Cisco

All Consuming Project

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The move downstairs is taking up allot more of my time than I would have liked. I am on my way home now. Kai and Co. will make sure the cubes are finished and the cable work is done right.

Now that the contracts are back, our data center wants to schedule the move of our gear to our new cage. I need to call them tomorrow. Hopefully we can do everything and have ourselves up in the new cage by mid June. Then all we have to worry about is IPCC.

On other notes I am working on getting a DC into VMware, still. I got side tracked since I had to goto Kingston. I will demote one of our DC’s tomorrow and bring it online as a virtual machine.

Still waiting to run the active directory upgrade at our data center. this will enable us to have 2003 domain controllers. This will be helpful for Biztalk 2004.

Construction (Still Going On)

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I am off to Kingston for 2 days of construction fun tomorrow. We are moving existing cubes downstairs, and putting in the remaining furniture. When I mean we, I mean the furniture guys are coming and I am going to “supervise”. I am going for 2 days since the furniture people think it will take that long. The cable guys are coming out the day after the furniture guys leave to finish up the cable. Once that is done we can move the remaining reps downstairs and be done with this long delayed project.

Fear not, the next 2 major projects is already underway. Turns out we are big enough and have the right people in place that I can run two major upgrades at the same time. My stress level is up there, but we can do it. I have NYC people (myself included) working on upgrades (now officially moving) of our cage to a new location in our data center. Kingston on the other hand is working on IPCC. I am still involved in that, but Kai will have to handle some of the day to day details since he will manage the product after it is deployed. Along the way the dev team has noted that they will be building an entirely new website environment to accommodate the next generation site they are building. That means in addition to what I just mentioned we need to find space for, design, quote, build and then manage new Dev, QA, & production environments. that means servers, databases, web servers, etc. All this while we maintain our existing equipment. It will be an interesting project.

Swiss Persision, & My New Omega

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My old Timex watch broke on me a few weeks ago. I have always been a cheap digital watch person. I liked the alarm, and the laziness of a digital watch. Not even the metal kind, the ones with the leather or rubber straps. My wrists are too small for a cheap metal watch. They would require cutting out of metal links. The work to do that would cost me more than the watch did, so I stayed with the cheap stuff.

Last year my dad gave me his 1969 vintage Omega Speedmaster Professional. I have worn it on and off since I got it. I have always been fearful I would damage it. My dad keeps saying that the watch has been through allot, and I shouldn’t worry. I have heard stories of it being sterilized. Been in countless peoples chests during surgery, and other interesting tidbits. My response is that most flesh wont scratch a watch, but sheet metal and a rack will destroy anything. I don’t want to destroy a great old vintage watch. That being said I have been afraid of wearing it every day. My family says I should just wear it for special occasions. Good idea, but that brings me back to my broken Timex. I got a replacement one at Walmart a few weeks ago. I hate it. It doesn’t feel right, the synthetic strap itches. I just don’t like it. What to do. The final straw was a conversation I had with Jayson on friday after he showed me the nice swiss army watch Gretchen got for his birthday. I realized my problem was I didn’t want to wear my dad’s old omega, but I wanted one I could beat up. I started smelling a spending spree coming on.

I went online and found several model’s of Omega watches that I liked. I was specifically interested in the X-33. it is the latest update to the Speedmaster Professional watch that is certified by NASA for space travel. If NASA certified something, it must be built to last. What I also liked was that the watch was both analog and digital. My main issues with the old Omega I had was that it was all analog. It takes me a few seconds to read the time since I am still not used to all analog. The digital face of the X-33 was cool. The other issue is the old one I have is heavy. it is of course stainless steel. The new X-33 is all titanium. Nice and light. I went over to Tourneau. They have a huge watch store on Madison Ave. They didn’t have any new X-33’s in stock, but the manager came out when I asked about availability of the watch. He showed me a “pre-owned” one. It had some wear on it. Nothing too noticeable, but he said it was heavily discounted since it was pre owned. When I heard the price I gave him my credit card on the spot. It was like half of what I thought it would cost, and it came with a 1 year store warrentee. I am now a happy wearer of a nice metal (yet digital) watch that I can beat up. I finally figured I would fork over some extra money for something that I keep on my wrist 16 hours a day, every day. I mean I buy a good expensive pair of eye glasses for the same reason (well that and other reasons), so why not get a good watch.

So I put my tax return money to good use. Hopefully I will have this watch around in 35 years like my dad had the one he gave me. that way grand kids can have a 70 year old watch and a 35 year old one! 🙂

Now all I need are nicer shoes, and maybe a few dress shirts and I will be presentable. On a plus note I do have the nice day to day dress paints down!

Most importantly now if NASA call’s and says I can goto the International Space Station, I have one less thing I need to buy!

IPCC SOW

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We met our integrator about the statement of work for our IPCC deployment. They calmed our nerves about most issues but we came up with another one. Dan and I will talk about this tomorrow.

If that is done, we can sign the papers and in 90 (work filled, super stressful, and probably extremely interesting and fun) days we will have an IPCC call center.

More news as it develops…

IPCC Deployment

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I have been quiet on the work front recently. Not because I don’t have things to talk about but because I have been busy. We went over the statement of work for our IPCC deployment yesterday. We need to go over a few details to make sure we know what we are doing! More news as that LONG project progress’s.

Cisco 7920 IP Wifi Phone

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I have had the opportunity to play with the Cisco 7920 Wifi IP phone recently. I have said before I am a fan of Cisco Call Manager (CCM). I use it, I like it. I thought the 7940 wired IP phones were great. This Wifi phone operates just like a 7940 but it is a cordless. I have taken it between 2 locations with the same WEP configuration and it worked seamlessly. I took it between 2 floors with seamless wifi setup and it worked without a problem. The battery life leaves a bit to be desired, and a cradle would be nice for what these things cost, but the phone is still great.

I am tempted to get a wifi IP phone for my personal Broadvoice account. They offer help on configuring them, and they even sell one through Hello Direct. I am just not sure if the quality is as good as the Cisco one? Too bad the 7920 is only a skinny based phone and wont work on SIP.

VOIP Rocks

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I haven’t said anything nice about Broadvoice recently. It still rocks. It’s $10 a month unlimited in state calls plan is the only reason why I have a home phone. It is only $1.50 in tax, vs $9 in tax for the $8 dial tone service Verizon offers. And that gives me just dial tone. My $10 gets me tons of crap. The only issue with the service is the customer service. it takes forever to get someone on the phone. They are growing so I will cut them some slack for now. Thankfully I only needed to call when I had to make changes to my account. No problems so far. Lets hope it stays that way. Why Vonage can’t or wont offer some of the services Broadvoice does I don’t know. Hey vonage you would have gotten my biz if you had more than 1 phone you can simultaneous ring on, and if I could use any VOIP phone, and not just your adapter. My Cisco 7940 rocks! Can you get the weather report off your home phone? Do you want to?

Other cool VOIP products I am playing with now is Skype. Just being able to make phone calls from a pocket PC got me interested. I have the free service setup, but I have not had a chance to use it. Gus and others rave about it. I am traveling on thursday and will give it a try then. Added bonus, Skype works on the Mac or Linux!

IPCC Is a Go

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After months of negotiating (and years of thinking and talking about it) my company finally decided to purchase Cisco’s IPCC software. Gus and I started looking into this stuff way back in December of 2002. It didn’t pan out. We ended up going to Cisco Call Manager 3.3.2 with our incumbent ACD Zeacom Smartconnect. Call Manager was a vast improvement over our Avaya Magix system we were using so we were sort of happy. Unfortunately Smartconnect has major problems integrating with Call Manager. We have uncovered several issues that have taken us months to overcome. Other issues are not correctable.

As we grow the need for a new contact center software became apparent. We looked at the major players, Cisco, Genisys, & Aspect. We were slightly limited with our options because we were already on Cisco’s Call Manager IP phone IP-PBX. That made us need to look at Genisys’s and Aspect’s IP based products. The problem with them was that either very few or no one was using them on Cisco’s Call Manager (CCM). To me that was one of the two killer problems for our situation. The other problem was integration. As we saw with Smartconnect the “hooks” that tied the Software to our IP-PBX was critical. Cisco was great at selling the integration between CCM and IPCC. Of course you assume there will be tight integration between the two, they are both Cisco products. The other two companies (in my opinion) had problems proving the tightness of their software to CCM. And for a major purchase such as this, I needed to be totally comfortable with the software we were buying. Because even if no one said it, if this integration fails peoples heads will be looking at me as to why.

There is allot to be said by having “one throat to choke” when dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars of phone gear. The up hill battle for IPCC was proving to our business people that the ease of use and functionality of IPCC was on par with Genisys.

So my multiple trips to Boston, Philly, Kingston, etc, and endless conversations with sales guys and pre sales engineers have finally paid off. And if you know me, dealing with sales guys a fate worse than death (sometimes).

The next step is scheduling this massive upgrade to not interfere with our other major projects going on. Such as expanding into our new Call Center space downstairs, new Fulfillment system, and upgrades to our data center infrastructure.

As part of this upgrade we will also be upgrading our voice mail from smartconnect’s voice mail system to Cisco’s unity. We will also need/want to upgrade call manager to 4.x after we are done with the IPCC upgrade. This is because Smartconnect as of now does not support CCM 4.x, so that upgrade has to come after we move to IPCC.

This will be exciting but stressful.

New BroadVoice Account

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This story starts out with me wanting to configure a Cisco 7940 phone we had for our Call Manager to work with my VOIP provider. I never did get it to work. I ended up with a nice Motorola cordless phone plugged into the ATA device Broadvoice sent me. I have wanted to tinker with getting the Cisco phone to work with SIP for months but didn’t. Truth be told I hadn’t really put much effort into it until today. After tinkering with some TFTP files and some firmware updates from Cisco I was able to convert the phone over to SIP. This enabled me to order the Broadvoice service without needing the ATA adapter.

I have been happy enough with my BroadVoice account that I signed my company up for one. We have a POTS line in our cage in our data center. It costs $50 a month for the dam thing. We use it like 4 times a month. The problem is that it is a life saver to have when calling in a server or communicating a problem to others from the data center. Broadvoice’s plan for $10 a month was too good a savings to pass up. I was able to get the phone configured in 10 minutes after I got the SIP firmware on it. Now all we need to do is move the phone to our data center and setup a firewall rule to allow it to work.

Cisco Executive Briefing

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It sounds fancier than it was. Gus, Dave, Kai, and I went up to Cisco Systems Executive Briefing Center outside of Boston. We were getting the overview of their IPCC product from all the product managers and engineers working on the system. First off I will say I think the trip was worth it. I think there were some issues still unresolved by some of our team, that I think Cisco was able to handle.

We got up to Boston by noonish. Our account manager and his boss picked Gus and I up from the train and we drove the 40 minutes to the site. it is a nice new campus. We ate lunch, which was surprisingly good. Normally this sort of stuff is not what I consider good food. They had nice chicken dish with stuffing and potatoes. I was stuffed for hours after that. We meet a VP of sales or something who came down to make sure we were getting treated right. I am not sure what Gus said to whoever at Cisco but around August they started treating us really nice. Far better than I would expect from a company our size. Granted we do some advanced stuff for a company our size, but it is weird when the #3 guy or so at Cisco stops by your office for a meeting. I will say that Cisco is very responsive to questions or problems. Some of my / Gus’ comments have reached high levels. it showed with the presentation.

We got a really good overview of their IPCC product. I think Dave was pleased with what he saw. I was. I also got to see some nice warez from them. We checked out the color VOIP phone. Gus and I also test drove the video conference functionality of Call Manager 4.1. I even got to see the long rumored VOIP WiFi cordless phone. It was so cool. I want one for my house, but a practical deployment of it would be for the supervisors in the call center when we have 2 floors to cover. Check out the MOB for some of the really cool tech we saw. No pictures of the video conference system we used. Just trust me that it was way cool.

We had a long fact filled day. Then we rushed off to catch a late train. We made it to the station with 15 minutes to spare. I decided to upgrade to First Class. I figured I wanted good service one time, and I would pay for it out of my own pocket. I am on the train now. The seats are bigger. There are less people in the First Class car. I also got dinner and free drinks. The food is MUCH better than Biz class. I had a steak with potato’s, with chrem brule. I cannot spell it. I was not a fan of the desert anyway. I am sitting at a conference table for 4 by myself. It is roomy. I was hoping to take a nap, but I haven’t written a detailed blog entry for a while so I decided to take the time now. So was the upgrade worth the money? Probably not, but it is nice to get waited on and just relax sometimes. Amtrak for the money has the best upgrades. And that is saying allot since the Biz class on the Acela Express is nice as it is. Right now this is my favorite form of travel.