Posts by Christian Legg

Pluto probe brain OVERLOAD: Titsup New Horizons explained

and 40 years to the day...

...since the Apollo/Soyuz joint mission.

Vauxhall VXR8: You know when you've been tangoed

This is why the Aussie motor industry is shutting down

V8 fuel guzzlers that cost an arm and a leg to buy and then take your kidneys for ongoing petrol costs.

Any wonder people aren't buying them anymore?

Are you ready to ditch the switchboard and move to IP telephony?

As with others who have written comments, we're facing the slow but sure phase-out of ISDN services in Australia, leaving us with PSTN (ugh) or IP based connections only.

We moved our call centre from ISDN to IP with one of Australia's biggest Telcos over 4 years ago, and the benefits have been pretty good. We can upsize our inbound pipe, both in terms of SIP connectivity and bandwidth, so that as our call centre grows we don't need to upgrade any of our hardware. And we can do that pretty quickly with a phone call to the Telco.

For additional outbound call capability, we have deployed a GSM mobile phone dialler that works like a SIP trunk on our network and gives us 24 outbound channels that we can use in the event that our fixed SIP trunks are full, or if the Telco's SIP system fails (which it has done, once, for 6 hours, during business hours).

And as we deploy new branches, we just spin up new site definitions in our phone system, plug the new phones in and away they go.

We do retain PSTN lines in each branch though for use by outbound faxes - inbound is handled by fax to email service. The same PSTN line also handles the duress/panic alarms and also sports a POTS analog phone, so if the worst comes to the worst the branch staff can make good old fashioned landline calls.

Besides the power downside (which you can work around with decent UPS or generator sets anyway), there can be some really thorny issues if your upstream Telco isn't across the technology that they have deployed. As an example, we have had codec issues that have resulted in DTMF tones not being recognised when our SIP trunks are provisioned on one brand of hardware at the Telco's central exchange, but the tones work just fine if the trunks are provisioned on another brand of hardware. That's a problem for the Telco now...

So when things go right, they go very very right. But when they go wrong, they go rotten!

It's all about getting the right mix of flexibility, cost-savings, expandability and reliability.

Office 365 turns Lotus eater

My recollection of the Binary Tree Database Migration Tools...

...was that they only migrated databases that had been built on the standard Domino database templates.

They could not handle anything that was even remotely customised.

I've yet to see a Domino site that doesn't have customised applications.

Apple to slash prices by up to 15% on Black Friday?

3% to 5% discount, it seems

Not even worth getting out of bed for here in Australia.