VOIP

Well, I just finished my first Skypecast “Using Technology in Education” and boy oh boy was it an adventure being the moderator of a discussion like that. Right after I finished I received a review of the skypecast from James Fadden at Allegheny College. A couple of things to add to his review form the host’s perspective.  Original article from EduTechie.com.

First Impressions

It was EXTREMELY hard to moderate a discussion like this. At first it was total chaos because I tried to allow everyone to speak that wanted to speak, but I soon found out that there were people (literally dozens) just coming into the conversation to practice their English. Eventually I just began moving people to listening right away and if they wanted to talk they would move themselves to waiting where I would then promote them to talking. That seemed to work pretty well, but it did take an extraordinary amount of concentration to keep up with the conversation going on at the same time while people were chatting with me as well.

In this 13 minute recording, we'll hear from Stephen Rose, the CIO of the American Council on Education. Listen in as he shares some background on ACE, background on technology issues of interest to University presidents, and learn more about solutionsforourfuture.org

Well, it is day 2 and I am blogging live in room w205a and listening to melissa and louis describe the university of minnesota's transition to a voip infrastructure. They are using an open-source pbx and are working now to transition from voice mail to unified messaging for 18,000 users.

Many people in this room are already using some sort of personal voip at home - skype, vonage etc.

Talked about issues with 200 year old buildings and wiring issues at UMN.

Louis is talking now about having the time to transition to the best voip solution for your situation. His current PBX is stable and should give him till 2008 to get his VOIP in place.

Finding that SIP support from vendors is still very limited.

Stil finding power issues with voip - no power means no phone from end point.

Well, it is obvious that VOIP is still no easy solution but is really getting to a point of real market penetration.