Mortens Blog

Swyx Technology Conference 2011

morten@rokosz.no — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 07:17:12 GMT

09:11 – Good morning. People are starting to show up at the Swyx Technology Conference. We will try at our best to cover the most important information revealed during this first STC from Dortmund. Stay tuned to this blog post and make sure to update your browser window from time to time.

Please note that pictures are taken with a mobile phone at the moment. There might be higher quality photos available later.

10:00 - Ralf Ebbinghaus is welcoming everybody to this first Swyx Technology Conference. It is clear that Swyx wants to do this event on a regular basis. 2010 was an excellent year for Swyx, and now 2011 will probably be even more successful. A new corporate design is presented and a new product brochure will be available shortly. It will explain the benefits of Swyx in a better way than ever before.

This is an event and a day about technology. There will be keynotes and breakout sessions throughout the day.

10:45 – The UC Challenge, a keynote speech by Mark Russel.

Mark is one of the real Swyx vetaran, doing Swyx installations as early as 2001.

He starts by asking the question: What is the UC Challenge. The challenge is : What is UC?! Some try to define it as an extension to IM or the possibility to work from home!

Problem: The majority of companies employs less than 10 people, in the UK as many as 90% of all companies. Do they need all these features usually defined as Unified Communication?

Mark addresses one challenge for Swyx, the fact that the need and competition differs from country to country. What makes Swyx unique? Mark points out that one strenght is the commitment to Microsoft technology like Outlook, .NET and SQL server which are used by almost all companies.

Is Swyx a telephone system? It might be just that, but start to think about SwyxWare as an application and that’s important since UC is about unifying communication with the customer’ processes.

Mark tells about some examples from real customer cases where they used SwyxWare as a platform to develop a real benefit for the customers. Bottom line, UC and Swyx are all about making customers more efficience.

The last challenge: How to get SwyxWare out to the world? Apps?

11:00 – Programming with Windows PowerShell with Martin Hüser

Powershell is Microsoft’s automation engine and is a scripting language. Powershell was choosen to automate Swyx administrative tasks. Powershell will change the way Swyxware can be managed. It is a Project on the Swyx-Forum and can be dowloaded from the download section.

Originally used to set up test systems. It uses the same modules as SwyxWare Administration and hence it will be possible to automate all aspects of SwyxWare Administration.

Martin is running a demonstration on how to use the Powershell module in SwyxWare 2011. Always do a backup before executing scripts

One of the functions demonstrated is how to manage groups. It is possible to read out group configuration, sort it and write commands back into the database, like adding an user into the group.

Powershell can be used to set a user picture. This is currently not supported by SwyxWare Administration.

The use of the Powershell module to import users from an AD Organisational Unit into SwyxWare is demonstrated.

Import/export of the global phonebook is also one of the many applications of the Powershell Module.

There is still some limitations in the Powershell module, but this will be continuously addressed.

Martin shows of scripting speeddials

12:00 – It is time for lunch…. Will be back at around 13:00 with Wolfgang Schröder talking about ‘UC Markets and the Swyx Technology’

12:55 – People are starting to finish lunch and gather in the main conference room for Wolfgang’ session. We will bring you the highlights.

13:00 – ‘UC Markets and the Swyx Technology’ by Wolfgang Schröder.

Where is the market for UC? Where is Swyx? How will Swyx do to expand its market shares? Some of the questions he is going to answer. Products like iPad and other mobile devices, will challenge Swyx to think about how to integrate such devices. UC is a marketing term, but describes well the shift to IT based form of integrated enterprise communication.

Who are the players in the UC market? Numbers from 2010 in West Europe show Avaya, Cisco and Siemens are major players. Swyx is placed at 6th position (11-100 users). Swyx has exeeded 50 users mark as an average number of users and several Swyx installations are around 1000 users. Anyway the core segment will be +/- 100 users systems and development will focus on this segment.

What will happen in the UC markets? Pure software solutions will penetrate into legacy PBX markets in a greater scale. The key factor will be integration with PC applications and integration with social networks, including status and presence. Mobile phones will be an even more integrated part of UC solutions.

Microsoft must be considered the new key player. It merits will be in the higher end of the market at the moment.

In the large enterprises video will be more important.

What will Swyx do to expand market shares? Focus on 30-250 SME segment. Push Hosted SwyxWare as its Cloud based offering and will be side by side to the CPE business. Swyx will invest into 3rd party applications (integration), the smart phone must be the ‘standard SwyxWare device’ and improvement to the Swyx Technology Partner Program.

Redefine the strategy for telephony/UC devices. Swyx will announce its device strategy in Q4/2011, part of this will be a P250 replacement.

13:45 – Smart Call Routing with Persistent Variables with Tom Wellige.

This session will be recorded on video and will be available later for viewing.

Scripts will often be dynamic, so a good practice is to put functions in the Start Block of the GSE.

Error handling and finding error is very important when developing scripts. A Run Time error will disconnect a call. Have a look at the video if you want to see best practices for error handling and tracing. A URL to the video will be published when the video is available online.

15:00 – Feedback SwyxWare 2011 – What is great? What is missing? with Marco Crueger & Michael Thomson

The participants of the congress got a chance to give feedback before arriving. This is the result.

The great thing about Swyx is flexibility. Gives you choice on what kind of servers, switches and end devices. Client flexibility by skin concept in SwyxIt!.

Comments from the audience:

SwyxIt! without the need of VPN client.
The need to be able to use or control every device as a ‘system’ device (3rd party call control).
Thin clients are about to be a standard in the SME, the need to make it a voice device.
Web (browser) based client
Access to the local mobile phone-book when using Web Access
Will there be an iPhone App? Yes, it will be an App similar to the SwyxIt! for iOS and Android. Not a SIP based App, but based on the Mobile Extension Manager.
Bulk administration in SwyxWare Administration.

The Beta testing of 2011 was a success. Thanks to to Frank, Rene and Remco for finding the most bugs!! They were awarded nice food baskets….

17:45 – Get together

Time for getting social. Thanks to Swyx and all the participants of the 1st Swyx Technology Conference. If you could not participate this year, we strongly encourage you to attend the next STC

Google busy making voice…

morten@rokosz.no — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:25:00 GMT

It has been really interesting to see what has keeping Google busy lately.

First they launched a really neat feature called ‘Chrome-To-Phone’. In short, it will add a button to Chrome that lets you seamlessly push links, maps, and currently selected text and phone numbers to your Android device. Basically a ‘CTI’ function between your browser and Android phone. If Swyx could release an Android version of SwyxIt! Mobile, this could actually be used to make some sort of CTI for Android phones integrated with SwyxWare. How sweet would that be!

Next up, call phones from Gmail! This in addition to the already popular (in the United States) Google Voice makes Google a potential important player not only as an contributor to smartphone OS’, but actually as a VoIP player.

Added 30.08.2010: Today I found this article, describing almost exactly what I meant with my blog-post,

What does Google's New "Call Phone" Gmail Feature Mean for Unified Communications?

Living it up in the Cloud…

morten@rokosz.no — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:16:00 GMT

Before the summer of 2009 we started up a new company to bring Hosted SwyxWare to Norwegian resellers. We refer to this as Cloud Communication. Starting a company from scratch is a perfect way to be a little bold and try to do things differently. So, my quest as the CTO was to see just how ‘cloudy’ a company can be in the year of 2009…

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