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Desktop video conferencing brings the power of visual communications to users' PCs. There are a number of advantages to this model of video conferencing including the low cost of the endpoint, no requirement for scheduling equipment or a room, the single-face per screen format, the ease of integrating with a unified communications environment and with data collaboration, and more. But of course there is no free lunch, and someone has to tackle the challenges that this deployment brings with it. Integrated or standalone? Desktop video conferencing can be deployed as a standalone system, as a system that integrates with existing room-based systems and/or telepresence systems, or as a service integrated with a larger unified communications (UC) service. This decision is largely driven by the circumstances of each enterprise. If you have no existing video conferencing and expect to be just desktop-based, look for one of the low-cost vendors or services that provide this capability. If room-based and telepresence systems are deployed and the business use requires integration, then look for a supplier who solves this integration task well. Conversely, if a UC environment exists or is planned, look into UC and video conferencing integration and make sure the resulting video service will have all the features you require for your specific business needs. Performance requirements Video conferencing requires real-time compression and decompression of visual information, which is a CPU intensive task. Telepresence and room-based systems have traditionally addressed this with dedicated hardware. PC-based endpoints rely on the PC's processor to accomplish these tasks. Older laptops or desktops may not have the horsepower to keep up with both a high quality video conference and the other applications a user wants to run in parallel. Test your typical desktop deployment to ensure your PCs are up to the task. Environment Unlike a telephone call where we manage acoustics by putting the speaker right next to our ear and the microphone right in front of our mouth, video conferencing is dependent on the environment in which it is running. Video needs sufficient light on faces to show details, but not too much light like an outside window with the sun streaming in. The contrast of sunlight is too much for a video camera and participants look washed out. Likewise, if audio is using a speakerphone-like device or the embedded microphone and speakers in the PC, the noise of the environment will impact the conference. Are your typical offices acoustically and visually ready to provide a good video experience? Echo cancellation or headsets Echo cancellation is not needed when you put a telephone handset to your ear, but it is needed for a speakerphone-type environment. Headsets can be used to avoid echo, but users may not be pleased about always wearing them. Make sure that your desktop video conferencing solution has good echo cancellation technology, and that it works well with the PCs and/or appliances you choose to use as well as the acoustics of your typical office environment. Most current desktop video conferencing solutions are server based, with some kind of portal acting as a directory for setting up a call. This same server verifies that the right software is loaded on the PC and that it can connect to the audio and video peripherals. This is definitely the way to go in a large endpoint deployment. The older method is to have stand-alone software that is installed on each PC, which means that software upgrades are painful. A server-based solution provides centralized management and reduced administrative overhead. VPN support As soon as users realize they can have video on their PC, someone wants to travel with it. Often, travelling employees connect back to the enterprise through a VPN tunnel. The tunnel termination device may be taxed if a number of concurrent video conferencing calls are coming in from the Internet. Ensure you have sufficient Internet bandwidth, and ensure that the VPN tunnel terminator (e.g. firewall) has sufficient CPU horsepower to keep up with the expected demand. Network impact Last but not least is the additional bandwidth created by large numbers of users running video conferences across the enterprise network instead of using the telephone. A typical VoIP call (assuming G.729 codec) uses 24Kbps to 35Kbps of WAN bandwidth. A video conferencing call can easily use 384Kbps or as much as 2 Mbps for that same call. The numbers add up quickly. Video conferencing needs to be high in the QoS stack to ensure the timely delivery of video packets, thus maintaining high quality audio and video reproduction. The high bandwidth demand of desktop video is causing some enterprises to deploy a second class of service below the class used by room-based and telepresence systems. This second class of service helps them manage the growth of desktop video without impacting mission critical legacy installations. Desktop video conferencing can grow quickly within an organization once users find out how inexpensive it is to put on the PC and how much value it adds to the collaborative experience. Enterprise IT teams need to anticipate these challenges to ensure that users will continue to be delighted with their new desktop video conferencing service. About the author: John R. Bartlett is a principal consultant at NetForecast, where he focuses on network support for voice and video conferencing. NetForecast provides consulting to enterprises and networking equipment vendors on application performance issues and convergence of voice and video conferencing on the IP network. John has 32 years of experience in the semiconductor, computer and telecommunications, and has been consulting since 1996. John can be reached at john@netforecast.com. Before you can reap the benefits of desktop video conferencing, you must first tackle several challenges associated with its deployment. This article explains seven challenges including performance requirements, software management and network impact. Learn how to approach these challenges to ensure a successful desktop video conferencing deployment.The old adage is it takes Microsoft three releases to nail a product. Lync 2010 is the third release of Microsoft's unified communications portfolio -- and it's impressive. Microsoft originally released the product under the name Live Communications Server (LCS), followed by Office Communications Server (OCS). OCS got some traction in the enterprise, but has numerous restrictions limiting broader appeal. With this third release, Microsoft addresses many of those shortcomings. Microsoft Lync 2010 is the client that connects to Lync Server 2010; the hosted version will be known as Lync Online. It is a suite of unified communications tools that includes IM/presence, voice calls, video calls and collaboration tools such as conferencing and sharing content. It tightly integrates with a Microsoft architecture including Exchange, Office and SharePoint. Lync's unified communications tools tightly integrate together and with other Microsoft applications. The solution is intended to simplify and unify the various communications tools, often a collection of disparate technologies, used in organizations today. In many ways, it does to unified communications what Outlook did to email in the 1990s. Outlook and Exchange were among the first mainstream solutions that combined email, calendaring and contacts into a single integrated application. Lync is more robust than its predecessors and includes new UC features. Improvements are found in every aspect of the product, including improved integration with both Exchange and SharePoint, support for location awareness, improved unified messaging with transcription, improved contact cards with support for photos, HD video conferencing and call recording. Administrators will find improvements in the management interface, resiliency/high availability features and also in that server virtualization is now also supported. These improvements are very broad, but the following four improvements are among the most significant: Lync 2010 client: Clients are supported for Windows and Mac, plus there is Web browser access. A Windows Phone 7 release is inevitable. This new client replaces two by combining the Communicator client (used with OCS) and the Microsoft Live client associated with Microsoft's Live online services. This single client can move a simple IM conversation to a voice call to a video call and/or include desktop sharing or a whiteboarding session. New endpoints: Initially, it seemed Microsoft was determined to kill the telephone. Phones are a big part of the cost of a phone system, and switching to headsets saves a lot of money. But, virtually all VoIP phone systems support softphones, so that didn't really help justifications, plus it turned out people like phones. So now Microsoft Lync users have a greater choice than before when it comes to new endpoints. Polycom will add new models, including a conference saucer, to its CX line of phones. Aastra will be joining in with new Lync-optimized phones. These companies make two types of devices; USB phones and IP phones. The USB phones look and act like phones but require connection to a Lync licensed desktop. IP phones, slightly more expensive, are stand alone IP phones. Snom offers a third alternative; the company wrote its own software to enable existing Snom phones to work in a Lync deployment. Branch office appliance: Branch offices were always supported, but if the link went down between offices there was no simple way to provide voice services at the remote office (even extension-to-extension dialing). Lync solves this by specifying a survivable branch appliance (SBA) option that will be initially available from five manufacturers. The SBA integrates with the data center servers including its administration and management. It also interconnects with local trunks and can automatically route calls in or out should the link between sites fail. Improved telephony features: Lync 2010 will support several new voice features common in most phone systems. Key specific features include call park, malicious call trace and executive private line. A common complaint of OCS was that it didn't support these common features. Lync isn't a minor upgrade to OCS; it's the release that makes Microsoft a real contender for comprehensive enterprise unified communications services. An online version will also be available in Office 365, Microsoft's new hosted portfolio, though initially voice won't be fully supported in that offering. About the author: Unified Communications Articles
If an accounting application crashes, its users probably can multi-task while IT troubleshoots the problem. If the server that hosts voice over IP (VoIP), email, instant messaging (IM) and conferencing fails for the entire enterprise, employees are going to pack their bags and go home. To ensure uptime for some of its most prized UC applications, one global enterprise deployed application delivery controllers to intelligently load balance its Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2 traffic. "Most of the applications in OCS … are applications that the firm expects to always be available," said Kevin Rice, global network architect at A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm headquartered in Chicago. Without the application delivery controllers, "we would have to go back to a singular architecture and keep our fingers crossed that we didn't have an outage," he added. The firm's OCS 2007 R2 servers support 3,500 users across 50 sites throughout 33 countries. Before Rice deployed F5's BIG-IP application delivery controllers in his two data centers in May, only one of the data centers actively served users. The other functioned as a cold site for disaster recovery. "If you're a user in... More... |
Unified Communications Columns
When thinking about the biggest challenge to the growth of the unified communications (UC) market, one of the first things that come to mind is the lack of interoperability between UC products and vendors. It's often up to the customer, VAR or system integrator to ensure that the various products used as part of an end-to-end UC solution work smoothly together. Often...
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Businesses are still finding VoIP and unified communications strategies challenging. Find out why Asterisk's open source communication server was not a viable solution for one organization with limited in-house expertise and resources; what this company could have done differently to achieve anticipated results; why so many organizations are... More... Expert Response
I just read the SearchUnifiedCommunications.com article, "Alternative to keeping data and VoIP traffic on separate...
Is it possible to connect the IP PBX to a wireless connection? How reliable would the service be?
Your question seems... Should I calculate telecom into my internal metrics?
If you are collecting and analyzing IT metrics -- and that is a big if... |