SnomONE and Voipfone

I’ve just diagnosed an issue a customer had getting a Voipfone SIP trunk Registered on a SnomONE PBX.

The trick to getting this to work is:

    • Turn on long SIP headers. Go to the admin, general settings page and set “Use Short SIP Headers” to “long”

 

    • If you are using IP access control then you need to enable the IP range 195.189.172.1 – 195.189.173.254 to ensure Voipfone will work

 

SnomOne more info

SARK meets PIKA

Article published by Maarten Kronenburg from Pika technologies. View the original article

“Sometimes I enter the office of a customer and just FEEL it – something’s brewing. A few weeks ago I was in the office of Provu in Northern England (www.provu.co.uk), and “that atmosphere” was in the air. Laptop computers were installed when I came in, the PIKA WARP Appliance fired up – it wasn’t going to be a meeting around a table with a firm agenda.

Provu sells software called SARK. The people from Provu had a demo ready for me of their SARK software running on the PIKA WARP Appliance. The Provu people have spent a fair bit of time on the subject which explains why they were excited. Their software is available in various configurations of course and the smallest one is now almost converted to the PIKA WAR Appliance. And I was blown away; the feature set of their software is very, very broad, the software is responsive, the screens look good, wow, very, very professional.

But what I liked best is the remote management facility that the SARK PBX offers. The unit can be accessed by a control room for a sanity check, performance measurement and more. But you can also click through to every IP device connected to the PBX and do the same thing. This is what I call “Controlled Devices”!

So if ever you don’t want to spend the (wo)man-years on developing software at this level of sophistication you’re in good hands at Provu.”

Find out more about the SARK 500

Call Wait Times

ProVu have setup some call handling statistics on our own PBX. We’ve helped resellers install many such systems, but not actually pointed the technology at ourselves before.

The results are that the average waiting time to talk to a human at ProVu is 5.1 Seconds.

And the Longest anybody has waited to talk to a human is 9 seconds.

So, ring 01484 840048 and you can be sure you will be talking to a real human within 9 seconds, even in the worst case.

We think our call answering times are just another of the ProVu special advantages.

Recommended replacement products

Recently we have added lots of new items to our product portfolio but have also had to say goodbye to some old ones too.

A lot of the items do not have a direct replacement from the manufacturers, so here is a guide to our recommended replacements:

Discontinued products Recommended replacements
Gigaset C47 Gigaset C59H
Gigaset C475IP Gigaset C59H and Gigaset N300 AIP
Gigaset S68 Gigaset S79H
Gigaset S685IP Gigaset S79H and Gigaset N300 AIP
Gigaset HC450 ProTalk SIP doorphones
Cisco SPA-901 Cisco SPA-301G
Cisco SPA-921 Cisco SPA-303G
Cisco SPA-922 Cisco SPA-502G
Cisco SPA-941 Cisco SPA-303G
Cisco SPA-942 Cisco SPA-504G
Cisco SPA-962 Cisco SPA-525G2
Cisco SPA-525G Cisco SPA-525G2
snom M3 snom M9*

As these are not direct replacements some of the features may vary. Please check out the product information pages to make sure the items have all the features you need.

* Please note the snom M9 handset is not fully compatible with the snom M3 base and vice versa

UCExpo Update

It is the UCExpo show at Olympia today and tomorrow.

Darren, Ian and Tim will be visiting the show and generally around and about.

If you want to meet up then just get in touch.

Aastra Wireless Headset

I have been testing Aastra 67xx series phones with Jabra GN9120 wireless handset for last couple of weeks and can only say one thing about it “awesome”.

Using this cable allow to answer and terminate telephone calls using the headset, while being away from the desk. Incoming calls are also signalled in the headset earpiece. And you can easily transfer the call from the handset to headset or other way round by just pressing single button.

GO MOBILE WITH AASTRA DHSG CABLE!

For more information about the product click here

Snom announce they are Microsoft approved with Snom 821 for OCS 2007 RC2

The snom 821 is now approved for use with Microsoft OCS 2007 RC2. This joins their other approved phone, the snom 300.

The snom 821 OCS edition will be on display from March 8-9 at UCEXPO in London, United Kingdom (Booth 717).

Read more from snom Channel UK: snom 821 Executive Phone Achieves Microsoft Office Communications Server Qualification in Microsoft’s Compatible Device Program

Upgrade your old phones for security

We’ve heard a few reports of VoIP fraud from hackers extracting SIP details from phones.

Problems usually from a combination of very old phone firmware, on a public IP address (no firewall) and no password on the web interface.

Tips

  • Put password on web interfaces
  • Upgrade old phone firmware. We suggest any Snom older than version 7.3.14 or Yealink older than version 60 is upgraded.

ProVu can help arrange this for customers who take our ProSys managed phone service.

If in any doubt please get in touch.

ProSys Provisioning Questions

ProVu are receiving a lot of of enquiries about our new ProSys phone provisioning and management system.

Some common questions and answers below.

The ability to download stock/pricing will be useful to us as we
already run an in-house database for quoting and splitting e-commerce
orders to the current best price/stock suppliers.

This bit is easy

https://secure.provu.co.uk/prosys/price_list.php?XML=yes

or

https://secure.provu.co.uk/prosys/price_list.php?CSV=yes

Using your prosys username and password.

We may not use the XML ordering immediately but would be interested
in doing so. If we need to do this in order to take advantage of
provisioning then this wouldn’t be an issue.

You don’t need to use XML ordering from day 1. You can just place the orders manually using the online order form.

We can also test your first few orders here before the phones get shipped to makesure everything is working properly.

It would be very interesting if we were able to place orders whereby the phone arrives at the customer and provisions complete with the SIP line configuration as this would drastically reduce the turn around and shipping costs for our customers as we would not have to
either have the unit shipped to us first or go out to site to configure new phones. Is this what your provisioning service is about?

Yes. this is exactly what the system is designed to do. You place the order (manually or automatically using XML) including the delivery address and SIP details. We ship the phone to your end user with the configuration details ready to go and branded like it came from you.

So that is provisioning.

The next bit is phone management, which is for phones after they have been deployed. You can edit settings and view diagnostics on phones deployed onsite.