Gavin’s Digital Diner

I think it was Alan Kay who once said (and I’m paraphrasing here): the personal computer won’t really be personal until you can wear it on your T-shirt. I think of that quote every time I see an IPod commercial.

I find it phenomenal how much of what defines this connected age actually is actually pretty “personal.” I used to say that the internet revolution was all about having a “one-to-one personal conversation with hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people.” But, I’m not sure I really groked just what I meant, just how essentially personal much of this communications and information revolution really is.

Technology Gets Personal

The fact is many of today’s really revolutionary technologies, and all those related gizmos and gadgets, don’t easily lend themselves to the needs of an organization. They are personal; either they don’t scale, or they don’t scale well. They’re not designed to. They are designed for the individual, for the consumer market, not for the organization.

The cell phone is a case in point. A cell phone is inherently personal. The billing, contracts, and rate structures all reflect this fact. Moreover, despite tax laws to the contrary, it’s almost impossible to accurately distinguish personal from business expenses, especially when you factor in the so-called “free minutes,” other rate plan permutations and other “features” designed to confuse the user. So too, blogs, social networking, and other Web 2.0 stuff is somehow just slightly ill suited to an organization — kind of like a pair of shoes that don’t quite fit. You can put them on, and they may look good, but wearing them for a long walk would be a bad idea.

A couple of other examples:

• Flickr works well for me, but is lousy for an organization. The same is true for Picasa. (See my post about my Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, here and here.)
• Del.icio.us has some “network” support, but it’s token at best. It’s a personal tool that you can bend to your organizational needs, but that bending takes work.
• Blogs, as I mentioned, are curiously unwieldy in an enterprise setting. Sure, they’re being used, but the underlying assumptions built into blogging — the philosophies inherent in the software — are ill-fitting at best.
• Information services like The New York Times online offer great individual access, but few offer any form of organizational subscription. The same is true of most magazine sites and even membership organizations where an organization is the actual member (such as TAG, COF, GEO, etc.).

All in all, these tools don’t scale well for the needs of what I call “SOB’s” — short for Small Organizations and Businesses. [How often do you get to make up an acronym like that!] And, while the tools don’t scale, expectations definitely have. Those larger than life expectations now drive demands in the workplace. It is somewhat ironic that the home-user experience — in terms of both applications and bandwidth — has surpassed the experience available in the workplace.

While small organizations struggle to scale, at home we luxuriate in megabits and bytes, bandwidth by the bucketful. We have servers at home, email at home, remote access at home, and video conferencing at home, wireless networking at home. Hell, I even have my own phone system tied into a VoIP provider so all my calls are “free” — yet those poor SOB’s (remember, that means Small Organizations and Businesses) continue to pay through the nose, by the minute, for plain old telephone service, and limp by, sharing with 20 or more people the same amount of same bandwidth I have at home, just for me. Poor SOB’s.

Scaling Mont Skype!

I set out to change at least a small part of this equation — and I took one of my favorites, Skype. I set out to scale Skype. Skype is neat. Skype is phenomenal. I’ve spent hours on Skype, conversing from Ashtabula to Antwerp, Brussels to Bali, with nary a glitch, nary a charge. I’ve even Skyped from hotels scattered around the world, using nothing but my laptop and an “all-you-can-eat” EDGE connection via my Blackberry. Free calls from here to there and back again. Skype is really neat.

As I mentioned, the only problem with Skype is scale. It’s designed for the individual, from interface to online directory. To roll it out to an entire organization is daunting and strangely expensive. First, you’d have to install and maintain the software on every desktop. Then you’d have to somehow manage tens or perhaps hundreds of individual (read: unmanageable) Skype address books. Finally, everybody needs headsets and microphones or the like. Hell, as I think about it, for one hundred people, at $50 a headset, it would cost, what? Five thousand bucks? Suddenly “free” takes on a whole new meaning.

Not to mention, I reckon half of those headsets would be broken, or disappear, before I’d even finished handing them all out. I imagine a scenario that all too soon might have me eyeing my dear colleagues, headset wires entwined in my fingers, pondering the pros and cons of the ancient art of the garrote. It’s not a risk I want to take. No doubt that’s relief to my colleagues.

The bandwidth costs also make me nervous. The thought of 20 or 30 folks, all simultaneously making Skype conference calls (probably to each other) gives me the willies. All this and we haven’t even talked about the security issues. At the risk of risking redundancy, Skype – out of the box – doesn’t scale.

Rather than live with these issues or eschew Skype totally, I decided to figure out a way to scale it. The need is there, and the pricing is attractive — especially internationally. In the NGO community across Europe and Africa, Skype has caught on like wildfire. Once again, the individual marketplace was driving expectations in the enterprise space. Time to adapt or die; besides Skype is neat.

What I Want:

The goal was to scale Skype by leveraging investments in existing equipment — those things called telephones that sit on every desk and that not-so-cheap PBX that sits in a closet and hums. Skype doesn’t do anything that a phone can’t do — except it lowers costs. In some cases, it eliminates costs totally. Skype maybe neat, but the pricing is revolutionary.

What I needed was something that would tie Skype to my PBX. I figured I wasn’t alone in the need, and necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. I went looking for that invention — a Skype-to-PBX gateway. All in all, my requirements were fairly simple:

• Something that would leverage my legacy (read: old) telephony infrastructure.
• Something that would offer centralized management and deployment.
• Something that would fit into my existing IT infrastructure
• Something that wouldn’t break the bank.
• Something that would do it all – allowing Skype to and from our PBX, transparently.
• Something that would let me shift some of our long distance over to Skype, to call regular landlines.
• Something designed with a “black box” mentality, without the need for lots of bits, bytes, cables and crossovers.
• Finally, something that would deliver a user experience equal to what Skype delivers to the consumer without gobbling up lots of bandwidth.

I looked for two years. I found it last month. We installed it last week. It works. It meets my requirements, and it scales things quite nicely. There are a few caveats. I’ll explain those below.

What I Got:

The solution, the magic box, is called VoSKY Exchange. (A bad name, IMHO – I’ve got too many “Exchanges” already). From this point forward I’ll just call it VoSKY (I pronounced it “voe” as in “snow” and “ski,” as in downhill. I try to put a little Russian spin on it just to add a bit of mystery). It’s made by ActionTEC. Find it here: http://www.vosky.com/

I looked at quite a few other options. Most were consumer-grade products designed to let you hook your home phone into Skype via your PC. That’s the last thing I wanted. There were a few “higher end” products that appeared pretty lame, almost fly-by-night.

[A note to would-be vendors — when half the links on your web site don't work, I have a hard time trusting your engineering acumen or your attention to detail.]

At first glance VoSKY tottered damn close to the edge on my “fly-by-night” scale. I worried a bit. Being an early adaptor can be dangerous. Moreover, the VAR experience was not what I would call “perfect.” Like so many other soft/hardware companies, VoSKY works through a VAR network, and I think we were their very first customer. It’s tough to train a VAR, teach them how to answer questions, return phone calls, and generally do sales and fulfillment like it should be done. I do get a certain perverse joy in it. <insert Evil Laugh here> But, it can be slow and torturous as well. I am not an easy sale. I usually have lots of questions and I tend to read the manuals (all of them) and then ask even more questions.

In the end, instead of the single “black box I wanted, I got two boxes — one VoSKY gateway server and one Dell box to function as a Skype server. Not perfect, but close. The first person to put this all in one black box will make a fortune.

Here’s what you get:

One VoSKY “Black Box” Skype Gateway	One VoSKY Skype Server (Dell PE 860 – 1U) – Running XP SP2

1. One VoSKY black box:First, you get a nice, rack-mountable box, and it actually is black; the size of a standard 19″ rack mount router. And, as you can see, it’s “Skype Certified.” I have no idea what that means. It has 1 or 2 USB ports and either 4 or 8 phone jacks, depending on model, to connect to your PBX. In phone-lingo, they’re called FXO ports. They look like regular CO (central office) phone lines to your PBX.
2. One Dell 1U PC/Server:You also get a PC, with XP (SP2) and all the required cables and other crap to connect things together. That includes one or two USB cables and power cables. You’ll need to provide the necessary telco cables to your PBX. We used a single cat5 cable and split out 4 pairs into RJ11c jacks on both ends, one set plugged into the VoSKY and the other four went to the patch panel and from there to four ports on the PBX.
3. Software:You also get a copy of Windows XP SP2 and a copy of the VoSKY software, VNC (for remote management), a copy of Apache TomCat (web server), and some of their utilities for managing address books via a web browser.

When it was all done, it looked like this:

(Note: the rack is really level; it’s me that’s slightly skewed)

Happy 4-port VoSKY Skype Gateway / Server

You can see on the picture (above) the blue cable that connects from the PBX to the VoSKY box. Note the little lights on the lower right. The Skype lines show up as “green” when they’re live, and “red” when in use. The in-use indicator is handy in case you want to reboot things. The black USB cable connects to the Dell 1U server immediately above it.

You need to provide:

1. Money: Our total cost, installed, for all the stuff (above), Skype setup, and the like, was roughly $4,000. Yes, that includes the Dell rack mount, and all the software, as well as on-site installation. (Not that they actually did much on site).
2. Skype Accounts: Four or eight Skype accounts, each with a minimum pre-paid SkypeOut credit of $10. You need to set up the pre-paid accounts so that you get a so-called Skype “business account.” This, by the way, was the toughest part.
3. PBX or other phone equipment: A PBX with four or eight free FXS ports, with hunt-group features on those ports — it will scale up to 16 ports, by the way, if you stack two eight-ports together.
4. A little thought as to:

• Where to put the equipment and how to connect it to your PBX
• What to call your Skype accounts and how to list them in the Skype directory. This by far was the toughest part of the whole thing — dreaming up just the “right” name. It’s kind of important as it shows in the public Skype Directory.
• How you plan on putting the inbound Skype address on your B-cards, letterhead and the like (hence the problem with dreaming up the right name).

Putting It All Together:

The whole thing assembles pretty easily. You install XP on the PC and set up user accounts for each Skype address. Per our standard setup for workstations with automated processes, we rig it to auto-login to the account, and set everything to start up on login. Included with the VoSKY setup is a copy of Apache TomCat that’s used to manage access to both public and private speed-dial lists. More on that below.

You then connect the PC to the VoSKY box via USB, and connect the VoSKY box to your PBX. Finally, once the PC is setup and the box is connected to your PBX, you set up your Skype accounts — in our case four of them — one for each line.

Each Skype account corresponds to a CO line on your PBX. CO lines should be set to “hunt” — so that when someone picks up a phone and dials “8″ for Skype, the PBX will hunt through the available lines and pick the first Skype line not in use.

On the inbound side, those CO lines should either be set to ring at your receptionist or to an auto attendant function on your voice mail system. Sorry, no direct dial. With our setup, you’ve either got to ring the receptionist and ask for someone, or connect to a VMail system and, from there, punch in a code or two to get to a downstream extension.

Here’s what the Skype PC looks like when everything is up, running, and happy.

VoSKY - Skype Accounts Up and Running

Skype Me, Dr. Memory!

I know what’s running through your mind now. How the hell does all this work? How do you actually make calls? How do you dial a Skype “name” from a telephone?

Well, first off, inbound calling, Skyping to the system, is easy. (”Skype,” like Google, has become a verb.) You just “Skype” our main Skype Name. That’s part of the magic, by the way. A single Skype Name that will automatically roll to the next Skype account if the one you call is otherwise engaged. All you need to do is list your single, master Skype account. Then it’s online, available to anyone with Skype. Whoopee! 

Finding Nemo – the Skype Directory

Making out-bound calls, Skype-to-Skype or Skype-to-phone, is a little more difficult, but there are some tools that ease the pain. These tools are all web-based, accessed through a browser, using that Apache TomCat server I mentioned previously. (TomCat is all set up and ready to go. It provides the management interface to the VoSKY system. )

Since Skype addresses are not numeric, making Skype-to-Skype calls from a telephone requires some sort of translator — something to convert numbers to names — so that Skype can handle them. To do this, VoSKY provides an intermediary “speed dial” system in the form of a simple look-up table.

The look-up table links Skype names to assigned speed dial numbers. Every Skype name needs a number, either in a pubic list, available to everyone, or in a private list available only to you via a secret PIN. To make things easier, there is a software tool that will grab addresses from an existing Skype address book and let you assign them numbers in your VoSKY “Private Contact” list. Once in, they’re managed via a simple web browser interface. It looks something like this:

My Skype Speed Dial List

Once it’s all set up, you have three options for dialing:

1. Dial direct to any landline or mobile number using SkypeOut.

   Dial “8″ for a Skype line and then dial the number directly just like a regular phone (with dialing prefix of “00″ followed by a country code, area code, etc, end it with a # sign, e.g., 8-00-1-810-123-1234#. Skype rates (cheap!) apply.

Dialing with VoSKY

1. Call a Skype address from the “Public Contacts” list:

   Dial “8″ and then dial a pre-configured “speed dial” number from the public VoSKY speed dial list, e.g., 8 – 100#.

2. Call a Skype address from your “Private Contacts” list:

   Dial “8″ and then dial your secret “PIN” to designate your private “speed dial” list and then dial the private speed dial number, e.g., 8 – “PIN” – 21#.

As I mentioned, inward calls are easy. You just Skype the main Skype name. If the gods are smiling, it should ring nicely at the receptionist’s desk… Ask for me and you’ll probably get my voice mail.

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