VoIP Challenges

Information Week recently ran an article about VoIP Gotchas. If you're looking to make the switch from traditional PBXs and digital phones to a Voice over IP system, read this article. This year, we began implementing a VoIP phone system. Fortunately, my network team spent a good deal of time preparing for the installation and were ready for the issues.

In preaparation for moving to a new system, we researched several alternatives including hybrid switches. If you're not familiar with hybrid switches, their main attraction is their support for both digital and VoIP phones. The catch is, you need a fairly recent digital phone system in order to use existing phones. Because of the age of our current system, the hybrid switch wouldn't support our phones. So, we decided to bite the bullet and implement a complete VoIP solution. So far we've implemented the new phone system at only one campus. If all goes as planned, we'll convert our corporate campus next fiscal year.

How did our installation go? It went fairly well. The biggest issue we ran into was a bad network card that caused circuit failures. We've received a lot positive responses from the departments now using the new switch. Unified messaging, the ability to have voicemail messages sent to email, is a big hit. The biggest complaint; people can't forward voicemails between the old system and the new one.

How do I like the system? I like it a lot. It has a number of strategic and tactical advantages. On a purely personal level, I like the software client that allows me to use access the phone system from my laptop via an Internet connection.

CIO Insight Article: Measure of Alignment Predicts Success

In the Fall Alignment issue of CIO Insight magazine, there is a very good article on IT/business alignment. IT consultants Thomas Lodahl and Kay Lewis Reditt talk about measuring IT contribution to profit margins and earnings growth. In the article, Lodahl states "...profit margin is a great measure of performance, because it deals both with revenue growth and cost reduction." Some companies miss this point when it comes to their IT departments. All too often, companies think about IT in terms of cost reduction. These companies ask questions like, "How do we automate to reduce costs? How do we save money on hardware, software?" Those companies that view IT as a strategic partner look beyond costs to the impact of IT on revenue growth. They ask: "How can we leverage our IT to promote revenue growth? What systems do we have, or can we obtain, that add value to our customers and can give us an advantage in the marketplace?"

Churches and Technology

Last night I read a CIO Insights article titled Megachurch Megatech. As a sometimes web designer for my church's praise and worship service site, I was intrigued by the technology being used at the larger churches. According to the article, there are an estimated 1800 megachurches. Some of these churches have technology budgets of over $1 million. At my church, we get excited over simple things like a new sound board, lcd projector, and the like. Just this year, we've added some streaming videos on our site...I'm still politicking for live streaming of Sunday services. What I wouldn't give for WiFi in my church. I wonder if the pastors in these megachurches get distracted by the clicking of keyboards as people surf the web on their laptops during the church service? Also, exactly what would people be using their laptops for during the service? Maybe they are setting the lineup for their fantasy sports teams.

More Video Streaming

After months of experimenting with several streaming technologies, I've finally settled on one I like, Flash, as in Macromedia's Flash FLV files for small video files and the Flash Communications Server for larger files. Why Flash? Simply put, Flash has become one of the lowest common denominators with browsers. In other words, most browsers support Flash and most corporate firewalls do not block it. The same can't be said for some of the other streaming technologies I've used. While the servers may allow one to change the streaming port, I've found that some corporate firewalls do not allow for downloading the client required to play the video. The bottom line, if you want to stream videos (and audio files) consider using Flash...either FLV files or the Flash Communication Server (Macromedia offers a free developer version). For more information visit Macromedia.

CIO Article Bound to Fail

I recently found an excellent article in CIO Magazine regarding the risk of maintaining legacy systems: Bound to Fail. Many companies today are still running back office operations on systems that are 20+ years old. It is hard to replace a trusted application running on mostly depreciated hardware, with a new application that may require extensive capital outlays, has an appreciable learning curve, and is running on an unfamiliar platform. Change, especially change from "green screen" environments to GUI environments, is difficult. Based on my experience, changing systems is often much harder on the end users than it is on the IT departments.

Keeping a legacy system just because it runs well is not necessarily a good idea. As Jim Collins says in Good to Great: "Good is the enemy of Great". Not long ago, I experienced a near disaster with a "good" legacy system. One morning while heading to my office I made a shortcut through our Network Operations Center to check on things. As I passed a particular set of mission critical SCO boxes I noticed a programmer staring dumbfounded at a screen. I asked what the problem was. He told me the server died with a disk crash and wouldn't come back on-line. He'd called in support and was told that the system was no longer being serviced by the vendor, and the only person who had a clue about how to fix it had retired a few months earlier (no joke). I asked the programmer about the "hot swappable" backup server. He said that it had never been tested (still not joking). My reply: "It's about to be."

I'm the kind of person who enjoys rolling up his sleeves and working on problems. I booted the backup server and began reviewing the network activity. Seeing no network traffic on the server, I looked at the connections coming into the back of the box. It turned out that this server not "hot swappable"...it had never been hooked up. I rerouted the network cables from the dead server to the backup server, and the programmer and I began configuring it. After several tense minutes we were able to get the backup server up and running. The total outage was less than 2 hours.

Problem solved? No way. We were still running a system that was "bound to fail." I'm happy to report that by the end of the year the old system will be replaced. That incident, while not as dramatic as the one mentioned in the CIO article, taught me something about legacy systems. Just because a system is in place and running well for years, doesn't mean that it is without risks. As they age, computer systems become ticking time bombs. You never know when a drive will crash, a CPU will fail, or a power supply will die. My advice, make systems replacement part of your overall IT strategy.