Irwin Lazar's "Real-Time" Blog

New VoIP Security Blog

The VoIP Security Alliance has launched a VoIP Security Blog, it's worth adding to your subscription list.

More on LCS as an IP-PBX

Networking Pipeline has more details on Microsof's forthcoming plans for LCS, noting that they will bundle web, audio, and video conferencing capabilities in the next release.

Money quote:

“Do the math. The market for collaboration software is $4 billion. The market for voice is $40 billion. If you were Microsoft, where would you go?” asked a Microsoft source who requested anonymity.

Microsoft LCS: Becoming a PBX?

David Greenfield writes in The Networking Pipeline Blog about an upcoming announcement by Microsoft's Unified Communications team clarifying its roadmap for enabling telephony features within the LCS platform. Dave mentions enterprise concern about the role of LCS, this is true. There is also considerable concern about using LCS as a master-presence server, versus federating multiple servers (e.g telephony, IM, video, mobile client, etc.), and there is concern about using AD as a single directory store. In all these areas Microsoft faces the risk of treading into areas occupied by its partners. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Cisco UCM 5.0 Roll-Out Blog

Those of you planning to roll out Cisco's latest Unified CallManager 5.0 should check out Shane Sheppard's blog. Shane has been blogging his organization's migration from CM 3.x to UCM 5.03. It's worth a read.

I should note I found this blog via a post on the Cisco VoIP user's mailing list maintained at https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip. This is a high-volume mailing list, but I've found it to be an invaluable resource to learn about the issues that folks in the real-world are dealing with on a daily basis.

MPLScon Live Blog

I'm blogging MPLScon this week over at http://www.mplsrc.com/

Polycom & Microsoft LCS

Polycom announced further integration between their telephones and real-time collaborations systems and Microsoft LCS. The announcements include federation of its products with LCS, enabling Polycom system users to see presence information on their phones, and establish calls using their Office Communicator client.

Polycom, while lacking a full-blown IP-PBX offering, continues to operate on the periphery, delivering standards-based SIP phones designed to operate with SIP-based infrastructure from a variety of vendors. These moves demonstrate further coalescing of the IP telephony & real-time collaboration product space around using LCS as the centralized presence/directory engine.

Burton Group Launches Collaboration & Content Strategies Service

Congratulations to my colleagues Peter O'Kelly, Mike Gotta, Karen Hobert, Guy Creese, and Craig Roth on the launch of the newest Burton Group research service covering collaboration and content management.

The press release contains a lot more detail. Our information page on CCS content can be found here.

SkypeOut - Free to North America

Major announcement from Skype today, all SkypeOut calls to the U.S. and Canada are free for the rest of the year. I'm guessing this represents a large investment for Skype as I would bet an awful lot of their SkypeOut revenue comes from calls that terminate in the U.S. & Canada

Treo 700p Introduced

Palm introduced the long-awaited 700p version of the Treo today. The "p" designation means that it runs the Palm OS, as opposed to the 700w, released a while ago which runs Windows Mobile.

The 700p improves on the 650 by offering support for EV-DO (which means it will only work on Sprint and Verizon's networks for the time being), a slightly better form factor, an improved camera, more RAM and a few other tweaks. Perhaps the biggest benefit for business users is that the 700p now supports Microsoft Active Sync, meaning that the Treo's mail/calendar apps can be kept synchronized with an Exchange server, a feature that was previously only available on the 700w. Tom Keating over at TMCnet has a very detailed review that tells you everything you wanted to know about the 700 and then some.

I've been a Treo user since the 600 came out. My 650 is a little over a year old and still meets my needs though the reliability is still an issue (it resets itself about a third of the time i make a call using my bluetooth-enabled car kit, but I think that's more a function of the e-mail app I use [an older version of Chatter]. Still, the 700p is tempting, but I'll continue to wait until a GSM model is available.

CompTIA: Convergence & Security top list of "hot" technologies

CompTIA recently released the results of their web survey of 2,200 IT professionals in which they asked respondents to vote on the technologies that will have the greatest impact this year. Convergence came in at #1, with 34% of respondents selecting it. Security was close behind at 33% (where would security of convergence rate?)

I'm always suspect of web polls because they make up a self-selected group and as such, aren't statistically valid, but given that the audience was made up of IT professionals, the results do give a good insight into what networking folks are most concerned about these days.

Other topics receiving votes including RFID (19.2%), Virtualization (9.3%), and Service Oriented Architecture (4.7%).