TL;DR The Jitsi team at 8×8 are proud to announce the brand new and awesome Jitsi as a Service: world’s easiest way to embed video meetings in your apps and websites! All the power of Jitsi and none of the hassle of running it. Check out JaaS now!
Ever since early last year we were proud to see a huge uptake in Jitsi adoption. Many were downloading and running it for their schools, companies and communities. Many others were simply using it on meet.jit.si.
To our great satisfaction we also saw a number of very creative teams and developers embedding Jitsi into their apps and tackling all sorts of different use cases ranging from work collaboration through education all the way to happy hours and Dungeons and Dragons sessions.
We find this absolutely exciting as we firmly believe that video meetings should be right where you need them: well integrated in the apps where you use them.
The Jitsi team at 8×8 is therefore proud to now announce the brand new and awesome Jitsi as a Service. JaaS lets you use the Jitsi iFrame API and mobile SDK to embed meetings in any web or mobile app. In addition to that it also gives you full control of meeting access through strong authentication and supplies a comprehensive set of webhooks that let your app nicely interact with the meeting. All of that comes with a very simple pricing model based on the number of users that connect to your service every month.
To see how easy it actually is to embed into a website, we asked Matt Gardner, the DevRel leader at 8×8 to try it out. Here’s the short video where Matt demonstrates how to do it.
We already have many interesting apps hosted on JaaS and we will be telling you all about them very soon! Until then, make sure you check out all that JaaS!
Love,
Your Personal Jitsi Team
The post JaaS: the Team that Builds Jitsi Can Now Also Run it for You! appeared first on Jitsi.
Given that mobility is such an important part of the Unified Communications experience, I have periodically written about the proliferation of WiFi, and about the expansion of faster cellular networks. More WiFi out there in the world, and the better the cellular networks, means the remote work aspect of UC will just continue to grow. That’s not really any big news, but I still check in on the growth and proliferation.
If you read the headline of this blog and have read this far, you likely know the meaning of these letters – they are all names of 
Today Sangoma has announced we have been chosen by Frost and Sullivan to receive their North American Unified Communications and Collaboration Competitive Strategy Leadership Award. Yes, a long-winded name for an award. In a nutshell though, we’ve been recognized by Frost and Sullivan for our UC products and what we’ve been doing to bring them forward. And we are very proud of that.
Interview with WebRTC standards co-chair and author, Bernard Aboba. We cover the current status of WebRTC and where it is headed including WebRTC-NV, Simulcast, SVC, AV1, WebTransport, WebCodecs, ML and more.
Unified Communication 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 customer 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.
If the future of Unified Communications means even more mobility, what does that all really mean? Some essential requirements emerge:
The benefits of Unified Communication systems have emerged front and center for businesses of all sizes. UC has enabled many businesses to keep going forward in this remote work environment, almost as if nothing had happened. Given the spotlight on UC now, and given many businesses have signaled that remote work, at least in some form, will remain a part of the company even when it’s time to go back to a physical workplace, many people are asking, “what’s next” for UC?
Last week I had the pleasure to deliver this very nice check to Rigidnet in Fort Worth, Texas. They are a cloud reseller selling Switchvox cloud and closed a nice 330 seat deal while we had a special SPIFF program going. So they made some nice money and since their offices are near where I live, I drove over to talk to them.
Pinning ideas and dynamic content on virtual walls and sharing notes in realtime from any device (laptop, phone) within a few seconds are practical examples of living in a mixed reality. Digital objects become physical in virtual rooms, so you can scroll through them – pick up images and contents you like and toss them up on the virtual wall. Anyone can enter and exit these virtual rooms and contribute at any time as if they are real physical rooms. 
While the tech world is busy building new features and technologies to enhance video conferencing in general, people have high expectations for multimedia, video, and communication technology thanks to the great visual and sound quality they experience today in their home theater systems. It is not the 90s anymore, and connecting to the Internet via Dial-up would be dreadful. No one has the patience to wait for buffering video or listening to breaking voices. Without proper video quality and sound management, any video conferencing event can quickly become frustrating for the users. 
Last week there was some buzz about a security flaw in FreePBX. It started with CheckPoint, and then a few outlets picked it up. One problem. It was a year old issue. And we acted on it back then quickly. Would have been great if CheckPoint or the others that picked up the story had checked with the FreePBX team or community before just blurting this out there, so they would have had the most up to date information.
While I talk about the benefits of UC and about Communications as a Service in general, the real point of my talk is not about UC at all. The real point is that UC systems have many features, yet users of UC systems still use collaboration, video, and presence systems from other companies. Why is that? That should not be a forgone conclusion since it’s harder for IT to deal with all these systems, they’re not all integrated together, etc. The UC system should be the hub that harbors all these functions.
Last week was AstriCon Plan 9 (Virtual AstriCon), and while it was the best virtual event I’ve been part of (seriously!), yet another virtual event makes it seem as if we’ll be working from home forever. But some companies are quietly already partially back to work, or making plans to have employees come back to work. No matter what, this will end someday, and things will be back to normal.
Walkthrough and deep analysis of how Azure Communications Service makes use of WebRTC by Gustavo Garcia
I was recently asked the question in the title of this blog when I was briefing an analyst about Sangoma. Without really thinking about what timeframe or anything like that, I blurted out “Probably a computer that sounds like a native language speaker”. In other words, a sophisticated chatbot. 
Chrome recently added the option of adding redundancy to audio streams using the RED format as defined in RFC 2198, and Fippo wrote about the process and implementation in a previous article. You should catch-up on that post, but to summarize quickly RED works by adding redundant payloads with different timestamps in the same packet. […]
We know that right now, communication is key. We also know that you need to be able to work where it makes the most sense for you, so mobility is a must. 
For system administrators, 
On September 1, I wrote a blog titled 
When I went on vacation this summer, I found myself with five 30 and under year olds for a week (The Group of Five), all who are still working, and all who are now working from home. They worked for companies ranging from a large Fortune 50 company to a small 10 person and under company. So a good representation of company size. None are in the business communication phone business, so, to them, the phone and IT systems are just there as part of their work environment.
Since 2011, Sangoma has recognized our top performing partners with the annual Pinnacle Partner Awards. 
I’ve been meaning to write this blog for a long time. When Sangoma merged with Digium a couple of years ago, there was a lot of integration we had to do. And one of them was with the channel partner program. It took some time. But during that process, I had to do a lot of thinking about what we wanted in our partner program, and the company did a lot of thinking about this as well.
Features: Standard and advanced features offered, as well as the advantages of having them. What specific benefits will users experience with these new features? What indirect benefits will the users enjoy, such as streamlines processes or shorter on-hold times?
Cost: Pricing between an on-premise solution and a hosted solution look very different, as one is an up-front capital expense, and the latter is a monthly expense based on usage. Whichever deployment type you choose, explaining it as an investment that will pay for itself is important (especially when you compare it to what you are currently paying, which is likely to be much higher). If you pay for the on-premise system up front, it will be a lower TCO than a hosted system will be. However, if your business lacks the capital for an on-premises system and has the required setup for a hosted system, the expense become operational, and is based upon usage and number of extensions. While the TCO of a hosted system is higher than an on-premises, the little to no up-front cost is a major selling point to decisions makers. Think of it this way: Netflix has a much higher TCO than your DVD collection, but which one are you getting better use out of?
Timetable: Include an explanation of when you think the system should be deployed, and what impact it could have on the business (example: most schools upgrade their phone systems in the summer months when staffing is minimal).
With this current work from home / work remote period we are now in, many of us are using softphones or headsets to do our daily calls. 
Back in April 2020 a Citizenlab reported on Zoom’s rather weak encryption and stated that Zoom uses the SILK codec for audio. Sadly, the article did not contain the raw data to validate that and let me look at it further. Thankfully Natalie Silvanovich from Googles Project Zero helped me out using the Frida tracing […]