are valuable insights that can be used in determining employee scheduling and performance reviews, as they provide a birds-eye view of how the campaign is being handled on your end.
  • Call Logs allow you to track an individual call from beginning to end. Managers can see who talked to the caller, and if the caller was transferred or disconnected for any reason. These logs are especially valuable in customer complaint situations.
  • Scheduled Call Reports can be set up to be automatically sent to a manager’s inbox on the day, time, and frequency that they choose. If you’re out of town but want to take a look at how well your half-off sale is performing (which you promoted with a unique phone number), you can view your custom reports anytime, anywhere.

  Customers are increasingly using their smartphones for browsing websites, purchasing products and services, and calling companies directly. In fact, many mobile searchers call a business directly from search results, so tailoring the phone call experience for your customers is imperative. Unified Communications solutions have the features and tools your business needs for effective call campaigning and tracking.

  The post Customize and Track Call Campaigns with Unified Communications appeared first on Sangoma.

June 23, 2020

• FreeSWITCH From smoke signals to VoIP: Two thousand years of telecom

  The concept of video conferencing can be traced back to as early as 1870, when the idea of transmitting an image along with audio over a wire was born. It would take another 50 years before the first versions of this technology would be built, and another 50 after that to create products that would actually stick around the market. It’s pretty crazy to think about the earliest forms of teleconferencing existing 150 years ago, especially with how much transformation has happened for telecom in just the last decade or two. Teleconferencing is truly vital to the moment we currently live in to the average person, with so many of us working from home for the first time. With modern technology like computers, the internet, and smartphones really taking off within roughly the same time frame as teleconferencing, it’s pretty fun to look at what forms of communication came first, and what led to the tech that makes our lives so convenient today.

  Humans have always had means to communicate through distance. Even 2000 years ago, the simplest methods would eventually lead to what we would formally define as telecom: smoke signals, drums, beacons, and horns. These were obviously very limited in their messaging, but eventually, more specific forms of communications would grow from them. The 15th century brought the spread of the printing press, which was obviously revolutionary for widespread communication. But the true revolution of what was to come was happening at sea: maritime flag semaphore was developed for ships to communicate with one another. A special code involving the positions of two flags was created, with each position of the flags representing a letter or number, later inspiring the technology that would form the beginnings of telecommunications – the telegraph and morse code.

  By the 17th century the first experimental acoustic telephone was built. It was discovered then that sound could be transmitted over a wire attached to an earpiece or mouthpiece. Telegraphs were developed in the 18th century, inspired by the maritime semaphores and their flag codes. The first optical telegraphs were a system of pendulums set up in high towers to communicate visually. Messages could be passed from one tower to the next, making this the first telecommunications system to span across Europe. The electrical telegraph would come about 50 years later in the 19th century, and along with it, morse code. By sending electricity through a wire, specific messages could be sent by holding and releasing a button in certain intervals. In 1858, the telegraph went transatlantic, creating global telecom. For the first time, people could instantly communicate across the globe – though these first global systems weren’t very reliable, as they often went down entirely. The 1870s brought the first electric telephones, and when they arrived, so did that concept of transmitting an image along with audio over a wire.

  The technology of the 20th century truly changed everything. The radio was developed, telephones became capable of long-distance contact across the US, and in the 1920s, images could be transmitted, creating the television. The first experimental videophones were introduced in the 1930s in the US and in Europe. In 1965, AT&T set up trial calls with this technology, at the time called picturephones. The phones were set up in booths with black and white video screens, where users on the receiving end had to remain still if they wanted to be seen on the video call. The booths were only in a few cities across the US, required reservations ahead of time to use, and a 3-minute call cost $27 (or $255 today).

  The end of the millennium was crammed with new inventions, accelerating the capabilities of technology with each passing decade. When the first computer networks and mobile phones were developed in the 1970s, AT&T attempted to bring picturephones to peoples’ homes. This was extremely expensive for the consumer – about $950 for 30 minutes of call time, and this, too, ultimately flopped. $500 million was invested in this technology, and it was projected there would be 1 million users by 1980. The reality was about 500 subscribers – people just weren’t that into seeing each other while on the phone. But in the 1980’s, with the rise of the internet, mobile phone networks, instant messaging, and email, a commercial group video conferencing system was launched by Compression Labs. It was bulky and extremely expensive, but actually had some success in corporate use for international meetings.

  The first webcams were invented in universities in the 1990’s. The first free video conferencing application was launched, and another in-home videophone was introduced by AT&T once again. Each of these technologies improved rapidly with every passing year, with more competitors releasing new videoconferencing systems, chat messengers, and mobile phones.

  In the 2000s, all this technology continued to develop and improve, with video calling in HD becoming possible to the regular consumer, smartphones becoming widespread necessities, and the creation and growth of social networks. 2003 was a big year for the introduction of VoIP internet telephony, with phone calls now able to be transmitted over internet protocols. And now, in 2020, video conferencing technology is basically a household staple for everybody. But even with better technology than we’ve ever had available at our fingertips at every second of the day, and dozens of providers, no platform can deliver perfectly – video quality is usually what suffers in favor of maintaining audio quality. So as teleconferencing continues to evolve and improve over the next decade, the question is: who will do it best?

  The post From smoke signals to VoIP: Two thousand years of telecom appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

• Digium The Importance of Telecom Applications

  

  TADSummit Online Asia took place a month ago.  The ‘TAD’ in TADSummit means Telecom Application Development. Seems under exciting. So what is Alan doing? And why is Alan actually even bothering to devote all of his time and energy to this concept?

  Because telecom applications are truly at the heart of the growth (and one can argue the innovation, though there is plenty of innovation in the transport side of things as well) of the industry, and we all need to make sure innovation is not stifled or owned “by a few.” This has created Billions (yes Billions, if not Trillions) of dollars of revenue and wealth for startups (that are no longer startups now) that created useful, new, easy to use applications targeted to either subscribers or businesses. Everyday, we all use telecom applications that at one time were some cool innovation and foreign concepts to us. The rate of telecoms innovation has truly been amazing since the early 90’s. All driven by applications.

  These companies saw some kind of interesting concept that could be evinced through the telecom or enterprise networks. Applications we take for granted today, such as texting, video, SMS, unified communications, speech recognition, location services…. you name it, were created by some innovative companies that had to figure out how to get their vision realized using some kind of available building blocks, or what Alan calls the “tech stack”.

  The BIG guys really had (have) no interest in anything that’s different or not controlled by them. The more it stays the same, the better it is for them. No innovation, or controlled innovation (controlled by me), means no disruption. And the money keeps pouring in, to them. The big telecom guys would stifle the innovation by putting all kinds of roadblocks in place, using standards bodies to delay the inevitable. In the meantime, innovation continued and what was created outside their realm would become defacto standards. Another way to get to the same place, yet waaaaaaaaaay faster.

  This is what Alan is championing and why TADS is important. Let’s not lose this developer focus. You guys, the ecosystem, are much smarter than anyone else. We need this innovation. No one or two or three or four (you get my point) companies are smart enough to see all new emerging needs. An ecosystem, though, can. And that’s why we’ll continue to see new cool innovative applications emerge. All powered by some kind of base core elements.

  The ability to innovate using easy to use, cost effective building blocks is at the heart of these new innovative telecom applications. When you get down to it, I’ve devoted my telecom career to this. At Sangoma, we have all kinds of elements in the telecom stack (from open source toolkits, to CPaaS, to network integration). And that’s why Sangoma supports what Alan is doing with TADs.

  Keep innovating. The underlying building blocks will be there. You guys will figure out how to use them in ways never imagined.

  If you want either read a brief synopsis of my keynote, or watch it, please click the link here. There is a brief overview of our tech stack provided and you can listen to me explain it.

  The post The Importance of Telecom Applications appeared first on Sangoma.

June 18, 2020

• Digium Why Seasonal and Growing Businesses Value the Cloud

  All businesses value scalability, but for seasonal and growing businesses, the need for scalability is paramount. And that’s why these types of businesses value the Cloud. By transferring communications to the Cloud, businesses can scale quickly while driving greater operational efficiency.

  Seasonal Businesses:

  Scalability is an important need for some businesses because of the way their industry is set up or positioned in the marketplace. Seasonal businesses, such as florists, lawn care services, and tax preparation services, will have periods throughout the year where they need varying degrees of phone system support. After all, why would you want to pay for a service you only use part of the year? The flexibility of a cloud phone system helps solve this problem by allowing more lines to be easily added during peak season, and easily reduced during the off season. Seasonal scalability such as this facilitates the ability of businesses to better control their expenses, and ultimately improve their profit margin.

  Growth and Decline of Business:

  A phone system that is scalable may be essential to seasonal businesses, but any organization can benefit from the flexible nature of cloud phone systems. Whether dealing with growth or a decline in revenues, both can be equally unexpected and require an immediate response. Scalability allows a business to quickly adjust to fluctuating market conditions.

  If you deploy a hosted phone system and you have 100 employees who need phones, then you pay for 100 users. Should your employee count drop to 75, you only pay for 75. When your business needs to scale up, it’s simple to add users and change your billing accordingly.

  Plus, growing businesses value the fact that hosted phone systems represent an operational expense rather than a capital expense, meaning that hosted systems are deployed as a service with little upfront cost and no maintenance obligations. Using a cloud-based solution means you have flexibility and can free up your working capital through the immediate cost savings of a hosted PBX.

  Additional Features

  The need for flexibility when your business expands doesn’t just apply to the number of employees (or users) that you may be adding. Cloud-based phone systems also help minimize the headaches that can come with expansion or when adding multiple locations. Whether you have multiple buildings across a campus setting that fall under one internal calling network, or you have several office locations across a certain geographic area, a hosted PBX can provide an economical answer to your communications needs. Not only do you save money by not having multiple phone systems at each physical location, you also have the added convenience of allowing those offices in different locations to call desk-to-desk, as if they were in the same building.

  Choosing a cloud-based solution doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice the features and flexibility of a full-scale UC solution. And because award-winning platforms like Switchvox Cloud use the same source code as the on-premise alternative, you don’t have to sacrifice features when opting for the flexibility and cost savings of a hosted phone system.

  Download our free guide 10 Reasons Why Hosted is Risk-Free with Switchvox Cloud!

  The post Why Seasonal and Growing Businesses Value the Cloud appeared first on Sangoma.

June 16, 2020

• Digium The Emergence of the Business Communications System

  What comes after a Unified Communications system?  More unification of course!  We are entering another phase in the evolution of the business phone system, where it is becoming an overall business communications system.   And we’ll continue to see computing advances have a huge impact.

   

  

   

  Let’s explore this a bit.  From an architecture perspective, it’s not a big leap to continue an evolution towards adding more communications to the business communications system. Other outside networks, such as may be required for IoT interaction can be added to the mix. Other devices, that may have nothing to do with voice, such as building access control, cameras and sensors can be added.  And the rules system and message broker brains also can get updated so that “voice” becomes just another type of communication method, not the method it was originally designed for years ago.  As such, the Business Communications System is born.

  And with all of this data coming from all of the business interactions, patterns and learning can be had and put to use in a positive way.  The advances in compute power and the ability to analyze huge amounts of data swiftly and efficiently have given rise to elements of Artificial Intelligence entering the business phone system.  In other words, the “rules.” And thus the Message Broker can get smarter. So the advent of Artificial Intelligence functionality with the PBX/UC platform has already started to occur.

  The last mile to this Business Communications System will also likely be augmented. With 5G comes the ability to “network slice” or carve a portion of the network to be dedicated to an enterprise. In other words, a 5G wireless trunk.

   

  

   

  The PBX has already undergone incredible evolution in the past 25 years. With much more to come. The office environment has also evolved from a single brick and morter facility to be a virtual, accessible at all times, and from anywhere environment. The PBX/UC platform branching out to become a more complete business communications system for the Evolved Office is a natural evolution for the PBX, and Sangoma is leading the way.

  The post The Emergence of the Business Communications System appeared first on Sangoma.

June 11, 2020

• Digium Building the Reputation of your Business with Cloud

  Few things are more important to a SMB (small-medium business) than its reputation. Building rapport with your customers doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a relationship that builds over many years of dedicated service or quality products. One place where some businesses fall short is maintaining a basic, open communication channel with their customers. When customers call to see what your weekend hours are or if you have a certain item in stock, it should not turn into a long hold or a busy signal. A hosted phone system can ensure a “lack of communication” is never an issue. Here’s why:

  RCF (remote call forwarding) is a business revenue saver and ensures that your customers always reach someone. If you set up notifications and call forwarding rules the call will cascade to the device of your choice, making that dreaded voicemail box less visited. You can leave to run to the post office or go grab lunch and calls can be forwarded to your mobile phone. The customers will have no idea you aren’t in the office, keeping them happy and content while you answer their questions. Need to take a break? Simply change your status to “away” and you can set up a call rule that will forward those calls to another co-worker or even a call queue, so you can take a much needed break.

  Your business phone number is the face of your company. Think of all the commercials where people have made up jingles centering around their main phone number. Moving to a new hosted phone system doesn’t mean you should lose something that helps to identify your business. Keep your identity and port your number. Make sure to set up a number port with your current vendor before you cancel services and set up a paper trail with emails. Working hand-in-hand with your new provider will help ensure a smooth transition. 

  The Cloud is the way of the future, there is no denying that. Gartner predicts that by 2021, 90% of IT leaders will not purchase any new premise based UC infrastructure. Not only can hardware take up valuable space around the office or in server closets, but for many small businesses, having your IT person focusing on your phone system as well as day-to-day operations can be overwhelming and perhaps lead to burn-out. Not having a physical phone system in the office is ideal for businesses in areas where tornadoes, hurricanes, or other natural disasters are a threat. Everything is in the cloud, so less equipment to be damaged and replaced. With less equipment to worry about and maintain, you can focus on running your business and keeping your customers happy. Leave the phone system maintenance to your hosted phone service provider. 

  Switchvox Cloud is here for the long haul. We have all features included at one, low monthly rate. That’s your phone system and phone service rolled up into one bill. All you need is an internet connection, set up a few call rules, and you are ready to go. You can add extensions as needed, making Switchvox Cloud a flexible solution that is perfect for businesses that have busy and slow seasons. Updates come automatically, there is no bulky hardware in the server closet or around the office, and 24/7 support is there for you when you need it most.  Contact our sales team today and see how Switchvox Cloud can help your business bring in more revenue, scale to your intended growth, and secure your business’s reputation.

  The post Building the Reputation of your Business with Cloud appeared first on Sangoma.

June 09, 2020

• Digium The Evolution of the Business Phone System into a UC Platform

  Last week, I described the basic architecture of a PBX system.  But these systems have evolved into Unified Communication systems that handle more than voice – they handle messaging, texting, chat, video and others.   This is where most business phone systems are today.

  

  But how did they evolve so quickly?  The basic architecture stays the same, so if you have a good architecture upon which to build, features can be added quickly.  When doing an instant message for example, there still needs to be a database of users and rules that go with it, there needs to a message broker between the two people involved, and there needs to be trunks and an end user device.  The basic architecture is there – just the type of media involved changes.  The UC system simply had to handle different media beyond voice.  The convergence of voice with IT (VoIP) proved to be monumental since voice became just a type of media- just another type of data to be moved.  And once that happened, other media could be moved with the same constructs as voice.  Hence, UC implementations became de rigeur.

  Messaging via chat, or playback of a voice or video mail on your email are everyday examples of such communications in the office beyond a simple voice call.  Different devices could be enabled for different kinds of interaction beyond voice, adding text, chat, and video for example.   

  The advances in the networks and the ability for applications to utilize these advances in network technology also played a huge role in enabling the PBX to evolve to truly become “Unified Communications”.  Once such network was the emergence of 3G and 4G, which ushered in the world of mobile enterprise applications.  Your office becomes mobile, because you have office apps such as your office phone, your instant messaging system, etc. on your smartphone or your laptop or tablet.  Effectively, your offices move to wherever you are.  And many of us reading this blog have experienced that.

  But what is next?  Next week I’ll explore some ideas.

  The post The Evolution of the Business Phone System into a UC Platform appeared first on Sangoma.

June 04, 2020

• Digium Conference Calling – 4 Steps to Success

  Organizations use conference calling as a means to communicate with remote employees, partners, vendors and customers. It can also help cut down on travel expenses and even enable you to connect multiple office locations.

  As helpful as conference calling can be for a business, some people would describe the experience as boring and unproductive. Often the experience isn’t as good as it could be because people aren’t properly prepared. Here are some steps to take to ensure you have a productive conference call for everyone involved:

  Properly Prepare

   

  Unpreparedness is the main reason conference calling take longer than they need to. To avoid this, create an agenda for the meeting. The agenda should contain the following information:

   

  • Date & time of conference call, as well as dial-in number and access code (which should also be in the meeting invite)

  • Topic of discussion & goals of the conversation

  • Participants, job titles, and their role in the project or topic being discussed

  • Detailed list of items to be discussed

  • Attachments or links to documents relating to the discussion

   

  Note: Make sure the items on the agenda can be discussed in the amount of time allotted. Employees are busy and have other responsibilities throughout their day. Running overtime while conference calling can throw a kink in the entire work day.

  Know the Conference Calling Technology

   

  Nothing is more embarrassing than thinking you’re are on mute and saying things no one was intended to hear. Understanding the platform and technology you are using is an important step in conducting or participating in a conference call. Make sure your employees are trained on the conference calling platform your business uses, and prior to conducting your first conference call, run a test call and play around with all of the available features. It’s always helpful to have an employee who is technical and can help if an issue with the platform arises during the call. If you don’t have a tech-savy employee on the call, have a backup option for the meeting, or reschedule. (Even if you are familiar with the technology, make sure you pay attention to whether or not phones are muted, for example, to avoid awkward situations.)

  Note: For remote and mobile employees, make sure they can easily access the conference call-in number and access code from their smartphone. Some platforms are not mobile-friendly and these numbers are not easily accessible from the emails the platform sends out, so including the dial-in number and access code in the agenda is key.

  Keep it Productive

   

  Follow the agenda you created ahead of time, and steer the conversation back on track if it derails. Of course, if discussions of the weather or other topical issues come up, go ahead and share as a quick ice-breaker, but then get back on track and stay focused on your agenda. It’s helpful to have someone on your team keep track of action items discussed during the call, including who is responsible for specific action items, and when those items are due. It’s also helpful to use a call recording feature so that anything missed during the conversation can be referred back to or shared with those team members who were unable to join. Finally, it’s good practice to check to see if anyone has any questions about a line item before moving onto the next.

  Follow-Up

   

  Following the conference call, you or someone on your team should send out an email to all participants recapping the conversation and action items discussed. Employee to-do’s should be very clear and include due dates if possible. If you have the capability, send the recorded conference call to participants for reference.

  Conducting a productive conference call depends on how thoroughly you prepare ahead of time. A detailed agenda will not only keep your team on schedule but will also help achieve the goals of the conversation.

   

  ---

  Have you tried Sangoma Meet?

  Sangoma Meet is an advanced video conferencing platform that seamlessly operates from a Firefox or Chrome browser. And right now, you can have access to this powerful tool capable of providing private, secure video calls for up to 50 participants – completely free.

   

  No registration required, try it today!

  The post Conference Calling – 4 Steps to Success appeared first on Sangoma.

June 02, 2020

• Digium The Changing Face of the Business Phone System

  The business phone system has evolved. If you didn’t know that before work from home, you know it now. If you have been on a Unified Communication system, you have been able to communicate in a variety of ways. And you found out while voice is an important element of the business phone system, voice is simply one of the ways you communicate with other people in a business environment today, and that is all supported within a UC business phone system. Voice is essential, but no longer unique. We communicate with other employees or customers via instant and group messaging, email, social media and the like.

  

  When viewing the architecture diagram of a basic PBX office phone system, one can see four important elements. There are interfaces that connect to the “outside world” networks via “trunks” that come into the building. In “the old days”, which is only a few years ago really, this was simply a PSTN trunk to the wired and wireless PSTN, internet or wireless networks. Today this also includes SIP trunks connected to these same networks.

  There are also interfaces that connect to whatever device one talks on. Again, in “the old days” that was simply a phone on your desk, or maybe a paging system, conference phone or intercom to the front door. Today, there are all kinds of softphones, or clients connected to your various mobile devices, including your watch.

  The business phone system also has a database of users (phone numbers, etc.) and rules on how to route calls. Finally, there is a message broker which manages the interaction between internal and external devices and follows the rules set out by the system itself and the administrator of the business phone system.

  Next week we’ll take a look at how the architecture has evolved to easily add Unified Communication features.

  The post The Changing Face of the Business Phone System appeared first on Sangoma.

May 28, 2020

• Digium 4 Not-So-Obvious Softphone Selling Points

  

  While there is a time and a place for the desk phone (and they aren’t going away any time soon), more and more companies are jumping on the softphone bandwagon. For those of you who aren’t familiar, a softphone is essentially a software version of a telephone that can be deployed on desktop computers or mobile devices. Calls are made via the Internet, using bandwidth (you may known this as Voice over IP, or VoIP), and many have similar functionality as their desk phone counterparts.

  Here are four reasons businesses of all sizes are adopting softphones into their tech stack:

  Brand Consistency

  Presenting a consistent brand message is central to maintaining professionalism and gaining customer trust. A softphone makes it possible for employees to provide their customers one phone number to reach them wherever they are located- in the office, at home, or on the road. From your customer’s perspective, they will feel like they’re calling your corporate office regardless of where you are located or which device you are using.

  Convenience & Privacy

  With softphones, every employee extension is tied to the company’s phone system, so customers don’t have (or need) access to their personal cell numbers; only the business’s caller ID information is shown. This is ideal for two specific situations. First, when an employee leaves a company, this privacy layer eliminates the possibility of the employee poaching customers and taking their business along with them. Second, it is for the safety of the employees that customers don’t have their personal mobile numbers, as after-hours calling abuse (especially from an angry customer) is not uncommon. Also, softphones provide additional features that are useful when customer interactions go south, such as call recording and voicemail to email. Call logs are also useful to show the time each employee spends on the phone with customers. If Steve spent 3 hours talking to a customer at 3AM, that may be worth having a conversation about.

  Visual Voicemail / Voicemail to Email

  Let’s face it- no one likes checking their voicemail. In fact, conglomerates Coca-Cola and JPMorgan both completely eliminated corporate voicemail due to lack of use by employees. While saving money obviously wasn’t a main motivator for Coca-Cola, the company estimated it would save about $100,000 a year by cutting the service.

  While some companies have no need for voicemail, others rely on it. Either way, companies should make it easier for employees to access and handle voicemails if they want the service they pay for to be utilized. Some softphone apps, like those offered by Sangoma, include a visual voicemail feature, which is very similar to the iPhone’s voicemail layout. If a customer details an issue they are having in the voicemail and the employee needs a manager to hear it, it can easily forward the voicemail as a .wav or mp3 file via email. If a generic voicemail is left on a receptionist voicemail, he or she can forward the voicemail by email to the appropriate department or person to handle. Important voicemails concerning personal information, issues, or anything else worth keeping, can be filed in a customer’s CRM profile for future reference.

  Cost

  As an extension to VoIP, softphones take advantage of its low-cost nature and eliminate the need to invest in desk phone hardware for every employee. Companies can save hundreds to thousands on communication expenses by offering their mobile employees a softphone pre-loaded with the same functionality their in-office coworkers have access to.

  Click here to learn more about Softphones!

  The post 4 Not-So-Obvious Softphone Selling Points appeared first on Sangoma.

May 26, 2020

• Digium The Tipping Point for Unified Communications in Business

  I was asked to contribute an article in FastMode about how we are responding, and helping our customers respond, to the pandemic. If you want to read the complete article, click here.

  My thesis has been that the companies that utilize Unified Communications systems as their basic phone system, with its ability to offer softphones with the same business number, conferencing, collaboration, presence, and mobile phones that also utilize your business phone number, are at the forefront for enabling this new remote work and work from home environment we’re all experiencing right now. They were prepared.   

  And businesses will either want to continue to be prepared for the next ‘work from home’ emergency, or they will see that this WFH thing wasn’t so bad, and they’ll be OK with enabling this in some form full time going forward. It’s just good business.

  This is why I see this whole pandemic as a tipping point for businesses and the use of Unified Communication systems. While UC systems were ‘nice’ before, they are now essential. And they’ll continue to be.

  But the part of UC that has really exploded has been video. Video helps enable a sense of community, camaraderie, and really just necessary human interaction that comes with chit-chat, just like at a water cooler, coffee station, or lunch room. I’m seeing our employees get on Sangoma Meet video calls a little early so they can just talk for 5 minutes. The need to be connected is more significant than ever now.  

  Given what is going on out there around the world, we’ve decided to make our Sangoma Meet™ video conferencing and collaboration service available for free. We’re simply asking for feedback during this time via filling out a form when the call is over.   

  Go to https://meet.sangoma.com to get started. It is a stand-alone service that can be used independently or with our award-winning UC solutions.

  The post The Tipping Point for Unified Communications in Business appeared first on Sangoma.

May 21, 2020

• FreeSWITCH How the pandemic is changing the future of events

  With the highly contagious coronavirus continuing to spread across the world, large events like conferences won’t be the same as we know them for a long while. It’s not difficult to imagine why. Hundreds of people together in close quarters, with not enough space to keep a safe 6 foot distance from one another – these conditions make social distancing impossible. Even if other businesses that are currently closed slowly open back up once the curve is flattened, large scale events probably can’t follow that pattern. Among other big gatherings like sporting events and concerts, it seems likely that conferences will not be returning until it is completely safe to do so.

  This isn’t stopping event planners, though. Many conferences are now being moved online, especially tech conferences frequented by professionals who aren’t shy about video-calling their way into networking opportunities. Online events aren’t new, but the phenomenon of large conferences being converted into remote gatherings within a short span of time is pretty specific to the moment we’re living in. For a lot of these events, it’s simply a process of offering recordings of the presentations they would’ve had in person, the breakout sessions and keynotes converted into webinars and some live streamed content. But what about more immersive experiences, conferences or trade shows where you might network, gather leads, exhibit? They aren’t being stopped, either. Some of the most interactive events, such as huge art galleries, are moving online for the duration of the pandemic, too.

  Though much of the in person contact will be missed, there are some pros to both hosting and attending an online event. They’re extremely accessible wherever you are, saving time, money and energy spent on traveling. Tickets are reduced price if not free. Even if there’s still a registration cost, you won’t have to pay for hotel rooms, airfare, or other transportation needs like car rentals or taxis. Virtual events are better for the environment – no stacks of paper flyers and name badges and piles of plastic swag. And they’re quite flexible for the audience since you could come and go as your schedule allows. If you want to check out an online event, you’d probably have an easier time getting approval to go than you would for a week-long conference.
  
  So when things go “back to normal,” will virtual conferences go back into hiding in the darkest corners of the internet, or will they stick around? With all the positive aspects of online events, perhaps they can exist alongside in person meetings in harmony. A lot will depend on the attitude at large when people can meet in person again. Will most of us be anxious to get together with others, tired of quarantine and ready to network? Or will we be cautious about gathering in large groups and slow to want to get back into the old way of doing things? 

  Pretty much all conferences of any industry are moving online for the first time right now, so event planners are having to find new ways of measuring success. This year is becoming one long trial run for any future virtual gatherings. And there is a new industry boom happening currently: the online event industry. Yes, there are platforms devoted entirely to hosting such things, and they existed before the pandemic erupted in early 2020. As one might expect, their numbers were relatively low. Now they can hardly keep up with increased demand in the tens of thousands on waitlists to use their products. When in person events become possible again, these platforms will still be around to offer their services, so if some conferences find success in the online format, there’s no reason to think they can’t continue virtually.

  With all that being said, in person events will not be gone forever. The value of face-to-face contact cannot be understated. The solid combination of body language, facial expressions, and verbal inflection creates such a strong style of communication that can’t be totally replicated virtually. Networking efforts are generally more successful when individuals can exchange looks and handshakes. There are simply more ways to interact with one another in person than online when maintaining those three facets of face-to-face contact. So while attendees are interacting via video chat in large groups, and perhaps individually via chat messaging at the same time, this can’t totally replicate what can be gained from meeting others at a traditional conference. For the duration of the current pandemic, however, the health and safety of everyone has to come first.

  If you’d like to experience an online event for yourself, consider joining the FreeSWITCH team at ClueCon Deconstructed, a conference by developers, for developers. This year, ClueCon will be held virtually on August 4-6. It’s free to attend, and we’re making it as interactive as possible – an online version of our Coder Games hack-a-thon, trivia, swag, raffles, networking rooms where you can hang out and chat, on top of a selection of awesome speakers. We’ll certainly be going back to the in person format as soon as we are able, so check out this virtual version of ClueCon while it’s still possible! Click here to register today!

  The post How the pandemic is changing the future of events appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

• Digium Sangoma and .e4: Long Live Open Source

  It’s been a little over two months since .e4 joined the Sangoma team. In that time, we’ve had an opportunity to adjust to multiple new realities, and we are finding our stride despite the ongoing craziness of the world. It has been an enjoyable onboarding experience. Having worked closely with the Sangoma and Digium teams for years, the .e4 crew has had fun getting up to speed on our latest innovations and sharing in the “I can’t believe we’re all on the same team” conversations. 

  The talent pool is deep here at Sangoma, and I’m excited to report that our Open Source projects (Asterisk and FreePBX) are flourishing. Having known some of the more visible players from community events like AstriCon, folks like Jared Smith and Matt Fredrickson- my team felt right at home, but still, I wasn’t sure what to expect knowing that some previous members of the FreePBX team had left. 

  Having said that, I’m pleased to report that, while separated by great distances, our development teams continue to collaborate closely and produce effective work. Both the Asterisk and FreePBX teams have redoubled their efforts to be actively engaged in our online forums and mailing lists. Both teams are focusing both upon improving innovation and improving process. For example, they are improving their respective test suites so that more bugs are caught during the development process. These efforts keep both projects relevant to our customers, to our resellers, and to those in the ecosystem that use and contribute back to our open source communities.

  While two months isn’t much time, and I am reminded daily that there’s much to learn when working at a bigger company like Sangoma. One thing is crystal clear: we have thriving FreePBX and Asterisk teams. Long live Open Source!

  The post Sangoma and .e4: Long Live Open Source appeared first on Sangoma.

May 19, 2020

• Digium Why are there 5G Routers and Gateways?

  First of all, the question is really why would anyone need a cellular router? They could be useful as a backup mechanism in case your landline internet goes down.

  That’s why I first thought of this blog. Everyone on the street was WFH, kids were “going to school” on the internet, and, poof, the internet goes down. Sheer panic, right? What does everyone do? I heard screaming for sure. And more. But soon everyone goes outside to see if anyone else is having the same problem, and soon, the whole street was outside (6 feet away from each other, of course)! Yes, we felt good it wasn’t just us, but it was good the internet came back on soon enough. Some people, though, just used their 4G/LTE phone as a hotspot and kept going…

  But there could be another use for a 5G router – there is WiFi, and the data needs to go out on a cellular network. This could be because some IoT data needs to be transmitted, or because it’s more secure going on a cellular network. There are numerous use cases where a cellular to Wi-Fi router/gateway could be useful.

  5G is coming, and just like Wi-Fi 6 (which I wrote about a month and a half ago), you’ll need devices and networks that support 5G to take advantage of it. So if you have 5G service in your area, it could be an option on how to get internet to your house. It could be the primary method, or maybe it’s a good backup method if you tend to have spotty landline service. And like I said above, it could work the other way around to get local Wi-Fi information back out.

  In this case, a 5G to Wi-Fi router might make sense as a last mile option.  

  The post Why are there 5G Routers and Gateways? appeared first on Sangoma.

May 14, 2020

• Digium Remote IP Phone Security

  The importance of considering network security in VoIP/UC deployments cannot be understated. Unsecured VoIP networks are vulnerable to the same threats as regular data networks as well as many more, including toll fraud. But to protect a VoIP network requires more than simply locking it down from unsolicited outside data traffic as this would disable the primary function of a VoIP network: making and receiving calls. This is because, in making or receiving calls, the person called or calling from outside the network is technically sending unsolicited packets of data. Fortunately, there are several key tools network administrators can use to ensure their VoIP network remains safe from malicious activity. Here are some that are useful in securing VoIP networks with remote users.

  Using VoIP Firewalls

  A remote phone deployment in branch offices or for work-at-home employees is completely different than SIP trunking. Remote phones are dynamic in location and require significantly more calling features. Remote phones cannot be considered as peers as phones register for services and change IP addresses often, across multiple devices and locations. Remote phones require automatic provisioning with file servers and possibly require web access and REST API access to the IP PBX. The interconnectivity between remote phones and an IP PBX is complicated with many communication requirements.

  The application of security solutions involves providing a firewall solution that is used to define the remote phone to IP PBX relationship between various networks using VoIP application layers, file provisioning, and other services, while ensuring signaling and media are secure. Meanwhile, remote phones most often are located behind other firewalls, presenting additional communication issues.

  In this example, the IP PBX resides behind a typical network firewall. The firewall is the border element between the Internet (or untrusted network zones) and Local Area Networks (or trusted zones). The remote phone is located on a remote network across the Internet. The firewall is monitoring network traffic and decides whether to allow or block specific traffic based on a defined set of security rules.

  Firewall Features & Setup

  The firewall controls the traffic by redirecting SIP signaling and audio media streams to the defined destinations. In this solution, the firewall is controlling communications for allowing SIP VoIP traffic from remote phones to be directed to the IP PBX.

  Using VPNs

  Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which relies on the Internet Protocol Security suite (IPsec), is a completely different way to provide a secure VoIP solution. Using already well-established encryption tunnel technologies, a secure tunnel is created between the remote phone and the IP PBX.

  In this example, the IP PBX resides behind a typical network firewall. The firewall is the border element between the Internet and LAN. The remote phone is located on a remote network across the Internet and the remote phone is establishing a VPN tunnel to the IP PBX. VPN uses the IPsec network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts the packets of data sent over the network. The firewall is relaying the VPN tunnel from the remote phone to the IP PBX.

  In this example, the IP PBX resides behind a firewall, the firewall is the border element between Internet (or untrusted network zones) and Local Area Networks (or trusted zones). The firewall is a network security device and will forward the VPN traffic from the remote phone to the IP PBX.

  Using SBCs

  As stated before, the interconnectivity between a remote phone and an IP PBX is complicated with many communication requirements.

  The advanced application of security solutions involves providing a Session Border Controller (SBC) solution that is used to define the remote phone to the IP PBX relationship between various networks using VoIP application layers, file provisioning, and other services while ensuring signaling and media are secure. This method highlights the strength of the SBC to protect the IP PBX  while providing access for remote phones located behind other firewalls.

  In this example, the IP PBX resides behind an SBC. The SBC is the border element between Internet (or untrusted network zones) and Local Area Networks (or trusted zones). The SBC is a network security device as well as a VoIP security device that monitors incoming and outgoing network and voice traffic and decides whether to allow or block specific traffic based on a defined set of network and voice security rules. As far as networks go, nothing can ensure the security of a VoIP network as well as an SBC solution.

  

  Next Steps

  Ready to secure an already existing Unified Communications (UC) or simple VoIP deployment? Check out our award-winning line of Session Border Controllers here.

  Or perhaps you are still researching your next business phone system? In that case, download our free guide to determining your network’s readiness for Unified Communications! It explains the basics of VoIP networks including how fast your internet speeds should be and how to ensure safe and reliable voice service.

  The post Remote IP Phone Security appeared first on Sangoma.

May 12, 2020

• Digium How the Office Environment Will Continue to Change

  Even before the ‘new normal’ of WFH, the office environment was changing. Collaboration was starting to take hold, and the open office concept replete with cool wood tables, huddle rooms, latte machines, wide screen TVs, and even play and congregation areas was becoming de rigueur.  

  And when we all go back to work, this concept could be up for debate. Will it be even more important as people crave the basic interaction they couldn’t get when they were home? We could likely see an acceleration of these trends at some point. In with these open tables, lockers for your “stuff”, no set desk or work phone, working anywhere anytime, and out with stuffy cubicles and closed offices and set office hours. 

  

  However, at some point, are the key words. When will this occur? Even when we get the go ahead to go back to work, will it be the same right away? It’s doubtful. Some companies may choose to split up when people come in, so social distancing can still be observed. In the picture above the “old” picture may make a comeback, maybe even with plexiglass dividers or dare I say some kind of office. Every company will handle it differently, but the point is precautions will be in order.

  No matter what shape the new offices takes, this type of environment would not be possible without the advances in the business communication system behind all of it – the Unified Communication system. In other words, the once lowly PBX has evolved to become essentially the hub of communications for this new business environment, because the mobile office, instant messaging, and other forms of unified messaging are core to the new enhanced person-to-person communication methods.

  And video conferencing and collaboration, what we have with Sangoma Meet, will not just disappear. There will always be remote workers, whether it’s a single person or whether there will be teams split upon coming back to the office. And we’ve all gotten used to the benefits of sharing documents and seeing our remote colleagues. So that is here to stay. Conferencing calls likely become now video conference and collaboration calls.

  We will likely continue to see change in the work environment, supported by your Unified Communications system. Sangoma will be there with you.

  The post How the Office Environment Will Continue to Change appeared first on Sangoma.

May 07, 2020

• Digium Putting the Value in Value-Added Reseller

  The channel is the lifeblood for the technology industry. It enables vendors to focus on R&D and gives end users a more personalized experience by purchasing through a local company (the reseller). While vendors are responsible for creating a turn-key solution that can give immediate benefit to a business, it’s the reseller who can truly build the business case and provide an extra level of value to customers.

  Value-added resellers (VARs) are the perfect example of this theory. They give customers an extra level of value by providing additional services that go beyond the scope of what a vendor can offer. Many solutions require additional services to support them and customers are faced with finding another provider. However, VARs are able to bundle the service or feature with the product and sell it as one complete, value-packed solution.

  Resellers not only offer value by creating a next-level end product, they are also instrumental in shaping the business case to potential customers for why they should choose a specific solution. In today’s B2B landscape, buyers are able to research different product offerings online and educate themselves. Many buyers have a clear picture of the solution they want before ever engaging with sales. While vendor websites are a great place for prospects to conduct research and narrow down solutions, it’s the local reseller who meets face-to-face with the customer and discusses exact pain points that can make all the difference in the world. By having someone present to convey exactly how the solution will meet the needs of each user, customers can feel more confident with their decision and know the true value the solution will bring to them.

  Furthermore, local resellers can provide value to decision makers by giving a more in-depth financial justification for a solution. They are in a position to compare competitor pricing and give a side-by-side analysis, and they can accurately depict total cost of ownership with the extra services they offer. Additionally, as resellers are deep-diving with customers, they can frame the “cost of doing nothing” if prospects were to keep their existing solution and provide a true ROI analysis for deploying the new solution.

  There is oftentimes a disconnect between how vendors market to end users and what customers are expecting to hear from vendors. Because vendors are sometimes forced to create ‘umbrella’ messaging to be relevant to as many people as possible, it can sometimes lose the personalization that customers have come to expect. However, resellers are able to take that messaging and craft it specifically to the customer and their exact needs, and, in essence, close that gap. Vendors create the solution, but it’s the resellers who are oftentimes the face of the solution and convey its value directly to the customer.   

  Vendors are the driving force behind a product, but they can’t be everything to everybody. That is why it is necessary to have a strong channel and partners who can provide added value directly to the customers.  

  At Sangoma, we treasure our channel and the partners who serve as the face of our solutions. And we are always looking to expand the reach of our channel into new and underserved markets.

  Click here to learn more about the Sangoma Partner Program!

  The post Putting the Value in Value-Added Reseller appeared first on Sangoma.

May 05, 2020

• Digium A Blog about a Podcast with Sangoma’s new APAC Marketing Manager

  A few weeks ago, I recorded a podcast with Isha Mukherjee, Sangoma’s new APAC marketing manager. We talked about a wide range of topics, including WFH and how Sangoma has responded to it, to new products we have announced, and to APAC’s importance to Sangoma.

  Regarding the first topic, Work from Home, Sangoma as a company is working from home,  using our UC systems, so it’s been relatively smooth for us since we have a phone system that enables a softphone to your laptop or mobile phone with our office phone number, we have conferencing on that system, etc. We are also helping our customers by putting up a WFH / Remote working page on our website, and by putting up a support wiki as well for those customers who needed help using our many WFH features in our UC systems.   

  We’ve also hosted numerous webinars about how our products enable WFH. We will be hosting some soon in APAC, so be on the lookout for announcements about that if you are in APAC.

  We also announced wireless headsets on March 31. These are also immensely useful in a WFH setting since you can be on calls and roam around the apartment or house if you need to.

  We recently announced our Video Conferencing Service, Sangoma Meet™, which is free to all users at this time. Just go to https://meet.sangoma.com  to use it.  One way to help with overcoming the missing sense of community and human interaction is to utilize video more. Unified Communications, as readers know, is at the heart of what we do at Sangoma. Our UC hadn’t until this point handled video conferencing. Sangoma Meet has HD video standard, is secure (is encrypted and needs a password), can scale up to 50 users, and you can share files, chat, etc. You need to be on a WebRTC compatible browser like Chrome or Edge.

  And like I said, it’s FREE to use right now. With your business or your family.  

  Isha also asked me about how important APAC was to Sangoma. It’s a growing region for us, and we are investing here. We expect it to grow. Most of our business in APAC is in the non-Unified Communications part of our portfolio (boards, gateways, phones), but one result of all this WFH stuff is that businesses see the importance of UC. And we provide exceptional value in our PBXact UC system.  So we’re expecting growth over time here.

  If you want to listen to the podcast, please go here:  https://podcasts.sangoma.com/wp-content/uploads/sangoma-apac-001.mp3

  We’ll likely be doing more podcasts so be on the lookout for them. And I’ll be in APAC as soon as we’re able to travel again.

  The post A Blog about a Podcast with Sangoma’s new APAC Marketing Manager appeared first on Sangoma.

April 30, 2020

• FreeSWITCH Slow internet? The pandemic is probably to blame

  It should come as no surprise that internet speed has slowed down across the world. With stay-at-home orders keeping people in the house and online, internet usage has exploded. Not only is remote working and schooling causing a spike in video conferencing usage, but video streaming services and gaming platforms are a huge source of entertainment like never before.

  A pattern popped up immediately in January when China locked down in certain places to mitigate the spread of coronavirus. People were stuck at home and went online, clogging the networks and causing certain provinces to have broadband speeds fall by more than half. In February, as the virus spread across Italy, Germany, and Spain, those countries also saw a deterioration in internet speed. In March, as stay-at-home orders rippled through the US, broadband speed dropped 5%, and median download speeds dropped as much as 38%. Demand for services like Cisco Webex basically tracked the spread of coronavirus, spiking in Asia, then in Europe, then soaring 240% in the US.

  We are all reliant on the internet now more than ever. Working from home, educating from home, friend and family video calls, entertainment – YouTube, Zoom, Netflix, video gaming – it’s all causing a strain on internet infrastructure that’s unprecedented, and we probably haven’t even seen the peak of it yet. Internet and telecom companies have to account for more traffic in a matter of days instead of the year they had planned for, with traffic up by 20-30%. WiFi calls, video gaming, and video conferencing usage have doubled. Messages over WhatsApp have more than quadrupled.

  Internet infrastructure is accustomed to handling certain spikes in activity on any given day, such as in the evening when most people are arriving home from work and getting online. The busy period for streaming would normally last for about 4 hours on a regular weekday, but now it’s as long as 10 hours. And with multiple users on any given network constantly cycling through data-hungry apps, last-mile services will be challenged. These are cable broadband and fiber based broadband services that channel internet into homes, and are different from what’s available in schools and offices. Many such schools and offices can handle the kind of internet traffic a typical home wouldn’t be used to. Especially when many people are on a single WiFi network at once, all streaming movies or video conferencing, things can get congested and slowed down. What may function for a married couple working separately in the same home at once may simply not be enough when two or three students in video classrooms are added to the mix.

  Internet providers are feeling confident that they can handle it though, and have taken a few steps to try to help. Some companies are automatically upgrading customers from basic broadband packages so these users can have faster speed and more bandwidth. Others are lifting data caps on data plans so people won’t be penalized for using more data than their current plans support. Big companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Charter have been preparing to upgrade the capacity on their networks as needed, with more equipment like emergency roll-in cell towers that would normally be used to keep people online during natural disasters. Meanwhile, big streaming services like Netflix and YouTube have globally taken their video file quality down a notch to reduce the amount of bandwidth they take up.

  In the US, dozens of telecom companies are also taking steps to help people financially, like not cutting off internet access over unpaid bills, waiving late fees, and opening public WiFi hotspots. Some companies are boosting free data allowances for schools and students. A pledge was made to keep up such aid for 60 days, but if the virus rages on, it remains to be seen if it will be extended. It’s so important for everyone to have access to the internet right now, not only for school and work, but for telehealth purposes – connecting patients to hospitals.

  So is it possible that internet infrastructure could fail entirely? It doesn’t seem likely. So far, with broadband networks adapting to the surging amounts of traffic, telecom is an industry that’s doing alright amid the pandemic overall. There have been outages in countries like Italy, but connection is able to be restored. Individual services and websites can also crash for a few hours at a time.

  In the worst case scenario, providers can resort to “data throttling,” the practice of shoving bandwidth-hungry video and gaming platforms into a data slow lane to prioritize more important traffic when networks are at risk of overload. Such actions are usually banned under net neutrality to ensure equal treatment and access for all internet users, and hasn’t widely been used yet. Though some companies are voluntarily throttling bandwidth usage, governments could step in and ask operators to prioritize certain services over others during specific times if things get bad enough.

  Additionally, physical networks require a certain amount of upkeep, and if workers like engineers are mostly self-isolating, it could make it difficult to maintain equipment to deliver broadband. Luckily, the internet isn’t just one huge monolith; it has many different parts, like a living being. If one part of it gets cut off and goes down, the rest of it will still be alive, and the injured part can be revived. For now, a grainy YouTube video or a frozen Zoom call isn’t an indication that the internet as a whole is failing. The situation differs all over the world. Internet speeds in some parts of Europe can be half of what’s standard in the US, for example. Overall, home internet connections are the ones that are under the most stress for everybody, especially for homes with aging infrastructure. If your internet keeps going down, you’re certainly not alone. The biggest struggle for this industry, as for most, is simply the uncertainty of how long the pandemic will last.

  The post Slow internet? The pandemic is probably to blame appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

April 27, 2020

• Digium WFH, Potential for Carbon Neutrality, and How UC Fits into All of That

  One direct impact of all this social distancing, not traveling, and working from home that is stark is the reduction in carbon emissions in the environment. It’s noticeable, dramatic in cases (such as people in Punjab being able to see the Himalayas for the first time in decades) and global.

  Obviously, knowledge worker type employees not going to a building to work and working from home instead, and not traveling to see customers in trains, planes, or automobiles, is having a large impact on the environment. Companies that would have never embraced WFH before are starting to understand that WFH is possible, may not negatively impact the business, and may even have a positive long-term impact. For them. 

  For instance, employees may be happier since they don’t have to commute and spend time in traffic. And companies utilizing current technology available, such as video, to help customers remotely, or have team collaboration meetings, obviates at least some of the need for truck rolls or plane trips to go see them, thus saving the company money. Suddenly, work from home is more interesting since there may also be a financial benefit to the company.

  These companies responded to a crisis by utilizing Unified Communications (UC), which gives the ability for employees to work from home as if they are in the office, or gives employees more tools such as video to help customers remotely or do team collaboration. They did it and utilized UC because they had to. There wasn’t some altruistic reasons behind these decisions. It was just figuring out how to move forward.

  However, these work from home scenarios created less carbon emissions, something surely positive for the world. And therein lies an opportunity. Now that these companies are doing it, and in many cases, doing it successfully, will some of them embrace it and go on the path towards carbon neutrality? It’s a leap for sure, but when things “get back to normal,” could companies put policies in place to adopt WFH as a part of their company culture? That is highly probable. And if they do that, could they then take more steps and go for carbon neutrality?

  Let’s examine first how could a company cut their carbon emissions? There are indirect ways of positively impacting the environment, such as recycling everything in your office (such as paper and aluminum), so reuse can occur. And using coffee cups instead of Styrofoam cups. Those are but a couple, but there are numerous examples I’m sure you can think of. 

  But there are also direct ways, such as changing air conditioning and heating even one degree as an example.  

  And there are companies exploring other ways, such as having smaller physical buildings to work in. We are already seeing trends where employees don’t each have an office or even their own cubicle. There are simply large work space areas where you go sit. Some of this is designed to try and foster better teamwork, while some is more practical given the need to try and cut monthly lease costs, or because more and more people were working from home anyway so there isn’t a need anymore for every single person to have their own space.  

  Whatever the original reason, the office square footage per employee has been decreasing, even before this crisis. This also has an impact on less heating and air conditioning required. In other words, for example, if work teams rotated when they came in an office, thus requiring less overall square footage the company would need to use, there would be multiple benefits to the environment. Less carbon emissions due to less employee travel and less heating/air conditioning. That’s a step, but not all the way to carbon neutrality.

  So let’s say your company wants to embrace this. What does being carbon neutral even mean? It means having a net zero carbon dioxide emissions. How can a company become carbon neutral? Companies can start with the ideas like above, but also then support a myriad of carbon offset projects or initiatives that offsets what your company is putting into the environment. Companies are also taking it upon themselves to go further, driving to purchase clean energy, such as from wind or solar. A company can even strive to become carbon neutral certified.  

  All big ideas, but ideas that could turn into reality. And Unified Communications is an important pillar that can enable this to happen, because without UC, the FH from WFH isn’t really possible.

  The post WFH, Potential for Carbon Neutrality, and How UC Fits into All of That appeared first on Sangoma.

April 24, 2020

• Digium Working from Home? Here’s Some Tips

  As a Unified Communications (UC) provider, Sangoma has seen the potential for workspaces to stay more connected than ever while becoming flexible enough to allow employees to work from anywhere. So, we’re no strangers to working from home. Here’s some general tips for working remotely.

  Routine

   

  Stay Disciplined

  The biggest pitfall employees working from home for the first time can encounter is the initial dissonance of trying to stay focused on work while surrounded by their leisure environment. It’s all too easy to slip into bad habits like inconsistent sleep schedules and wanting to “clock out” early.

  Staying disciplined by sticking to a schedule and staying focused throughout the day actually makes the transition to working from home easier. If you start to mix work and leisure, the lines can begin to blur between the two, leading to either slacking or burnout.

  Disconnect Regularly & Take Breaks

  Just like going into work, it’s not normal to sit for 8 hours straight. When in the office, you, no doubt, get up from time to time and walk around, take a coffee break, chat with a coworker, and stay stretched and refreshed. In just the same way, it’s important to get up every so often to move around even when you’re working from home.

  Get up and take a walk around the block. Actually take your lunch hour and cook something. Play with your pet. It’ll do wonders for your mental health while keeping your mind fresh for the work at hand.

  Make Time for Yourself

  Similar to the other two points, it’s important to make time for yourself, especially for those working from homes occupied by other people. In these types of situations, it can be all too easy to slip from being connected to colleagues to spending time with family with no time to collect your thoughts and take care of yourself. So, make sure to keep a solid distinction between work hours and home hours, and schedule in time to look after your own needs. This will keep you happy and productive, whether you’re working from home temporarily or full-time.

  Goals & Productivity

   

  Set daily and weekly goals

  At the start of every week and every day, identify your top priorities and physically write them down, highlighting especially the top 3 or so. This will ensure you stay motivated working towards a goal and ensure you don’t lose sight of the big picture of the business. This will also help you remain focused – especially when working in a home environment where there may be many more distractions than usual.

  Stay connected and responsive

  Without the possibility of popping into each others’ offices, it’s vital to ensure you remain connected and responsive. Yes, it’s fine (even good) to stop responding to chats for a while to tackle some project, but making sure you are in sync with your team, answering their questions and getting their insight, will ensure that you stay engaged with your work and avoid losing morale or direction.

  Schedule regular check-ins

  At the same time, though, be careful not to rely on random messages, emails, and phone calls to stay connected as a cohesive team. Take the time to schedule regular check-ins with all the people you need to stay in sync with. This will eliminate a lot of headaches and ensure that productive collaboration can continue outside the walls of the business office.

  Environment & Sanity

   

  Dedicate a workspace in your home

  One of the best ways to stay disciplined, on a schedule, and maintain a healthy work-life balance is to designate one part of your house as your home office, even if it’s just a table away from the high-traffic areas of the house. 

  Perhaps you already have a home office? Make sure it doesn’t share use with other activities, especially during work hours. Many are accustomed to using their offices for hobbies or personal paperwork, so it’s important not to get distracted by personal activities that could sideline the work you need to get done.

  Keep drinks and snacks at hand

  One of the most dangerous journeys one can take while working from home is to run to the fridge outside of taking a break. En route and back, you’ll encounter many distractions and sidetracks that it may be better just to wait for a break. Or… just keep a small supply of snacks and drinks with you to keep you refreshed. Heck, move the coffee pot into your home office if you can. Then your breaks aren’t always to eat and drink, and you can snack while working without having to run to the fridge and back. Win-win.

  Don’t feel guilty about ambience or entertainment

  Finally (and this is especially important for new remote workers), don’t feel guilty about doing perfectly appropriate things that you couldn’t do in a business office. Open the windows wide, run that noisy fan, play your music without headphones. In your home office, you control the environment, both for good and for bad. So have fun while staying productive, and you’ll find that remote work may be what you always wanted.

  ---

   

  Interested in a Communications Solution that Keeps Remote Workers Connected?

   

  No matter what line of work your business prevails in, Sangoma has a business communications platform for you. Switchvox is a Unified Communications (UC) business phone system that integrates all the ways colleagues stay connected to each other and customers into a single platform. Best of all, it’s available in both on-premise and hosted in the Cloud, using the same source code. That means it’s incredibly easy to get started, and most users are able to use it from day one. Check it out! 

  The post Working from Home? Here’s Some Tips appeared first on Sangoma.

April 23, 2020

• Digium WFH Month in Review at Sangoma

  At Sangoma, we are already in our 6^th week of WFH. Given we are a Unified Communications company, it’s been relatively smooth for us since we have a phone system that enables a softphone to your laptop or mobile phone with our office phone number, we have conferencing on that system, etc. 

  But a lot has happened in these just over these past few weeks. It seems like we started this months and months ago, but it’s just been a few weeks!

  So what have we done:

  • We started WFH on March 16
  • Sangoma put out our Covid19 response via a post on our website and through email the next day
  • We were getting many requests (some from existing customers) about how our systems can enable WFH instead of just being a “phone system”
  • We put up a WFH / Remote working page on our website
  • Support put up a Wiki for our customers
  • We announced wireless headsets on March 31. (This was always in the plan, and we were going to announce this at Enterprise Connect) 
  • We announced our Video Conferencing Service, Sangoma Meet, which is free to all users at this time.

  In review, our systems can help WFH because of the following:

  • Your business phone number can go to the softphone on your laptop or your mobile phone, enabling regular business calls to get answered by the right people in your company. The softphone is part of the system people have already bought, so no additional money was required to get these people up and running if they were not using it.
  • The softphone is not just a softphone either. It’s really a softphone and collaboration client. So you can chat on it as well.  
  • We have wireless headsets to help you roam around your house while on phone calls.
  • We have a video conferencing service that you can use to collaborate with co-workers, keep in touch with your family, whatever…
  • You can take your phone that you use at work home. It needs to be connected to the internet, it needs power, and the admin needs to do some work, but we’ve had customers doing that as well (or buying a 2^nd phone to take home permanently now) quite a bit.
  • Our UC systems have built-in conferencing. Again that is part of the system and is not an additional cost to use.
  • You can enable the “find me, follow me” in case you need to send phone calls to your mobile phone number or your home phone number.

  So, yes, a lot has happened in a month. I can’t wait until we go back to what we knew as normal, but no one really knows when that will be right now, so in the meantime, we’re all working hard to make this work.

  The post WFH Month in Review at Sangoma appeared first on Sangoma.

April 21, 2020

• Digium ITEXPO Interview

  As I was trying to figure out what to write about this week, I was thinking that doing business over a video calls is good, but not quite the same as FTF. And thinking about tradeshows that have been postponed or cancelled and the longer term business impact of that. Time will tell. But as we enter our 6^th week of this, I, like many others, are probably starting to have a harder time with this.

  Like everyone else, I think talking in person with someone to find out or learn new things is why I go to tradeshows, and conversation over a video conferencing solution like Sangoma Meet isn’t quite the same – it’s a bit too formal.

  So I thought about the last tradeshow I attend, which was IT Expo. There, I did a stand-up interview with Rich Tehrani at IT Expo. It’s always good seeing and talking with Rich. We’ve known each other a long time. While I’m sure Rich would do a video call with me if I pinged him, it’s not quite the same as seeing him and talking to him.

  Anyway, you can watch the interview here.

  In summary though, Rich was asking about how it’s going at Sangoma. And everything is going well. We’re getting organic growth with our UC products. But he also asked about integrations of some M&A we did the past few years. Soon after we bought Digium, there was concern in the channel about both PBXact and Switchvox, because these are two different UC/PBX platforms and the concern was whether both would continue on. The channel now understands both products are still there – they serve different purposes and different target audiences. And then in October we bought VoIP Innovations and that integration is going well as we’ve added more resources to the SIP Trunking business. And then he asked me if we had other M&A on the horizon, like he always does, and this time I surprised him and I was like “ah… we just bought .e4”.

  The post ITEXPO Interview appeared first on Sangoma.

April 16, 2020

• WebRTC Hacks Open Source Cloud Gaming with WebRTC

  Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Communications Platform as a Service, Video Conferencing as a Service, but what about Gaming as a Service? There have been a few attempts at Cloud Gaming, most notably Google’s recently launched Stadia. Stadia is no stranger to WebRTC, but can others leverage WebRTC […]

  The post Open Source Cloud Gaming with WebRTC appeared first on webrtcHacks.

April 15, 2020

• Digium Sangoma is Offering Sangoma Meet Video Conferencing Service – Early Access and Free Right Now for Anyone to Use

  

  Unified Communications systems, as I’ve blogged about numerous times already, with their ability to offer softphones with your business number, conferencing, collaboration, presence, and mobile phones that also utilize your business phone number, are at the forefront for enabling this new work remote / work from home environment we’re all experiencing right now.

  We’re starting to see more and more articles about missing the sense of community, camaraderie, and really just necessary human interaction that comes with chit-chat at a water cooler, coffee station, or lunch room, and starting to see more and more articles about how to combat loneliness as we self-isolate right now. The need to be connected is more significant than ever now.  

  At Sangoma, we recognize this because we see this happening in our company as well. UC has most certainly helped. But there’s been a key ingredient missing. One way to help with overcoming the missing sense of community and human interaction is to utilize video more. Unified Communications, as readers know, is at the heart of what we do at Sangoma. Our UC hadn’t until this point handled video conferencing, but it’s been in our roadmap and we’ve been hard at work on it. 

  Given what is going on out there, and the large need we saw for it right now, we accelerated the development of it.   We have been using beta versions for video conferencing ourselves, and we saw the positive impact it had made for those of us who had used it. And it’s ready now for a broader usage even though we will continually be adding features to it in the coming weeks and months.

  And so that’s why today we’ve decided to make our video conferencing and collaboration service available in Early Access phase to our partners, and friends and family, and blog readers. For Free. Your feedback during this time is important, so please insure when you exit you fill out the feedback form.  

  Sangoma Meet™ is our video conferencing and collaboration solution. Go to https://meet.sangoma.com to get started. It is a stand-alone service that can be used independently or with our award-winning UC solutions.

  Once Sangoma Meet goes GA, we’ll continue to offer it for free for as long as this new normal is normal. No gimmicks or anything – we are just trying to help as we’re all just trying to figure out the best way to stay connected. To be used with your company, your work teams, or even your family.  

  If you want to use Sangoma Meet, use it! Get going with your teams or your family and regain some of that camaraderie and sense of community. 

  

  Sangoma Meet is a web-based, multi-party (up to 50) video conferencing solution based on Jitsi Meet that can be used with any WebRTC compatible browser, such as Chrome or Edge. Sangoma Meet also fully encrypts its password-protected video conferences, and uses HD Video as the default video format. Optional calendar integration and dial-in capability to the video conference from a separate phone, will be available shortly, and will also offer enhanced security using a PIN.    

  By the way, UC will certainly continue to evolve, and I’ve written in the past about some of what I see out there. Rest assured, Sangoma will continue to evolve our UC solutions to meet the ever-changing requirements of UC, just like we’ve released this video conferencing solution.

  At any rate, try it. It’s free so you might as well try it. Go to https://meet.sangoma.com to get started. Just set up your first video conference with your team and see how it goes. Have a virtual happy hour or just have everyone see each other. I have to go to a virtual coffee break with my team right now….

  The post Sangoma is Offering Sangoma Meet Video Conferencing Service – Early Access and Free Right Now for Anyone to Use appeared first on Sangoma.

April 13, 2020

• WebRTC Hacks True End-to-End Encryption with WebRTC Insertable Streams

  A couple of weeks ago, the Chrome team announced an interesting Intent to Experiment on the blink-dev list about an API to do some custom processing on top of WebRTC. The intent comes with an explainer document written by Harald Alvestrand which shows the basic API usage. As I mentioned in my last post, this is the […]

  The post True End-to-End Encryption with WebRTC Insertable Streams appeared first on webrtcHacks.

April 12, 2020

• Jitsi This is what end-to-end encryption should look like!

  Work in Progress!

  Some of the people watching our repos have been asking us what the deal was with this little new HIPS project (which by the way stands for Hidden In Plain Sight). Well, now you know! HIPS is about using a new Chrome WebRTC API called “Insertable Streams” to add a second layer of end-to-end encryption to media streams in a way that would make them inaccessible to the video router.

  While there is a ton of work left on getting authentication and key distribution to work, the project is already advanced enough for us to engage in two very important steps:

  1. Request for Comments

  We are calling out to all crypto enthusiasts to have a look tell us if they see anything wrong with what we are doing. The code is here:

  https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/blob/master/modules/e2ee/E2EEContext.js

  And here’s an explanation of what we meant to achieve with it:

  https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/e2ee.md

  2. Demo: end-to-end encrypted calls in Jitsi Meet

  In order to try the feature, you can use the End-to-End Encryption option in the overflow menu (bottom right corner of your Jitsi Meeting):

   

  This is already enabled on meet.jit.si and people can try it out if they are using a browser based on Chromium 83 and above (such as the corresponding versions of Edge, Chrome, Opera and Brave).

  Now, let’s see exactly how the demo works. In this case,  Yana, Fippo and Saúl are having an end-to-end encrypted conversation using the new e2eekey param. At a glance, other than the amazing people on the call, nothing about it seems noteworthy:

  

  Things get interesting when Emil decides to join the call. What he sees in there is just … an endless stream of rubbish:

  

  If Emil was a rogue service provider running the bridge for the meeting, he would no longer be able to eavesdrop on it and an attempt to do so would only yield, well we already said that: an endless stream of rubbish.

  The only way for Emil to actually participate in the meeting would be if he was made privy to the e2ee key. In this case he was and once he enters it, everything goes back to normal:

  

  And that’s it! Now everyone sees everyone else and the conversation can continue in full trust and privacy.

  So how does all of this work?

  Let’s take a step back. We would very likely all agree that we need our meetings to be protected and secure.

  Deciding how to protect them, who to protect them from and how exactly to do this is a significantly more complex topic, that we believe everyone in our community should be informed about. We have already discussed how Jitsi Meet gives you protection by using ephemeral rooms and passwords, so no one undesirable can join your meetings, and how all information sent on the network is strongly encrypted using DTLS-SRTP, so that no one who happens to intercept it can actually understand it.

  The final piece missing in this puzzle comes from the fact that DTLS-SRTP in WebRTC is strictly tied to a PeerConnection which means that, when using a video router (like Jitsi Videobridge) is involved, WebRTC and DTLS-SRTP can only provide hop-by-hop encryption. In such scenarios Jitsi Videobridge (JVB) ends up establishing as many encrypted channels as there are participants. This is what protects all data on the network. In order for media from one participant to reach another however, it needs to be extracted from the sender’s crypto context and re-encrypted with the receiver’s.

   

  

  The need to decrypt information while it traverses Jitsi Videobridge, technically provides whoever controls the JVB machine with an opportunity to access the data. They are hence in a position  to hear and see everyone on the meeting.

  So far, our only answer to this has been that people who feel they cannot trust existing service providers not to eavesdrop on their meetings, can run their own bridges. We spend considerable effort to make sure this is very easy to do, but however much work we throw at streamlining the deployment process it will never be as simple or as hassle-free as a single click on a link.

  Insertable Streams in WebRTC

  Around three years ago, IETF’s PERC working group (Privacy Enhanced RTP Conferencing) settled on a transport design that could allow a reasonable path to end-to-end  encryption (e2ee) in WebRTC conferences. The idea is that rather than try and tweak the existing DTLS-SRTP implementation, conferences can simply add the additional layer of e2e protection on top of the existing one.

   

  

  The great news is that the approach just became implementable! The Google WebRTC team is currently in the process of adding a brand new feature to the Chromium ecosystem known as Insertable Streams. The feature provides WebRTC apps with access to audio and video frames after they have been encoded but before they have been sent on the network.

  Fippo has just published a brilliant description of how insertable streams work in a webrtcHacks post. Do give it a read!

  And this, friends, is all we were waiting for! So, we rolled our sleeves and got started.

   

  What’s next: authentication and key management

  As we already pointed out, passing keys as URL parameters is a demo thing only. Aside from being impractical it also carries risks given that URL params are stored in browser history.

  Our next step is therefore to work out exactly how key management and exchange would work. We expect we will be using  The Double Ratchet Algorithm through libolm but the details are still to be ironed out.

  The important part is: end-to-end encryption is on its way to protect your Jitsi Meetings. So, stay tuned!

  Love,

  Your Personal Jitsi Team

   

   

  The post This is what end-to-end encryption should look like! appeared first on Jitsi.

April 09, 2020

• Digium Mobility for Auto Dealerships

  In the auto industry, there are many teams within a dealership hoping to achieve a singular goal: sell cars. And doing so today requires sales and service departments to separate themselves from the competition. 

  If you’ve ever worked at a dealership, you understand the sense of urgency that comes with each deal. Catering to customers, following up with questions and resources, and the overall nurturing process is of the utmost importance – and so is having the right communications tools to do the job.

  A Unified Communications (UC) phone system can offer staff plenty of features to help them reach success in closing deals, but mobile softphone apps and mobility features are of the utmost importance to this process.

  Keep your sales team available – no matter where they are

  Chances are, your sales team is constantly on the go and hardly ever at their desk. Whether they’re on test drives or showing cars on the lot, a mobile softphone allows them to continue to receive calls from their work extension without giving customers their personal cell phone number. This ensures that your sales team never has to worry about missed calls sinking a deal or the woes of an overflowing voicemail.

  Utilize Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) practices

  Whether you’re looking to save money or give staff a bit more freedom, mobile softphones give dealerships the option to enact Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies. Rather than giving each individual a company-assigned mobile device, let your employees use their own devices with a mobile softphone app.

  Manage multiple locations without being tethered to your desk

  For GMs, mobility features offer the ability to transfer or forward calls between multiple devices, meaning you can switch from your desk phone to your mobile phone (and vice versa) without interrupting a call. And if you’re going between dealerships, you won’t return to your desk to find a slew of missed calls! You can focus your time on more pressing tasks rather than playing catch up.

  Enable remote work

  While many essential parts of a car deal are better handled in a dealership environment, today’s car buyers expect some flexibility, especially with new forms of internet car sales disrupting the industry. That flexibility to sell cars online and over the phone, while unfortunately lacking all of the in-person, “show-and-smell” effect that test drives and walk-arounds can have, does enable salespeople to enjoy the flexibility of working remotely from the dealership. Mobility features provide these salespeople with all the tools they need to prospect and sell from wherever, with the customer never having to worry about coming to a dealership sales floor.

   

  Discover Switchvox

  If you’re interested in what a UC business phone system can do for your dealership, take a look at Switchvox. With powerful mobility features, CRM integration, and an abundance of contact center features, you can ensure your sales and service teams are well-equipped to provide the best customer service every time.

  Want to learn more about how Switchvox can improve productivity at your dealership? Download our free guide now! You’ll learn how Switchvox can fit within tight budgets, connect multiple locations, help your team manage high call volumes, and more.

  The post Mobility for Auto Dealerships appeared first on Sangoma.

April 08, 2020

• FreeSWITCH Will Apps save us during future pandemics?

  Could smartphones track the spread of coronavirus? Contact tracing – the process of identifying people who have come into contact with infected individuals – has always been part of infectious disease control. In 2020, cell phones track so much of our movement already. By tapping into this data, researchers are hoping to track the spread of coronavirus and warn people who may have come into contact with the infected.

  Projects using location data have been popping up everywhere in the world, from Asia to Europe, and now North America, and how they function largely depends on the country utilizing them. Privacy laws vary, and one country’s attempt at mass surveillance would not necessarily fly in another, especially when it comes to restricting movement. In places like the US, the public tends to not trust the kind of data gathering that has already happened in other countries like South Korea. With the reality that data can be used and exploited, the value of privacy may have to be weighed against the possibility of saving millions of lives. 

  It’s unclear if location data harvesting related to coronavirus would even be possible in the US. The first step in a project like this becoming a reality is widespread, rapid testing and diagnoses, which has been very slow in many countries. The other challenge is that many infected with the coronavirus spread it before they even show symptoms. That means no matter how many resources are put into developing a tool to track movement, it may never be ahead of the spreading virus. 

  It’s tempting to try, though. In China, an app was developed to tell families when and where it’s safe to go out. An app in Europe is being developed to send alerts to others as soon as someone tests positive for the virus. These apps depend on the network effect, which is the phenomenon of a service becoming more useful the more people use it. Vaccines follow this model, as well as social media and information sharing platforms like Twitter. Apps to track pandemics would depend entirely on most people using them and sharing their information – hopefully, voluntarily. And in the case of COVID-19, an app would have to catch up to the spreading of the highly contagious virus in order to truly be useful.

  So how would an app like this work? In theory, phones are already logging locations all the time. So if the owner of a phone tested positive for something like coronavirus, health officials would be alerted immediately, as would owners of any other phones that recently came into contact with that phone. As simple as this sounds, all the details of how it would work would still need to be sorted out.

  In some cases, telecom and tech companies would have to share anonymous information they’ve already gathered in order for something like this to work. Even without individuals being identified, that data could reveal trends about hotspots where the disease is being spread. The other option would be to develop an app where people would voluntarily share location and health information. The problem with a voluntary app is that it’s only useful if most people use it – so it would have to catch on rapidly.

  A couple of app projects have appeared in the US, and their creators are banking on the voluntary use of the app spreading quicker than the virus itself. MIT developed an open-source app called Private Kit: Safe Paths, which shares location data between phones to alert people if they’ve come into contact with others who have tested positive for the virus. This particular app is based on the voluntary participation of users and the voluntary sharing of medical information with health officials and other users. The MIT app has been designed with the privacy of individuals in mind and as a priority, not only to comply with privacy laws but also to keep peace of mind among citizens. Those reporting their positive status remain anonymous, while allowing you to see if you’ve crossed paths with that individual. Detailed GPS trails are not available for viewing, only areas of high risk.

  If apps like these manage to help mitigate the spread of something as contagious as coronavirus, a helpful precedent will already be in place during any kind of future outbreak. As different countries take their own individual approaches to similar projects of this kind, it remains to be seen how tech like cell phones will shape the outcomes of the current pandemic, and any yet to come.

  The post Will Apps save us during future pandemics? appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

April 07, 2020

• Jitsi Jitsi Meet features update, April 2020

  Hello Fellow Jitsters!

  While we work on making sure our infrastructure is able to cope with the recent surge in traffic, we have managed to ship some features we think you may like, let’s go!

  System audio sharing

  Sharing our screen while in a meeting has become second nature to most of us. From a quick peek at a document to a troubleshooting session, it is a very useful companion to the traditional camera feed.

  Some time ago we introduced presenter mode, adding the ability to share your screen and camera at the same time.

  Today we are improving Jitsi Meet’s screen sharing capabilities by adding the ability to share system audio together with the screen!

  Since a gif is worth 1500 words:

  

  PS: Browsers behave differently depending on your platform with regards to this feature. On Windows you are able to share the entire system audio, but on Linux and macOS just that of the tab you’re sharing.

  Improved device controls

  Changing what audio or video device we are using during a conference used to be a couple of menus away, which made it hard to use. We have now added a simpler way to change your devices, take a look!

  

  New participant muting capabilities

  Muting evey noisy participant, especially in large meetings, is used to be quite the task: one has to go and mute every participant individually. We are now introducing some simpler controls so a moderator can mute every participant, or all participants except one:

    

  Updated translations

  Jitsi Meet is translated to many languages thanks the our community’s help. In the past few weeks we have seen many contributions to our translations, both improving the existing ones and bringing in new languages. Thank you to everyone who contributed!

   

  Happy meetings everyone!

  The post Jitsi Meet features update, April 2020 appeared first on Jitsi.

• Digium Wi-Fi 6 and Why It’s Important

  There’s a lot going on now, and for this week at least, I didn’t want to write another remote work or WFH type of blog.   So I figured I’d take a look at some new technology that we’d all be using someday soon in your house or your enterprise.  So I zeroed in on Wi-Fi 6 as a good thing to write about.

  If you haven’t already, you’re going to start hearing about Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi previously had naming schemes like 802.11 and some letters. It was pretty techy. But the Wi-Fi alliance decided to make it simpler so the new version announced last year is called Wi-Fi 6 (would have been 802.11ax), and the next one will be Wi-Fi 7, etc.

  To use it, you need a Wi-Fi 6 device (like an Apple iPhone 11 or a Samsung Galaxy Note 10) and you’ll need a Wi-Fi 6 capable router.

  But why use it in first place? Faster speed obviously is a key thing. But with more and more households having multiple Wi-Fi devices (right now, a US household has an average of 11 connected devices) with no end in sight for the increase, slower internet could occur if all of these devices are on at one time.  Probably a lot of readers have noticed this – I certainly have when all my kids are home at the same time.  And you may have noticed this is you have a lot of people working at home right now.  A Wi-Fi 6 router is designed to help data flow to each of the devices, effectively keeping the speed going.

  And if it can do that at home, and at a public venue (an issue I’m sure we’ve all experienced!), it can certainly help at work, with many of us now simply connected via Wi-Fi instead of an ethernet cable.

  There are also improvements to battery life and security.

  So we’ll start to see this coming into work.  You may get questions about it or may be wondering about it.  First, we need to be on devices that support it.  And then the infrastructure the devices connect to need to support it.   And then we’ll be using it.

  The post Wi-Fi 6 and Why It’s Important appeared first on Sangoma.

April 04, 2020

• Jitsi Jitsi Meet Security & Privacy

  Jitsi Meet Security & Privacy

  For us Fellow Jitsters, developing a platform our users can rely on is the most important thing. That means, amongst other things, we are very mindful of the security and privacy aspects that affect our users.

  Security and privacy are very broad topics so we are going to try and go through some practical use cases to demonstrate what’s at play.

  Fully secure you say… What does this mean exactly?

  In many respects Jitsi meetings are simply private by design. To begin with, all meeting rooms are ephemeral: they only exist while the meeting is actually taking place. They get created when the first participant joins and they are destroyed when the last one leaves. If someone joins the same room again, a brand new meeting is created with the same name and there is no connection to any previous meeting that might have been held with the same name. 

  This is all very important. Some of the systems that let people “pre-create� rooms, have subtle indications that let a potential attacker distinguish reserved from unreserved meetings which then makes the reserved meetings easier to identify and target.

  That said, since a name is all that one needs to actually access a room, we have to be really careful about how we choose and advertise them. We don’t want others accidentally stumbling into our meetings, just as we want to keep pranksters and snoopers away.

  This is generally not much of a problem for small size deployments (remember you can host your own Jitsi Meet) or low profile meetings but it may be a problem if you are using a large and public deployment such as meet.jit.si or if there is significant interest in your meeting.

  One has to really keep in mind that the name of a meeting is sensitive and needs to be protected. You shouldn’t send it to anyone you do not want in your meeting. Advertising this name publicly, for example on social media, is something you should only ever do if you truly are comfortable with maximum exposure and the possibility of unwelcome visitors.

  Then there’s the matter of choosing the name. If you start a meeting with the name “Testâ€�, “Yogaâ€� or “FamilyMeetingâ€� for example, chances of having some random uninvited people joining are very, very high. How does one pick a good room name then? Our random meeting name generator is a great start. It offers names that are easy to remember and read out loud on a phone call, and come from a set of over a trillion possible combinations. Picking out one of the auto-generated names is therefore quite safe.

  If you don’t like the funky way the auto-generated names sound and you don’t want to use a long and uninviting UUID (which you totally could), then go ahead and pick a name by yourself but make sure it is long enough. For example, next time you’d like to have a coffee with someone over video, rather than going for meet.jit.si/coffee, try something with more of a twist.

  

  We are also working on a “bad meeting name detector�. You’ll see a warning if your meeting name has a high chance of collision, so stay tuned!

  We also give people the option to set a meeting password. A few important things to keep in mind: if you do set a password, it is your responsibility to communicate it to your peers. 

  

  More importantly, keep in mind that your password, just as chat and speaker stats, will be reset once the last person leaves the room. So you have to make sure that you set the password again, if you find yourself ending the meeting and then rejoining. 

  A similar approach you might consider would be to append a random character sequence at the end of your room name.

  Anyone can mute or kick me out of my meeting, what’s up with that?

  Jitsi models its meetings after in-person gatherings. Take the case of 10 people having a discussion in a room. You wouldn’t expect one person to have exclusive  “kick� and “mute� privileges in an in-person meeting and yet, those meetings usually go fine.

  In the vast majority of cases, moderation controls in online meetings serve a different purpose: they help address tech related issues, such as people not realizing their microphones are introducing noise, or people forgetting to leave. Moderation controls help you solve those, so that people can continue their conversation. And now, with that in mind, why wouldn’t you want to enable anyone in the meeting to help solve these kinds of issues? 

  For that reason our moderation controls are soft, and for everyone.

  This is specifically the case on meet.jit.si, since all users are moderators.  

  If you really, really, really need moderation controls to be limited then consider deploying your own Jitsi Meet instance and configuring it in a way that suits your needs. Once you do, you can configure strong authentication, so only authorised users will be moderators.

  We understand the settings in meet.jit.si are not for everyone, so if you’d rather have your own private setup (which we encourage you to do!) you can get started quickly with our Docker setup or the quick-install guide. We’ll be happy to help you in our community.

  Are my meetings encrypted? Is encryption end-to-end?

  This is something we get asked a lot, so let’s dive into the details:

  Jitsi meetings can operate in 2 ways: peer-to-peer (P2P) or via the Jitsi Videobridge (JVB). This is transparent to the user. P2P mode is only used for 1-to-1 meetings. In this case, audio and video are encrypted using DTLS-SRTP all the way from the sender to the receiver, even if they traverse network components like TURN servers. 

  In the case of multiparty meetings all audio and video traffic is still encrypted on the network (again, using DTLS-SRTP). Packets are decrypted while traversing Jitsi Videobridge; however they are never stored to any persistent storage and only live in memory while being routed to other participants in the meeting.

  Note: Since Jitsi is built on top of WebRTC, a deeper look into its security architecture is very important when evaluating Jitsi’s security aspects.

  So, why is the media decrypted in Jitsi Videobridge? Currently there is no way to do without this in WebRTC.  

  Some services try to achieve this by establishing a full mesh of peer-to-peer connections between participants but that presents significant issues.

  From a scalability perspective, this is a very limited approach as utilization of CPU and bandwidth grows quadratically to the number of participants thus quickly resulting in a very degraded user experience. This is the very reason why services like Jitsi Meet resort to using video routers (a.k.a., Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs)) like Jitsi Videobridge. With SFUs, clients establish a single connection with the video router and all data goes there. That saves a ton from a resource utilization point of view, but it complicates the encryption situation. At the moment WebRTC has no way to negotiate multi-party encryption over a single connection. Every client sets up a separate crypto context with the video router, which then has to trans-crypt the data as it relays it from one client to another. 

  Not all hope is lost though! The folks from the WebRTC team are working on providing the necessary APIs in the browser so applications can add an additional layer of encryption that would allow apps to add an end-to-end encryption layer while still allowing SFUs to function. You can bet we will be all over this as soon as possible.

  IMPORTANT EDIT (April 22, 2020): Thanks to the insertable stream API, that recently landed in Chrome Canary,  Jitsi Meet is now able to manipulate encoded packets before sending them on the network, and as a result we have been able to launch our new efforts on end-to-end encryption. Check out the demo and our next steps here:

  https://jitsi.org/e2ee

  What do you do with my data?

  To begin with, by default Jitsi Meet does not require users to create accounts. Any information they choose to enter, such as their name or email address is purely optional and is only shared with other meeting participants.  We do not retain this information after the meeting. 

  Other pieces of data such as the chat, or speaker stats, for example, are stored for the duration of the meeting and then destroyed when it ends. 

  Obviously many of these things can be customized by the configuration of the actual deployment that you are using so we are going to talk about the one we maintain: meet.jit.si 

  We preserve all of the above defaults but you should absolutely also check out the meet.jit.si Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

  Recordings are a bit of an interesting case. They are kept on our servers until we can upload them to the place you indicated (currently Dropbox). If we haven’t managed to do that in 24 hours we still delete them and they are gone forever (so make sure you have enough space in your Dropbox folders )

  Do you use analytics?

  Jitsi Meet does not come with any preconfigured analytics engines. 

  We do use analytics on meet.jit.si, so let’s talk about it.

  We are very committed to privacy and security and we are extremely careful about what information reaches the analytics engines we use. That said we also want to provide our users with a great product experience, so we need some visibility into what’s actually going on. We are currently using Amplitude, Datadog and Crashlytics to cover various aspects of the apps and the infrastructure on meet.jit.si. Things that we track in analytics include, an anonymous identifier (you can run in “incognito� mode if this bothers you), bitrate, available bandwidth, SDP offers and answers, product utilization events, mobile app crash dumps  (how much various product features are used overall).

  Most importantly, once your meeting is over we do not retain any  names, e-mail addresses or profile pictures (as we mentioned above, those are only transmitted to the other participants in the meeting).

  While we hope that the meet.jit.si configuration will be satisfactory to most users, we completely understand that it will be incompatible with what some others are looking for. If, for any reason, this is the case for you please remember that you could be running your private Jitsi Meet instance in as little 15 minutes!

  The post Jitsi Meet Security & Privacy appeared first on Jitsi.

April 03, 2020

• Digium Keeping Your Workforce Safe and Connected During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Introducing our guest contributor:

  Ben has been doing Linux based IT support and networking for over 25 years, and has been doing VoIP sense asterisk 1.2.

  His company VOICE1, provides Managed Switchvox Support and custom product integrations for small and large customers across the US and Canada as well as SIP trunking services.

  When he’s not tinkering with technology and automations, he can be found enjoying the Pacific Northwest and being surrounded by animals.

  ---

   

  As US business and the world is taking preventative measures for the coronavirus pandemic it is important for many businesses to remain accessible to their customer base.

  If you have a Switchvox and are considering sending/allowing staff to work from home the following information will be helpful to you.

  Allow Staff to Bring Deskphones Home

  

  If you already have desk phones and your system is configured to allow external access you may want to allow your staff to take their desk phones home with them. This has the advantage of:

  • Assuring no one else uses their equipment and reducing the chance of spreading infection.

  • Allows your staff to work with existing setup and not have to ‘learn’ something new at a time where everyone is on high alert and already stressed.

  • IT staff can focus on a centralized solution vs individual users, allowing rapid setup.

  How to Enable Remote Users

  Assure that you have adjusted your firewall to allow remote SIP access and HTTP/s access. Click here for a detailed listing of firewall ports.

  Make sure that you authorize only allowed SIP services by IP.

  

  Adjust the ACLs on your Switchvox to match your requirements.

  Best practice is to create a new network rule for each of your remote users.

  However many of you may need a faster simpler approach. You can enable SIP and optionally Web and API access for “All Networks”.

  This should only be done if you have your Switchvox behind a firewall and have the proper ACL permissions on your firewall. If you have not properly secured your firewall you will be exposing your phone system to public access.

  We do not recommend turning on “Never Block IP’s” at all. We also recommend setting per work IP restrictions, as soon as possible.

  

  Update the “Phone Networks” to be sure that you have a DNS name pointing to your PBX that can be reached from the public internet and properly forward to your Switchvox.  You can use just an IP, however you will have a warning about not having a proper SSL certificate. If you have properly set up your Switchvox you should have a valid SSL certificate already in place.

  Switchvox Desktop Softphone

  

  Setting up your Switchvox for use with the free Desktop Softphone is a little easier.

  You first need to assure that port 443 is forwarded to your Switchvox.

  Make sure to limit your firewall to only allow access from authorized sources to avoid exposing your system to the public internet.

  

  Next to each extension you will have 4 icons to the left. The third one allows you to manage phone assignments.

  

  Clicking the Manage Phone icon will let you edit or assign new phones.

  You have 2 options.

  1. Add an additional phone extension with phone-type “Switchvox Desktop Softphone”

  2. Edit a phone extension to set phone-type to “Switchvox Desktop Softphone”

  If you choose to add an additional phone you will need to adjust the users individual call rules so that the new additional phone will ring with incoming calls.  For many the simple process is to just re-assign the to only a softphone.

  ---

  Click here to learn more about Switchvox!

  The post Keeping Your Workforce Safe and Connected During the COVID-19 Pandemic appeared first on Sangoma.

• WebRTC Hacks Accelerated Computer Vision inside a WebRTC Media Server with Intel OWT

  WebRTC has made getting and sending real time video streams (mostly) easy. The next step is doing something with them, and machine learning lets us have some fun with those streams. Last month I showed how to run Computer Vision (CV) locally in the browser. As I mentioned there, local is nice, but sometimes more performance […]

  The post Accelerated Computer Vision inside a WebRTC Media Server with Intel OWT appeared first on webrtcHacks.

April 01, 2020

• WebRTC Hacks Does your video call have End-to-End Encryption? Probably not..

  Time for another opinionated post. This time on… end-to-end encryption (e2ee). Zoom apparently claims it supports e2ee while it can not satisfy that promise. Is WebRTC any better? Zoom does not have End to End Encryption Let’s get to the bottom of things fast: Boo Zoom! I reviewed how Zoom’s implements their web client last […]

  The post Does your video call have End-to-End Encryption? Probably not.. appeared first on webrtcHacks.

March 31, 2020

• FreeSWITCH Telemedicine: Telecom in the Age of Coronavirus

  Telecom has produced countless technologies that keep us all connected – especially tools allowing employees to work remotely by video conferencing. In the age of coronavirus, these same tools are now vital for people to connect to medical professionals. Telemedicine isn’t really a new thing, of course. Doctors have been connected to patients by radio and video for decades. But how often have you opted to participate in a doctor’s appointment via video call?

  As coronavirus spreads, so does the concern of overwhelming medical facilities and staff. Some people are more at risk due to other illnesses, some are more likely to be vectors for the virus, and medical staff themselves risk their own health coming into contact with so many patients. And all of these people have a lot to gain by swapping out in-person appointments for virtual meetings.

  Telemedicine has yet to really take off in the United States, but that seems to be rapidly changing with the spread of coronavirus and limited testing available. Health insurance plans have been offering the option to patients of talking to a nurse or doctor online instead of going to a clinic or doctor’s office, but most people haven’t made use of that.

  In the United States, hospitals are expanding the use of telemedicine during this time to safely screen and treat patients for coronavirus while containing its spread. This is a massive turning point for virtual health, and we’re starting to see the benefits of having it available to us during a public health crisis. Many hospitals now have virtual screenings set up to help identify patients that may have coronavirus, but telehealth will also be crucial for other appointments. Meanwhile, in Canada, a free platform was recently developed to connect doctors and patients remotely with the goal of limiting stress on the healthcare system.

  Medicare in the United States has also just been expanded into telemedicine, with the hope of stopping the spread of coronavirus among seniors, the most vulnerable population. Patients can connect to doctors with commonly used apps like Skype or FaceTime. This will be essential for keeping seniors up to date on any of their usual follow up appointments for other medical issues. Telehealth coverage under Medicare was very limited, but now Medicare will cover visits that previously had to be held in person in order to be covered.

  As telemedicine becomes more widely available, we can help keep the most vulnerable populations safe while steering everyone toward the proper treatment. By calling in with a video chat, patients can get guidance about whether they should be tested instead of showing up to doctors’ offices unannounced and putting others at risk. Or, high-risk patients can keep themselves safe by opting for a virtual visit first, whether it be with concerns of the virus, or for a routine check-in to avoid crowded waiting rooms.

  Especially for an otherwise healthy person who is low-risk and currently has mild symptoms, remaining home while still receiving medical expertise is a great option to prevent putting others at risk. If it is determined that a patient needs to come into a hospital for care, medical staff can prepare appropriately, protecting other patients from exposure and getting the infected to an isolation room. When it comes to coronavirus, this also helps to prevent widespread infection of healthcare workers.

  Virtual care still has its limits, and vulnerable patients are still encouraged to seek in-person treatment. Some of these systems may not yet be fully prepared to help patients who do have the virus. But, at the very least, telemedicine can allow the risks of a patient to be assessed to determine whether in-person care is needed, or if self-quarantine would be sufficient. It’s also useful for medical staff who have to self-quarantine due to exposure but who otherwise show no symptoms, allowing them to help patients online.

  Telemedicine will continue to be rediscovered and expanded as health systems adapt and develop more virtual tools for patients to use during this crisis. So for now, take care – and if you’re feeling sick, call your doctor and see if a virtual meeting would be accessible for your situation.

  The post Telemedicine: Telecom in the Age of Coronavirus appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

• Digium UC is all the Rage, but Voice Minutes are Hot Again…

  Unified Communications (UC), for knowledge workers, is all the rage right now. UC enables these folks to work from home relatively easily because this type of phone system enables the ability to offer softphones with your business number, conferencing, collaboration, presence, and mobile phones that also utilize your business phone number. So you can set up at home just as if you are in your office. The internet, whether home WiFi and/or LTE connectivity, is key for this to work well however.

  Sometimes a Plain Ol’ Voice Call is what the World Needs

  Not everyone is a knowledge worker with access to a UC system or even good internet connectivity, for that matter. And because of what’s going on today, the whole world wants to communicate more than ever. So that means the good old PSTN is there for the using. Certainly for subscriber-to-subscriber, but even for those that have businesses, you are probably taking more regular phone calls. Yes, just a plain, old-school voice call.

  

  Even a regular voice call can do wonders. And, really, even though many of us live in video and have great internet and Unified Communications, we all still just do plain voice calls, probably more than we even realize. And in this new reality out there, many people need to just place phone calls and talk.

  So what does this mean?

  I do not have the voice minutes data yet, but I do know that for the part of our business that services carriers, we are seeing an uptick in demand for our carrier gateways. That means these customers are seeing an increase in voice minutes and are gearing their networks up to deal with the increased demand.

  Sangoma offers IMG gateways, which are the leading lower density service provider gateways on the market. Its small footprint combined with a highly equipped feature set makes it ideal for quickly adding voice capacity to your networks.

  The post UC is all the Rage, but Voice Minutes are Hot Again… appeared first on Sangoma.

March 26, 2020

• FreeSWITCH How COVID-19 will impact ClueCon

  Like the rest of the world, ClueCon is keeping both eyes on how the COVID-19 virus will unfold. We are hopeful that the virus will wane by August but we also want to be prepared and lookout for the safety of the entire ClueCon family. We are planning on holding ClueCon in Chicago, August 3-6th, [...]

  The post How COVID-19 will impact ClueCon appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

• Digium Resources for Working Remotely with Switchvox

  COVID-19 is impacting how so many of us go about our workday. It’s no longer ‘business as usual’. At Sangoma, we’re doing everything we can to support our employees, partners, and customers. From working remotely to travel restrictions, we’ve taken many internal measures to ensure our employees are safe, yet well-equipped to continue serving you in the same dedicated way we always have. You can read more about those initiatives here.

  We’ve also received a high number of inquiries about how our Unified Communications (UC) systems can potentially help. As such, we would like to provide some additional information and address any concerns you may have about your business communications.

  At Sangoma, we have a complete portfolio of products and services that can help. This information is tailored to registered Switchvox users specifically. As such, you have access to the UC features you need to work from home and still accomplish just as much as if you were in the office.

  Here is an overview of the specific capabilities available to you to help you work remotely. Please see our Guide to Setting Up Remote Employees for detailed information about these features and how to use them.

   

  Watch the on-demand webinar “Unify the Mobile Workforce with Switchvox” to learn more about working from home with Switchvox! 

   

   

  Switchvox Desktop Softphone

  Take your extension on the go with the Switchvox desktop softphone. You can easily make/receive calls on your Windows or macOS laptop, see the statuses of other remote workers, and have full access to your contacts list. You can further enhance collaboration with group chat and SMS (via SIPStation) features. Additional information about the softphone is available here. Pair the Desktop Softphone with the Switchboard, so your calls and other Switchvox tools are right on your computer. (Please Note: the Desktop Softphone and Switchboard do not offer 3-way calling, but you can use the Meet Me Conference feature.)

  

  Using Your Existing Desk Phone to Work at Home

  If you use a Sangoma desk phone in the office, you can bring your phone home with you. In many cases, when attached to a properly-configured Switchvox system, you can plug in at home immediately. Please keep in mind that you will likely need a wall plug adapter to power your phone, as most home users do not have Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). Prior to doing this, please work with your Switchvox administrator to ensure that your Switchvox is set up to support remote employees.

  

   

  Switchvox Switchboard

  If you are already working remotely due to quarantine recommendations, our browser-based Switchboard is your window into all of your colleagues’ communication – no matter where they are located. A call control panel with the ability to manage calls and instant message with co-workers, this tool is especially valuable to receptionists as well as sales, service, and support teams. The Switchboard is also a great tool for call queue managers, offering a full set of queue management tools accessible from anywhere.

  

  Conference Rooms and Audio Conferences

  As the need for virtual meetings increases, you can take advantage of the conference features available with Switchvox. With the Meet Me Conference Center, your phone extension can have its own conference room. The extension-owner can even control the audio conferencing experience with announcement options, as well as specify who can talk in the conference. Conference Apps for the D80 desk phone and the Switchboard let the admin mute others on the call, or even remove others from the call.

   

  Want free training videos on working from home with Switchvox?

   

  Sending Work Calls to your Mobile or Home Phone

  If you’re working from home and you can’t use the Switchvox softphone, or you only have a home phone, you can easily configure Switchvox to send all of your calls to your personal mobile or home phone. This can be configured by logging into your Switchvox user web tool and navigating to Features > Call Rules and setting up a Call Cascade to your mobile or home phone.

  Sangoma Meet Video Conferencing

  

  Lastly, we are excited to introduce a new video meeting solution: Sangoma Meet! With Sangoma Meet, users can host high-definition video calls with up to 50 participants. Meetings are private and secure, with password protection turned on by default. And, Sangoma Meet is currently being offered, free of charge, to everyone! Click here to learn more or start meeting.

  The post Resources for Working Remotely with Switchvox appeared first on Sangoma.

• Digium Resources for Working Remotely with PBXact

  COVID-19 is impacting how so many of us go about our workday. It’s no longer ‘business as usual’. At Sangoma, we’re doing everything we can to support our employees, partners, and customers. From working remotely to travel restrictions, we’ve taken many internal measures to ensure our employees are safe, yet well-equipped to continue serving you in the same dedicated way we always have. You can read more about those initiatives here.

  We’ve also received a high number of inquiries about how our Unified Communications (UC) systems can potentially help. As such, we would like to provide some additional information and address any concerns you may have about your business communications.

  Here is an overview of the specific work from home (WFH) capabilities available to PBXact users:

  Zulu UC Desktop Softphone

  Sangoma’s Zulu UC delivers productivity and collaboration tools (chat, SMS, click-to-call, file sharing) through a single application which can be installed locally or used in a browser. Zulu brings all of your tools together in one place, letting you take your work environment with you, wherever you are.

  Through the Zulu interface on your desktop computer, you can:

  • Chat with coworkers 1:1 and in a group setting
  • Initiate group conference calling and merge calls together for ad-hoc collaboration
  • Create rooms for team collaboration sessions and transfer files
  • Send/receive SMS with clients using your work extension (via SIPstation)
  • Control presence and view the status of other colleagues
  • Open voicemail directly from the visual voicemail feature
  • Contact any of your co-workers from the corporate contact integration

  Administrators, please be aware that Zulu and VPN clients connecting directly to the PBX use significantly more system resources than a simple SIP registration. Be careful when deploying these solutions at scale on an existing system.

  

  User Control Panel

  The User Control Panel (UCP) is a browser-based, customizable dashboard available to every individual user, giving you call control options including:

  • Call forwarding, presence, conference calling, and more
  • Visibility into your colleagues’ presence/status, even when you’re not in the same location
  • The ability to access voicemail remotely
  • The option to redirect numbers to your mobile devices – scheduled or manual

  Use Your Existing Desk Phone to Work at Home

  If you use a Sangoma desk phone in the office, you can bring your phone home with you. In many cases, when attached to a properly-configured system, you can plug in at home immediately. Please keep in mind that you will likely need a wall plug adapter to power your phone, as most home users do not have Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). Prior to doing this, please work with your system administrator to ensure that your PBXact system is set up to support remote employees.

  

  Administrator Options for Connecting Remote Workers

  System administrators have the following options for connecting remote employees:

  Connect to the workplace VPN infrastructure.
  With this option, admins can extend the existing VPN infrastructure from the workplace to the home and not rely on the PBX at all to use the PBX resources remotely.

  Connect directly to the PBX using your S-Series phone from a remote location.
  Sangoma phones natively support connecting a VPN from the phone directly to the PBX. You will need to set up your PBX VPN server first, and then use EndPoint Manager to tell the phone to use the VPN on a per-extension basis. More information on this technique is available here.

  Connect directly to the PBX using the built-in VPN server from your desktop.
  A desktop VPN connection to PBXact can only be used with the Zulu Desktop Softphone or desktop softphone of your choice. It does not offer access to other company resources. Additional configuration information is available here.

  Deploy a second PBX in the Cloud for remote employees and enable a peer trunk to the main workplace system.
  Deploy PBXact in a hosted environment for WFH users and bridge the premise PBXact system via IAX2 or Chan_pjsip trunk for minimal exposure to the company network. When a rapid deployment of remote staff is required, this method is arguably the fastest, most cost-effective, and feature rich when direct VPN support just isn’t an option.

  Allow remote extensions to register directly to the PBX over the Internet.
  Administrators should only implement this method provided they are comfortable with the security implications.

  Send extension calls to a user’s mobile or home phone.
  Simply add a personal mobile number to Find Me / Follow Me for an extension. Calls through the PBX can be transferred to other extensions or queues.

  Built-in Contact Center Features

  PBXact also offers built-in contact center features for users like receptionists or service and support teams who handle a high volume of calls.

  • Calls that go to the company IVR can be easily redirected to specific users.
  • Businesses can create custom announcements so that callers can hear about valuable information before being connected to an agent.
  • Agents can prioritize calls with Caller ID prefixing and VIP caller options.
  • In the event of a spike in the number of calls, additional team members can be assigned a ‘stand-by’ option so they can easily start taking calls.
  • The XactView Operator Panel add-on module provides a command center view to control inbound calls, transfer, and more.
  • Hot Desking lets employees use their remote Sangoma IP phone as if it was in the office, allowing their individually customized settings to seamlessly transfer to a remote phone.

  Coming Soon! Video Meetings

  Lastly, we are excited to introduce a new product offering for a video meeting solution that will be available to you soon! While this offering was already on our product roadmap, we have recently accelerated our efforts to bring you this solution as quickly as possible.

  The post Resources for Working Remotely with PBXact appeared first on Sangoma.

March 24, 2020

• Digium Updating Your ILEC, CLEC, or Coop Telecom Network Infrastructure

  If you are one of the multiple hundreds of telecom coops, ILECs (Independent Local Exchange Carriers), or small CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers), it may be time to think about updating your voice network infrastructure. 

  Due to a variety of factors, you may be thinking about cutting costs, especially on the voice side of the business. Why pay those expensive yearly maintenance fees on that softswitch? Or maybe your expensive high-end softswitch solution is getting old, and you want to replace it. Or maybe that same softswitch solution is just overpowered for your voice network needs today, and you want to right-size your voice platform.

  No matter what the reason, a good solution could be looking at an enterprise switch that has been used in carrier environments. Someone who has an on-prem solution that you can put in your data center but that also has its own cloud solution based on that same technology, that you know can handle the traffic load on your network.

  Sangoma is such a company. We have 1.5 million paid-for UC endpoints, with many of them on our own cloud.  

  Sangoma Switchvox is present in many hundreds of enterprises of all sizes. The same product can and is currently being used in MSP environments, hosted on the MSP cloud. Switchvox is a great option to be the switch behind your voice network, if you are looking to change switches.

  Let’s take a look at the architecture diagram below. Running your voice network is your voice switch and applications, such as voice mail, IVR, and even contact center applications. This is connected to different networks, such as different mobile networks or the PSTN through gateways and SBCs which help transcode different media codecs and also translate protocols such as from the SS7 network to and from the switch. This enables your network to connect to those outside your network.

  

  You also need wholesale SIP trunking so that you can resell SIP Trunking to your subscriber base. The ability to obtain DIDs, provision those numbers for SMS/MMS, offer fraud protection, and manage e911 services is critical to your customer base.

  But you also need to connect the network to your subscribers, whether they are a home, a small or medium business, or a small or medium enterprise. These subscribers all have different kinds of endpoints, whether they are phones, computers, tablets, etc. Most likely, at this point in time, the subscriber (even a home) will not have a PSTN connection anymore. So the voice network will come into the subscriber through a SIP trunk. 

  If it’s a large business doing a lot of minutes, then wholesale SIP trunking will be the preferred option to use. Retail SIP trunking will be the preferred option for smaller businesses or the home. Either way, the subscriber will want to buy a connection service that works for them.

  How Sangoma Can Help

  Sangoma can help in a variety of ways. Let’s take a look at the network diagram again. As discussed above, Switchvox is Sangoma’s scalable PBX/Unified Communications system that can be your network voice switch. While it can be on-premise in an enterprise, or accessed through the Sangoma Cloud, we also have numerous installations in MSP environments, in the MSP data center and run on the MSP cloud.

  Switchvox also comes with call reporting tools, IVR, voice mail, desktop faxing, and many contact center features in an all-inclusive, easy-to-understand affordable pricing model.

  

  Sangoma offers our own Vega and IMG gateways and SBCs that have been tested to work with Switchvox. The gateways can support up to 2250 SIP sessions and 2016 channels of SS7 signaling and will make connection to other networks as simple as possible.

  Sangoma also offers our own phones and desktop and mobile clients that auto-provision within minutes to and with Switchvox. We offer a range of phones to suit your different subscriber needs. Our softphone clients enable chat, presence, and remote access to your business phone number and are included in the standard price of Switchvox. No hidden costs here.

  Sangoma also offers both retail and wholesale SIP Trunking. Our wholesale SIP Trunking solution (SIPDepot) is designed for you to offer retail SIP trunking to your customers. Or if you want to resell wholesale SIP Trunking to your larger enterprises where appropriate, you can do that too. And if you want to use our retail SIP trunking, we have SIPStation as well. Whatever SIP trunking solution makes sense for you, we can discuss that.

  As you can see, Sangoma offers a full range of potential ways we can help you both upgrade your existing telecom infrastructure and, at the same time, reduce your costs.

  The post Updating Your ILEC, CLEC, or Coop Telecom Network Infrastructure appeared first on Sangoma.

• FreeSWITCH Telemedicine: Telecom in the Age of Coronavirus

  By Danielle Plicka   Telecom has produced countless technologies that keep us all connected - especially tools allowing employees to work remotely by video conferencing. In the age of COVID-19, these same tools are now vital for people to connect to medical professionals. Telemedicine isn’t really a new thing, of course. Doctors have been connected to [...]

  The post Telemedicine: Telecom in the Age of Coronavirus appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

March 23, 2020

• Jitsi You can help! Deploy your own Jitsi Meet instance now

  The majority of plans we schedule each day are made with the assumption that we will be able to meet with people, face to face, and work out whatever we need to, with the appropriate level of privacy. 

  The same goes for products. Many of the tools we use come with the same assumption: the activity that the product supports would sooner or later lead to an actual gathering of people: discuss a ticket, a customer request, ask a teacher plenty of clarifying questions.

  Well quite unfortunately, at least for the time being, this is no longer possible.

  We are all hoping that this won’t last too long but right now we urgently need to provide ways for people to substitute their face-to-face meetings without compromising on security or fidelity. 

  Here are two options to get started quickly and easily:

  Run your own service on your own servers.

  So let’s start with this: running a Jitsi Meet rig is simply the easiest way on the planet to set up meetings that you can absolutely trust. Open Source, encrypted and on infrastructure you own. What’s more, you can get all of this in less than an hour of work!

  Have a look at our installation instructions or our docker containers. You might also be interested in Amazon’s Jitsi tutorial for AWS

  In many cases you should be able to get through all this and end up with a fully working video service in less than an hour. Questions? Ask the Jitsi community.

  Add video to your product.

  Once you have your own Jitsi Meet service, it is only a matter of minutes to integrate it into a product. The easiest way to do this is to simply generate random links and present them to the users of your application. Jitsi Meet does not require any sort of pre-meeting setup so all you need to worry about is picking up URLs that are unique enough. Here are a few examples:

  https://meet.jit.si/classroom-185a690e-6ca9-11ea-bc55-0242ac130003

  https://meet.jit.si/AppointmentSarahAndJohn-xfgha 

  https://meet.jit.si/session-202009121718687-afg 

  If you’d rather embed Jitsi within your own product experience, then please consider using Jitsi Meet’s iFrame API.

  In case all of this sounds overwhelming…

  If for some reason you don’t have the time to go through with a custom deployment, you can always start kicking the tires of the whole thing by using https://meet.jit.si.

  The post You can help! Deploy your own Jitsi Meet instance now appeared first on Jitsi.

March 19, 2020

• WebRTC Hacks Stop touching your face using a browser and TensorFlow.js

  Don’t touch your face! To prevent the spread of disease, health bodies recommend not touching your face with unwashed hands. This is easier said than done if you are sitting in front of a computer for hours.  I wondered, is this a problem that can be solved with a browser? We have a number of […]

  The post Stop touching your face using a browser and TensorFlow.js appeared first on webrtcHacks.

March 18, 2020

• Digium Working from Home Now and Its Impact on the Future of Work

  Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog about how UC can positively impact the ability to work from home. In fact, it’s almost mandatory to have a UC system to effectively work from home. That’s because you can have the same work phone number, you can access the same applications, you can be part of collaboration teams, your colleagues can dial you on a 3 or 4 digit extension, you can have instant messaging, etc. You’re basically at your desk at work, except the desk is now in your home.

  As companies come to grips with how to handle the Coronavirus issue, more and more companies are instituting work from home policies of some sort. Companies are going to see how it works for them, whether they were prepared or not. Obviously, some workers are not able to work from home just because of the job they do. But if you are a knowledge worker and your company utilizes a UC system, it will likely work out OK, certainly better than a company without a UC system. 

  And with these companies that institute some kind of work from home, or for employees who self quarantine, etc., whether the company intended it or not, this current work from home environment will be like a trial run for working from home, and its impact on operations.   So what is going on now will impact the future of working from home, most likely in a positive manner.

  Many companies who utilize a UC system will probably see that employees working from home had less impact than they thought it might. Or it will bring up some vulnerabilities they didn’t think about before, such as VPN load. I’m guessing this will also spur some employees to get faster internet connections if they are not getting the “response” they desired. Either way, something positive about the work from home company experience will come out.   

  And from that, there could likely be some employee-friendly policies about working from home instituted from the employer, to help retain and/or recruit employees. This even helps companies get to their “green” goals given working from home can help reduce a company’s carbon footprint simply because employees aren’t driving to work.

  Some companies will also see that they “needed” a UC system because it didn’t quite go that well. In 2008/2009 during the recession, many companies had been experimenting with VoIP. The recession, and the need to reduce as much cost as possible, was a key tipping point for companies to go all in on VoIP systems. This work from home time we are in now likely will further expand cloud and UC footprints.

  If you are thinking of installing a business phone system to help your employees work better from home, then Switchvox Cloud can help you.

  The post Working from Home Now and Its Impact on the Future of Work appeared first on Sangoma.

March 15, 2020

• Daniel Pocock Handling attacks on volunteers and their families

  Over the years, volunteers have done a lot to promote and contribute to free and open source software and the organizations/communities in this space. The leaders are not the only ones doing this work. Many people are quietly doing far more work than the leaders of some free software organizations.

  In 2017, the now defunct FSFE Fellowship, which consisted of approximately 1,500 Fellows, voted for me to be their community representative. Not only did I have to represent those who voted for me, but also those who voted for other candidates. I also discovered that I was representing a Fellow who died leaving a EUR 150,000 bequest. Although I was only a volunteer, I took all those responsibilities seriously.

  I didn't realize this at the beginning but representing the interests of donors and volunteers put me in opposition to some people who had not previously had to deal with the same level of committment from a community representative. The type of people who paid themselves salaries and took long periods of paternity leave after receiving that gargantuan EUR 150k bequest.

  Around that time, I was also dealing with some incredibly tragic circumstances in my family life. I resigned from some of my roles, for example, resigning as a Google Summer of Code admin in Debian in August 2018. Thanks to the never-ending creativity of open source politics, people immediately started rather offensive lies trying to connect me to trolling or even suggesting that I was expelled. It isn't coincidence when people say things like that about somebody elected by the volunteers. My only mistake was joining the FSFE in the first place.

  In September 2018, Debian's leader (DPL) Chris Lamb had the Debian Account Managers move my key from the DD keyring to the inferior DM keyring.

  They wanted me to feel humiliated.

  They wanted me to continue contributing to Debian, but under their coercive control. You can see the entry on 20 September 2018 when I was moved from the DD to the DM keyring, not expelled.

  The thing is, my responsibility is to my employer and clients. By exercising this control over me, those co-conspirators aspired to have the power of an employer without actually paying me.

  In other words, they wanted me to be their slave and their puppet.

  

  People tried to give me orders about what I can and can't tell the community who elected me to represent them.

  I couldn't perform my role as a community representative under such coercive influence so I resigned. I resigned from the representative role and also completely resigned from FSFE on the same day that Debian started blackmailing me, 20 September 2018.

  That date wasn't coincidence: that is the impact of blackmail.

  Now we get to the bizarre part: 12 October 2018, the Debian Project Leader, Chris Lamb, wrote that he had me "demoted" but the current leader, Sam Hartman, is telling people I was expelled. These words mean very different things. That is an incredibly vindictive way to re-write history. Hartman has made far-fetched claims about trolling but since doing so, not one piece of evidence has appeared. Any evidence produced retrospectively is no more trustworthy than anything else that has been said in the meantime. Debian has a history of making up evidence retrospectively to justify political assassinations.

  If you have any doubts about this, you can check the DM keyring log, why would they move me to the DM keyring if I had done anything that would remotely justify an expulsion? Anybody on the DM keyring can still upload all of their packages.

  In what kind of organization do you expel or fire somebody and still keep asking them to do stuff for you like that?

  They behave like the men who extort women with revenge porn: the relationship is over but they want to maintain control over the woman, having her on call. They threaten to humiliate the woman by releasing some videos if she doesn't volunteer for things.

  In the case of Debian Developers, they humiliate one of us every couple of years to keep everybody else under their thumb.

  The demotion was a veiled threat, a form of blackmail: follow orders and do work for us or we tell people we expelled you. Sam Hartman's outburst is nothing more than a bunch of gangsters following through on a threat.

  In my case, they wanted to benefit from my technical work making packages but they didn't want me to have a voice representing the 1,500 Fellows. Why can't the people who do the work have a voice?

  Given the challenges my family faced over that last couple of years, this was a particularly nasty case of harassment and abuse from Debian's leadership.

  Other Debian Developers continued to work with me on various things. None were aware that I had been moved to a different keyring. It quickly became obvious that this was a conspiracy operated by a very small group of people, including the leader and the three Debian Account Managers, a silent act of abuse hidden from the community at large.

  Nonetheless, I didn't say a lot about what was going on. Then something changed: I saw them starting to subject another volunteer to the same coercion. I realized that, like serial rapists, these people were going to keep doing this. The vast majority are unaware that some leadership figures in Debian behave like this: if people knew, they wouldn't join Debian.

  On a number of occasions now, I've been a witness to other volunteers in a range of organizations being subject to harassment, abuse and coercion in various ways.

  When I've tried to defend other volunteers, there is a nasty overreaction. In a brazen case of victim-offender reversal, when bullies like that are challenged, they will claim the entire community that is being defended is under attack. In my mind, there is no community without the grass roots developers. There is nobody else to defend the Fellow who died and left a EUR 150k bequest. Women and other groups that are at a disadvantage. Defending those people or defending the privacy and dignity of my own family is not an attack, it is just the right thing to do.

  Could that be the difference between Lamb's demotion and Hartman's expulsion/ban/revenge attack, my effort to stand up for a fellow volunteer? I owe so much to the people who did the real work creating free software that its an honour for me to risk my own reputation to defend them against the menace of these blackmailers.