Time time time

Have I been neglecting this blog?
Maybe.
Honestly I get so wrapped up in work each day that I have not enjoyed the thought of returning home to put more thoughts into this.
I will try harder....

Using the Cisco Room System API's to simplify BlueJeans meetings

Following the code samples at https://developer.cisco.com/site/roomdevices/ it should be possible to create a "Dial BlueJeans" button that would lead to a dialog to enter the Meeting ID and PIN code to connect to a meeting.  Something similar to this:

  



You could potentially use a combination of "Custom Dial Pad" and "Prompt for PIN" at their linked GitHub. I'm not a coder and so far that top screenshot is a home panel button based on the "On Button to Dial" sample.

Yes - we have Relay and encourage people to use it for the OneButtonToJoin calendaring, but not every meeting happens like that. We have a contact in the directory that everyone dials for those cases. 

Through this bit of Cisco API work you could put a single button on the Cisco Touch home screen and have an experience very similar to other BlueJeans devices (like a Dolby Conference Phone and Huddle Kit for example).

Advanced mode Boss-type stuff:

Even more.... Since you are gathering the Meeting ID, there is a Customer Satisfaction sample that you could feed it to and have a survey after the call linked to the Meeting ID. The one missing step there is to push that feedback to BlueJeans so it could be rolled into the CommandCenter!

Why am I not doing it myself?

I could code my way out of a paper bag but you would have to hand me a blowtorch: this is past my skill set and time allowance. I've pointed you to some neat API's and given you what I think is a pretty workable idea. 
I'm curious to see what someone can make out of it!

and now for a change of pace

It has been a while friends, hasn't it?
Much has changed since I last wrote - I have taken a Senior Unified Communications Engineer position in San Francisco at a little company that is responsible for the great sound and video in yoru music, movies and television. They also branched out into conference phones a while back and announced a video system add on at Enterprise Connect 2018.

The last two months have been filled with a major deployment here at work while also trying to figure out how to exist in two places. You see, since my family and I have been established in the Tacoma area and with a daughter in high school, I don't want to move everyone down to the most expensive area of the left coast just yet. So I am splitting my time about 80% in the bay and then home for the rest. It is not easy, but it is becoming more familiar.

So about the work.....
   We are a major partner with BlueJeans so I jumped into the deep end of the pool right away to move all of our conference phones straight onto a new BlueJeans software and connect all of our Cisco VCS-based video infrastructure to BlueJeans and their Relay services that enable One Button To Join on almost any standards-based-endpoint.
   The Cisco infrastructure and endpoints are in need of some TLC as well so I've started learning and exploring their configurations. It's fun to do this part because sometimes there are creative things you discover but more often I learn so much by wondering why someone did something. Manual phone books in TMS for example - I will never understand how that is a good idea!
   The cowboy in me wants to fix all the things right away but I am measuring myself because My philosophy has been throughout this blog to document all the things and leave things so the next person can pick up where you left off.

Leaving things....
    With a long story made short, I did not leave everything as I wanted at my former place of work. There simply was not time and as the sole person knowing a technology, as much as I tried to share info I was never sure if that information was received.
    I think IT Organizations should place greater emphasis on some repository of information. It doesn't have to be pretty, but that helps. One place where all passwords are stored and one place where people should keep notes about the things they do. This isn't tickets or change control... let it be free-form open notepads if that works, but start somewhere.
    At my new place, we use combinations of Sharepoint for communication outside our group, Confluence and Box (and Box Notes) for internal things and even some SmartSheets. Then a common but hard to manage online password storage tool. These seem to work but I think part of that is a constant push to keep things off your computer and to share info. Frankly, the less I keep on my computer the better but that same practice makes it easier to share data with those that need it.


I will try to expand on these more and talk about my experience with BlueJeans (short take: it is nice) in the coming days. Now that I have my own little room I should have more time to myself, but I'm also going to start on a Cisco CyberOps course next month.

The tools I use - what do you need first when you get a new computer?

Rejoice for the year is new and I get a new work computer! As I'm setting this up, I figured I might as well go over some of the most important essential tools I use to do my job. By no means is this list exhaustive or complete; instead it cover the thing I am installing on day one because I know I'll be using them tomorrow when I have to go back and fix what I couldn't touch today....

General Tools I Use:

LastPass *- Because I have a million passwords I use LastPass to manage them. It will also autofill them in Chrome and Firefox as well as on my Android phone and my Chromebook. This becomes essential as I start installing new apps and logging into new webpages. I turn off most of the "Show" notifications though as well as autofill because many admin webpages I use have password fields that would be best left unchanged. PS, I love setting the password length to crazy long - minimum 50 characters :)
SnagIt - Before I make any sort of change it is always important to make a backup but it is also helpful to screenshot things first too. SnagIt is the easiest clipping and fast editing tool I have found so far. I'll also use it to screencap and then highlight settings I'm not too fond of and then I'll email them to the responsible parties. I'm like that.
Notepad++ with Plugin Manager and Compare plugin - Simple editing of text files, but with the Compare plugin you can see why one endpoint works and the other doesn't.
KiTTY - yes PuTTY is what everyone knows, but KiTTY offers some additional features like login scripting and passwords.
Wireshark - If I have to explain this, you are in the wrong business.
7zip -  We have to work with compressed files that are not .zip files all the time, so using 7zip is quick and reliable.
Evernote *- I use Evernote for most of my documentation and note taking and the cross-device sync function is absolutely killer for people on the move. (remember - don't store confidential or proprietary info in your personal cloud service!)
FileZilla - It is infrequent that I need an FTP application but this one is still updated so here ya go....
Royal TS - I don't quite know how to describe RoyalTS; Terminal Services, Remote Desktop, SSH console, VMWare things... It's a crazy powerful connection manager and a single pane of glass to work with almost every kind of system.
Google Backup and Sync - You should never use a personal cloud service for work files so I strictly use Google Backup and Sync and a synced folder to drop PDF release notes, install and config guides and other things of that nature so I can read them from my phone on the way home or from another computer - kind of like a cloud USB key.

What do you use or need?

Reflecting on the year both personally and professionally

As the year comes to a close we frequently reflect back on what we have done. This is my first year of blogging so it's been the BEST ever!

A winter journey to Miami to connect with our headquarters made last winter more bearable. Then a little surgery followed up with a week of training in Dallas. It had been a long time since I had spent any time in Texas; it was more pleasant than I expected. So a few months later I followed up with additional training in Houston. In-between all of that my employer opened up a new building in Seattle that I had key involvements with. Oh, and the paychecks started coming from someone else (unfortunately) even though the job didn't really change.

As the year progressed I began an effort to be more active in social media as a technical professional whereas previously I was just a professional joker. When the 140 characters of Twitter no longer sufficed I expanded here. I attended many Microsoft Skype user groups and training, plus (as mentioned) even more Cisco Collaboration training, conferences and Cisco Champion program shenanigans.

I decided that working within the realms of my production corporate environment was not experimental enough, so a quick jaunt into the world of my own personal Microsoft Office 365 environment then later into Google's G Suite let me see what other environments could be like. This allowed chances to connect collaboration and telepresence products in new way and to fiddle with ones I have not otherwise been exposed to.

My family and I have adventured to Spokane Washington, where according to the hotel receptionist the most fun thing to do is drive to Montana! There was a day trip to Portland, Oregon but far more exciting was our 2017 Solar Eclipse impromptu excursion to Springfield (home of the Simpsons)! The typical 6 hour return drive only took us 14 hours! Camping out in a motorhome along the Canadian border got wedged in there too. More recently though, we experienced our first Oktoberfest in the mountain town of Leavenworth; where lederhosen were made for snapping and the hotel rates were astronomical. We might go back this weekend to see them light up the town.

I took up a new hobby, so considering it would be motorcycling it was only appropriate to do this come October. A solid 3 weeks of great weather and a fancy new 2017 Honda Rebel 500 has provided distraction as the season has turned colder. Or did it amplify my attention to the bitter wetness preventing me from riding? One shall see....

Thank you for sticking with me this year. I plan to make the next year more exciting and of course to share more!

Meetings sucked but they don't have to anymore!

Today I attended a seminar about the modern meeting. Thank you to Logitech who sponsored the seminar, and also to Microsoft and Pexip who presented, and finally to the guest speaker, Dave Michels, who gave an excellent talk which i will borrow from and expand upon below. These are my words and ideas, but Dave reinforced them and made me want to write a little about them here.

Let's reflect on a simple truth - meetings suck.

They are an anachronism from a time of TPS reports and heavily regimented hierarchical structures incompatible with the modern American organization.

Do you come out of a weekly 60 minute status/team meeting and feel 120 minutes older?
     I know I do...

Meetings must die.
     Long live the meeting!

Just to get started, here are my recommendations for meetings:

• Never host or goto a meeting without a clear agenda or purpose
• Include the agenda in the meeting invitation and relevant documents with the meeting (or even better - links to them)
• Never schedule a meeting for something that can be handled in email or IM
• Remember that status reports and project updates should be a part of a project management system and not a meeting
• Schedule meetings for WAY less than an hour - think 15, 30 but never more than 45 minutes
• Ask yourself, "do we NEED this meeting/time?" - remember this is probably time that everyone can be more productive doing their jobs
• Ending early isn't "giving you back your time," it's just a good idea
• If you don't need to be there, then you shouldn't have the meeting
• Meeting time isn't social or complaint time so a leader should direct the conversation so the agenda/purpose of the meeting can be completed efficiently and quickly (wrap business up before the social sessions)

These simple things are a first step in making meetings better.  Notice that they also discourage meetings. I intend to preach this idea far and wide because "meetings" are evolving; the act of consciously devoting cycles to stopping work and talking about your work has been componentized and redistributed in function by a number of different tools. Decades of thought have gone into this but the changes have come very quickly and are remain is a huge state of flux as the competitive markets see who wins.

What is changing these meetings? 

In the IT world a dozen or so years of Project Management, ITIL, and many other methodologies have standardized business practices. When we all work the same way, or at least have an understanding of how we should work towards a goal, we don't need to meet as often to figure out how we will wing our way through the next week. Standardization helps!    With this, we have many tools to track projects, assign tasks, and fiddle with all kinda of levers that traditionally we had meetings for. Just look at email - it killed the memo and has been leveraged to avoid meetings for forty years now! Many other areas have seen similar standardization and tools come into regular usage and we can always use them to reduce wasted meeting time.

Video and voice conferencing has become pervasive in the workplace and in our everyday lives. We've tied these into our phone systems and added messaging and made them all work from everywhere. This rapidly changing technology is nearly commoditized such that everyone everywhere can communicate as if they were in an old-fashioned meeting but in a short ad-hoc impromptu way. This can avoid the interruptive nature of a scheduled meeting yet still allow the face to face productive benefits than single model communications cannot.

Think about communications in the different models we might use: written < verbal < documents < visual. Each model provides more information and therefore more context than the previous but also requires more attention. Retention also increases with each as well.

The coming revolution might lie in what Dave referred to as "Work Stream Apps." I like that name as it appropriately describes what Slack, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams and similar can do. Think  about those models I just described; each was completely separate not long ago. Talking to someone on a phone required a very separate set of infrastructure than sending them a document but how often did you have to do both at the same time? A work stream app allows you to multitask your communication (or meeting) such that textual messages exist in the same space as the documents they reference and those involved can start a voice call about the topic instantly without leaving the same app, or even add in video participants. 

When we consider Work Stream Applications, the traditional meeting does not need to exist. We have distilled it down into a concentrate that fits better into the way we work. When a team or functional group is working on something from diversa locations and times, they can keep each other up to date without ever having interrupted their work. This isn't even an EOD handover - it's an active ongoing conversation (ok, a never ending meeting). When there is a situation that the keyboard/finger combo turns to head/desk, you can push a button to start using your words OR gesticulate a little. 

As I said, these ideas are in flux right now as the pioneers see the big guns crowding the market with their different take. Everything will change in the next few years. It is possible that "work stream apps" become too monolithic and are rejected by users. It is hard to tell for certain, but having seen how componentized these things are I am confident in saying that if you are in Collaboration, Telecommunications, Unified Communications or Messaging and you are not paying attention then you are behind the ball.

Meetings? Are ya with me?

The power of Social Media and Collaboration

I was asked last week about "social media" and work and I have been thinking about it a lot since then.

Twitter, blogging, chat groups and community message boards are definitely a very powerful tool, even more so in some of the more specialized fields like collaboration, voice, telepresence and UC. I am active in attending what user groups I can, but the online social communities really give me the feeling that I am not alone in this technology.

Some of the first user groups I ever attended were the Seattle chapter of the Avaya Users Group - it's one of the largest in the country so I was lucky to experience it. There is the natural chance to commiserate with people who handle the same stuff everyday, and the opportunity to learn form their experiences. But organizing these groups is difficult and takes a different type of leadership.

I make sure to attend the Skype Users Groups here - they are usually hosted by Microsoft and run by members and sponsored by companies and vendors with a keen interest in informing and engaging with their customers. I always learn good things - a few weeks ago we had a dive into Microsoft Teams (I came away impressed).

Social Media - that is Twitter, blogs, online communities, ongoing chats and the like - really fills that gap. It keeps me from feeling like I am the only one in the world working on this stuff. I get ideas from other, keep up to date with news, but more importantly I can put out my thoughts so they organize more easily. I'm not obsessive about my social activities and I probably overshare. If I occasionally sound like an idiot then hopefully someone calls me on it.  But really it has helped me grow and so I love it.

Please share your opinions and experiences! Has being social helped you? Where do you keep social?

This is a technical meeting not a sales call!

I was on a call with Polycom today taking a dive into their RealPresence and Clarity solutions. Prior to my current job I worked with a Polycom infrastructure and took quite a bit of training in it. So I have a pretty good understanding of the bits that make the bauble.

The essentials of a Polycom infrastructure are very similar to a Cisco VCS-based system, and for that matter a CUCM too. There are only so many ways to skin a cat - h323 and SIP are universal standards after all.   Right?
                                            Right?
                                                        ok, basically yes.

Anyways, I'm not writing this up to repeat everything about the meeting. I found it to be refreshing and invigorating to exercise some of the beginnings I had in the video and collaboration space.  It was also fun to hear the senior architect begin to realize I was not coming in cold. I knew the core components they were selling and this was no sales meeting, no bs.

It also can be a reminder that we should always know the other products out there and always be critical of the things we use and know.

Toilets, Lightbulbs and TelePresence

My primary job is managing the Cisco TelePresence environment but it is never that simple. I think more than any other IT field, we have to work with other non-IT departments and deal with things that are not traditional IT all the time. When things break at work people are going to point at IT or at facilities. If the sink doesn't run, they know who to call and usually call IT for anything else that even remotely smells of technology.

Of course I'm always amazed at the technology behind a flushable toilet and it is astounding how much "technology" is involved with lighting these days.

So when you go into a conference room and push the button to turn the light on you expect the light turns on. When it doesn't you push it again. If it still doesn't work, you pretty much leave and find another room, right? But when you walk in the room and push a button to turn on a video system and ......      do I need to go on?

The truth is after a century we instinctively know there is a relation between the physical utilities like a toilet and a light and "Facilities" but even after a quarter century of use the line is blurred with "technology." Turn it off and then back on works too well for things we do but has no equivalent in anything else. When the blender doesn't work and you unplug it then plug it back it it isn't to "initialize" the blender it is to confirm you plugged it in in the first place. Then you might check another plug but that is to see if maybe the outlet is dead.

Keep pushing that button to power on the TV... just like the elevator button makes the elevator get there faster when you push it more ;)

But really, the things people look to us for help with might be simple for us but so much friction and apprehension is instilled in people that when something doesn't immediately react, doesn't react at all or just goes plain bonkers we don't always know what to do.

We as IT and technology people can always do more and do better to explain and assist.  Edison and Tesla went on big road shows and conducted grand public displays so the public could understand that the little light bulb was going to turn on and should replace their cherished whale oil lamp. The genius inventor of the toilet had a harder time demonstrating so but thankfully that work made our lives less shitty.

So what am I doing about this all?

Instructions. For now.

Getting Started instructions

When you tap the button on the main screen of a Cisco Touch Panel, you get some basic instructions. This screen is explaining the controls on the wall and I give some other helpful this. I'm trying to keep it short and simple. This is only on the main home panel so nothing in here should be needed during a meeting since it it is not nearly as discoverable during a call.

AV Controls help

No matter where you are on the Cisco Touch Panel, there is a little help button in the upper right of the screen (it's a lightbulb here but in real life it's a question mark).
I am using these panels to give the most basic of instructions to users for how to use the controls on the wall to turn screens on or off, select the different modes of the room and change volume levels.

VTC Controls help

While I find the Cisco Touch to be really simple, some people wanted more help. Again, I kept it simple and just the basics.

HELP!

After reviewing feedback and looking at support tickets I added some of the top issues here and most importantly how to get more help. A single unified service desk to call when they have issues. There are ways I could even add a button to call them, but if the system is broken then that is not a call they can make, right?

This was pretty simple to do. I utilized the Room Integration tools for Cisco endpoints. Ideally they could interface with the butt things on the wall for AV control but that is not an option yet with all of our audio video equipment. So they are just text fields  that I built in the Cisco provided tool and uploaded to every endpoint.

Hopefully they will reduce calls and let people use the rooms faster and easier.

As tie goes on, I will improve these. I will have training and maybe I'll record it. But really I'm going to try to remember that no matter how simple and easy I think it is, It still isn't that magic lever that makes it all go down the drain.

I forgot about the lab (not really)

It's been a month since my last post.
It has been a really long month and not an easy one at that.

I took a nice little road trip down to Eugene, Or to see if the sun really can disappear.

It did.

It was glorious.

It was also a 13 hour drive home (normally only 5).

I went to see a bunch of ChiaPet Battle Fellows. Ok, the Terra Cotta Warriors Exhibit at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle doesn't really like for you to put sprouts on these guys. That is an assumption.

Late summer is always a busy time for people in Seattle. It is *our* vacation time because the weather is reliably awesome. It's hard to argue with August and September temperatures from 70-90 every single day and no rain :)

All that being said, I connected the O365 account to Cisco Spark, setup Single Sign On and played with it so I could learn a whole bunch. I documented things at work because Hurricanes happen, and learned that Cisco dCloud pretty much means your home lab only needs to be a couple of phones and a router. If anything at all.

I've also struggled and not been my normal positive happy self. Depression sucks. Partly from my job so if you're hiring; help...

Did I forget about the lab??

Golly no! I just haven't written much lately what with life and all and things work related. But my free Office365 licenses are running up soon so I better migrate to a less Microsoft world.

First and Last thoughts on O365

Look, Microsoft is the defacto standard for many reasons and there is little to fault with this stuff. Microsoft certainly did have it's 70's Detroit era products (Vista and Millennium for example), but brought it back strongly with XP and the associated Office suite. Their back office and server products took off about then and continued to accelerate. 

Take all rough to manage server voodoo, plop it up into the cloud then give it an attractive price - you've got something magic that should be hard for any small or medium business to resist. Seriously, At $20/month per head you get something whole IT orgs normally maintain. 

OK, I am not going to get any money trying to sell this so I'll move onto what i know more. and that's Skype4B and the collaboration tools provided. The hardest part about my trial and Skype is not in the configuration. It wasn't in the testing. No, everything went so incredibly easy! 

Without going into the not-gory detail review, after signing up, I had to insert a string into my DNS records for nosaturn.com to prove it's my domain and then follow the instructions to update the SRV records for Skype federation. I also had to setup some email redirection but again, everything was simple and I was up and running in a couple hours at most. Read Starting a business (or setting up an IT Department)  where I cover it more but that was about the size of it.

Back to the hardest part - why shouldn't everyone use Skype4B then? If you don't laugh after reading that then just do it and be very happy with great and easy to manage complete authentication, email, messaging, internal webpage, file sharing, and so much more IT organization that Microsoft is selling for a pretty amazing price. For a few extra bucks they will even let you call regular old phone numbers and accept incoming phone calls.

Office365 and Skype for Business are a bad choice

With that extreme statement I plant the flag down and boldly declare something that is actually pretty true. You see for every reason this O365 business is wonderful, the actual use might have different needs or objectives in mind. While O365 is amazingly flexible, it simply isn't everything everyone always needs. Every IT org and the software they use varies a little and so do their needs whether it is legacy choices or whatever. 

I could dive deep on the Skype4B is cheating with SIP bandwagon or i could leave it at it takes work for Skype4B to talk to things that are not Skype4B. There is good about that but having a background in voice and networking makes me see Skype4B as an interesting product but not a real telecommunications system. 

While VoIP and WebRTC are very different from their analog and TDM forbearers, you can get down in them and see their evolution. Skype4B grew out of a media streaming toy tossed into Windows 95 back in the days of dial up modems. Use a tidy little codec to slice up your noises and another to pixelate your good looks then sling across the information articles and boom! NetMeeting! It diverged some to and fro within Microsoft picking up new features and names along the way, but also changing the core bit that made it work (those little codecs). What we have ended up with is something that outwardly works and acts like a phone and a video conference application but doesn't use any of the fundamental "systems" that make those work for every other system sold. So you end up adding more and more bits and bling to make it work.......

/rant

What are your alternatives?

If you are small and need to stay in the cloud because you can't handle even the smallest data center your choices are quite abundant. Vonage, ShoreTel, and so many others offer out of the box solutions or you can roll your own quite easily in your pillowy AWS space with a little Asterisk punctuation*     (*must love Linux).    Ward Mundy's blog NerdVittles  has even better info for the roll your own crowd. 

Eventually an organization has to grow up and look at something grown ups choose from big industry players like Avaya and Cisco, right? Rght?      NO!     You be a tiny fish in the big pond of standards=based telecommunications and collaboration tools! 

Spark this fire, get things burning!

Cisco offers a cloud based communications and collaboration package that is flexible in sizing and powerful in it's reach. The basic package lets you make SIP standards-based calls and have persistent chat communications with anyone in the world for free. (for companies of one). Their option levels and pricing are reasonable for larger companies and that's when you get the more important administrator tools. When you fully option a user out, they will be able to host meetings in Spark or even in WebEx, can join from a PC or phone or tablet or regular phone as a voice call or get a desk phone that works directly on it or from any of Cisco's modern TelePresence endpoints or from any other standards-based endpoint and even from Skype. That's like 9 ways to connect without counting variants of each (Windows vs MacOS vs a web browser on Linux). 

Again, I shouldn't try to be selling these things. But I will be fair and remind you I am a Cisco Champion for Collaboration so I am a little biased to Cisco products. But I like Spark and Ive been using it for months now

Its late Brian.... wrap this up.

I opened this window and started typing about how I was moving my perfectly functioning IT department from Skype4B to Cisco Spark. 1000 words later and I haven't moved a thing. Let's see how this goes because I finally got my Spark trial pack :)

Whatcha doing tomorrow?
What are your thoughts?

Expertise is an illusion; A motivational essay about how you don’t know crap.

Many years ago, when I started at Microsoft in the ramp up to support Windows Millennium, they asked us “on a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you know windows?” My answer was 7-8. I reasoned that “5” must be the average and i knew way more than that; and since Microsoft hired me to support this amazing revolutionary new Windows, i must know *way more than that*. Everyone else rated themselves as 2-3 and the instructor chastised me for giving myself such a high score. “You see,” he explained, “the developer who worked on the exit button can explain everything about that button: the down click, the up click, every API it uses and all the implications of using it. But they probably can't tell you a single thing about the button next to it.”

Expertise *is* an illusion just like any technology sufficiently advanced enough is magic. No-one can know everything out of hand, but they can be pretty good at many things. More importantly they can learn and socialize. I’ve frequently told people whom I’ve helped so quickly that “i’m just a couple pages further in the manual than they are.”

How you attack issues and problems matter. Consistent strategies and knowing when it is the right time to stop the self research and call in the big dogs is important. (the big dogs being escalation in your org, mentors, coworkers, your vendors, manufacturers support or sacrificing goats). I know I’ve spent hours and hours exploring and trying to teach myself new things simply because there was a small issue. All that time wasn’t completely wasted, but small issues usually have simple solutions so those hours could have been avoided by asking around or calling support.     Of course i can tell you that learning the things I did paid off in other ways and sometimes I have called in support only for the answer to be worthless or so slow coming that I should have just worked it on my own.

So what is the best if expertise isn’t?

Fundamentals; solid understanding of core concepts and technology behind them. 
In collaboration I see these:

• Fundamentals of networks - what the OSI is and Isn’t, how to packet capture and recognize parts of it
• Fundamentals of communications protocols: SIP messaging (and to some extent h323), the common codecs involved (like 264, 265, g711 etc)
• Explain what modular architecture is - that everywhere different components have to work together but those components are often changeable. Be able to understand and map these components
• How audio video and all those physical layer components work - audio feedback, hdcp on hdmi, what is avc vs svc
• Security practises - (this should be core to every IT job) - good security practises (service accounts and unique passwords, social engineering, certificates and etc

If you have these fundamentals then you have a core that can be worked with… but what about the intangibles:

• Research - how well do you google and how well can you find documentation?
• Retention - can you recall things you researched later even if it didn't help or did you just forget it because it wasn't important (why get deep in research if you don't retain it)
• Communication - nobody ever tells you what the problem is; they just tell you the symptoms they experienced. Of that “It's broken” you also have to be able to talk to “non-technical” people, talk to other teams and talk to higher pay grades. Can you identify who is important (an admin is usually the most important contact you have)
• Documentation - look, this is the ugly part of the job and i’ve blogged about it already read here
• Knowing when to quit - will you call for help because you can't know everything? When?

We can build things in labs and classes a dozen times. 
We can deploy and migrate a hundred systems. 
None of that makes you an expert, does it? 
                  It just shows you've been doing your job.

But it’s ok to be an expert.

Ok, so I’ve used eight hundred words debunking the idea of an expert and I should probably rebuild it. 
If sufficiently advanced technology is magic, then someone who knows more is reasonably an expert. Or a wizard. At least from your perspective, for the question at hand and in the time needed. And the same is true for everyone coming to you. 

YOU CAN BE THE EXPERT THEY NEED. 

So be the expert they deserve! Help them solve the problem, learn a little so you both can move on better for the experience. They might be a new hire in a grunt position, the CEO, or someone outside; they came to you and you represent something so you might as well be an “expert” for them. 
Then later on you get to be just pretty good at something again ;)

Know your environment - Diagram All The Things!

If you're thinking about UC media encryption it helps to do detailed flow diagrams for voice, video and content. #ciscocollab

— Josh Warcop (@Warcop) August 2, 2017

Yesterday Josh Warcop mentioned that diagramming is important and as an example we should check out Microsoft's Protocol Workload Posters for Skype4B/Lync/OCS/NetMeeting 👀  

I have to agree and point out how beautifully simple Microsoft has made some of their documentation. From magic Excel spreadsheets where you input a couple of parameters and spit out huge maps and configuration guides to the always stellar MSDN, MSIT, Channel 9, Microsoft puts a lot of useful and easy tools right front and center.

The documentation for Cisco is quite extensive, but so is it's distribution. Recently I pointed out Cisco's Collaboration Solutions Analyser; it was something I only found last week yet I have been working on Cisco TelePresence for a few years now. While it is always fun to find new things, it is frustrating when that was something you really needed weeks, months or years ago! I think Cisco Is getting better but so is the socialization of knowledge (we share things we find).

Josh was right though, do not let your environment languish in your head. Write it down and often in that process you will understand it better - possibly pinpointing problems in the process! My own documents are not perfect but I decided to share a sanitized version so I could share my work. You could use these as an example, I'll even share the Visio if you ask me, but I already see they need much improvement.

Is Diagramming Different Than Documentation?

Yes. Documentation includes diagrams, but a diagram is a visual thing and that sometimes is more effective than just using words. Diagrams can show flow and motion and relationship that words just cannot.

But What Should I Diagram?

Make sure to include important details. You can see I include names, FQDN and IP addresses. It might be important to include version numbers but when you do that you have to update them too! I have experimented with linking diagrams to spreadsheets that may or may not have referenced some db of SNMP queries and that really shows the power of MS Office collaboration (and the hell that happens when you move files).

But I Don't Plan On Getting Hit By A Bus!

Nobody does. But we are supposed to remember that we should document as if it will. More than likely your efforts to do this will help you learn so much that you get a promotion because you are truly awesome.

Here are some diagrams

Overview

This is obviously just an overview. We have multiple offices with stuff and things, then our datacenter has everything important; clusters of nuts and stuff.

Protocols

There are more protocols involved but the big SIP/h323 and then the backchannel management things happen here. I can already tell I should pile in a bunch or zone information and where transforms and transversals happen but that really would be whole other diagrams. Try not to overload too much information into one screen!

Dial Plan

My background is more telephony and networking whereas most Skype people usually came from server and messaging. Understanding dial plans is something drilled into telephony kids from day one. It is the basis of life and from it grew IP planning. Skypers are so Layer7. But seriously folks; The meat is knowing how you are going to route and direct calls. If you cannot master that then you will not have a working communications system. This diagram shows all the e.164 extension dialing we got going on with the 33xxx range dedicated for video, 72xxx range dedicated to a sister company for voice or video, and 73xxx  range for voice at a remote office (they could use it for video too but they do not).

I'm going to wrap this up and think about how I'm going to make this better now!

Coming back from vacation and Cisco's Collaboration Solutions Analyzer

I spent the last week on vacation in Birch Bay, Washington. It's a little town just 5 miles south of the US/Canada border. We had very little to no cell phone service and no internet so this was a great vacation. The sunsets were fabulous!

I wanted to read up on Expressways and all sorts of other things but I skipped all of that hub-bub and just enjoyed the slow pace of doing nothing. I avoided tech except to play SimCity Build-It in offline mode :)   All of that to say that the fam did not want to kill me as I was previously worried about.

So what happens at work when you are the only one minding the shop and you are gone for a week? Thankfully not too much. So today being my first day back at work I had a few emails to parse but moved through them quickly. Now I'm looking for things to work on.

Collaboration Solutions Analyzer - the greatest thing ever?

Has anyone ever seen this? Collaboration Solutions Analyzer (Cisco how to use) is something I found before I left and took a cursory look at today. The doc I liked explains it pretty well, but of course I'm going to add my bits here.

Take a diagnostics log from your your Expressway, VCS-C, Conductor or even most endpoints and this puppy will parse out all the goodies that you probably need to know. The keen folks at Cisco TAC built this and must have had it in their secret weapon toolbox

I decided to make a few calls, gathers a couple of logs and see what it tells me. The first thing that popped up from a log captured on my VCS-c is this: POTENTIAL PROBLEMS!

Right there, the CSA tool tells me there might be some problem I didn't even know about. This is very cool. By following the link right there I was able to see what it was and in this case completely did not apply, but I like knowing that CSA can identify something I might not otherwise be looking for.

There is so much more to like in the CSA that I'm going to have to use it more and include it in the troubleshooting processes we use.
I will probably even write about it more later.

Were you like me and missed Cisco Live last month? Fear no more! #CLUS2017

Cisco announced that most of the sessions are available now! I followed the #CLUS2017 hashtag and got so much out of it already but some of these sessions will be great!

https://twitter.com/CiscoEvents/status/887797960196620288

I'll let you know when I see the #MSIgnite2017 sessions.

It didn't kill me, but my family might. (part 3 in a series)

So with the CMR's all backed up as Conductor Conferencing Aliases, I feel like things are "stabilized" for now and I'm preparing for vacation.

However,  the nature of my ADD means that sometimes it is hard to think of anything else than what excites me. Lately that's been all the things at work and that I'm working on. So a week up camping with my wife and daughter (plus her friend) may possibly lead to them killing me.

I guess you cannot escape death.

In order to clear my conscience and (maybe) wrap up this trilogy, I would like to explain a tiny bit more about that I've learned about what a "CMR" is. In part 1 I explained it as magic tied back to some SQL thing - pretty much magic begetting magic, am I right?

It really isn't quite that mystical. When you create a CMR - something you can only do in TMS - it makes an API call to the Conductor to build a conference that is then stored in the Conductor but you cannot modify it. If a CMR is in the Conductor and has the same video number or video address as a Conductor Conference Alias, the CMR will take priority. This way you can have a CCA that mirrors the CMR but they can coexist peacefully. If the CMR gets wiped from the Conductor because it's marked for deletion and you hit that Regenerate CMRs button you will be totally safe. the CCA is backing you up.

Until TMS creates a CMR for someone new that uses the same video number or address.

These moments of clarity were provided in the "Cisco-TMSPE-with_VCS-Deployment-Guide" on page 57 and 58. I also learned about how a CMR differs from a CCA and most significantly in guest access. I have never played with a host/guest meeting room in the Cisco environment so it's fun to exercise this. In short: with a CMR you can have the PIN determine the participant's role in a conference. User one PIN and you are a guest, or use the other PIN and you are the host. With a CCA, you must have a separate alias for the guest to call.

Where do we go from here?

I'm going on vacation. HA!

Not much of this really matters to many because ya'll are probably on to CUCM which totally changes what a CMR is. There is no Conductor. TMS is relegated to a purely scheduling function. Who knows, it might not even have a place in the future where Spark/WebEx converge to take over.

But I feel better putting this down and maybe you found this bit interesting. The Cisco documentation is deep. I've ready too many PDF's in the last month and I really should be working on my lab again. But for now i'm going to sit back, light a marshmallow on fire, and try not to talk about tech too much.

Don't Complain - EXPLAIN! a Twitter moment from @SwiftOnSecurity

Don't Complain - EXPLAIN!

Starting a business (or setting up the IT department)

Back to the lab....

I signed up for a Microsoft Office 365 E3 account for my fictional company NOS Corp. There is a try it free for 30 days option requiring no credit cad info or anything so the E3 level is perfect to get started with. I'll have a full Microsoft stack it appears and I have to tell you the setup was so painlessly easy.

We all like things to be simple, right? I do. I may be crazy, but I like things to work straight out of the box. I know when I worked on beta projects at Microsoft we obsessed on the "OOBE" - the Out Of the Box Experience. That was many years ago and my experiences with Lync since made me think Microsoft might have left the OOBE out of enterprise installs. Courses and labs with deep powershell really don't make me feel like this is easy. So I was a little afraid that an o365 setup might be unnecessarily hard.

Getting started with Office 365 has been incredibly simple.

I was surprised at exactly how simple it was. Type my name and a couple other details into a series of about 3 screens and it's all done. I didn't even need a domain (yet)!. I've checked and email works. I can sign into Skype and send messages. All of this is with the Microsoft supplied @%domain%.onmicrosoft.com default, so now I need to really connect my domain.

Connecting O365 and my Domain

I have to manually update DNS records. they offer a way to do it automatically, but i really don't want to move my DNS host to another provider, I'd like to maintain it at Google. Manually updating DNS records was fairly simple because Microsoft gave me all the records I needed to update and they even had handy copy buttons for each.  

One little spot is that problematic is the SRV record they told me to update. Google Domains offers you Name, Type, TTL, and Data fields, but an SRV record needs a few more fields so when the O365 told me to enter Service, Protocol, Port, Weight, Priority, TTL and Target I didn't know what to do. The O365 Domain Setup had a help link that thankfully worked out perfect, telling me to paste in the "Priority Weight Port Target" into that Data field ensuring there is a space between each value

After setting up the domain connection and verifying in O365, my resource records look like this:

I highlighted the SRV records mostly because that was the one area of the O365 setup that I needed help on.

Testing

Here is where I forgot something important. Since I had been using Google Domains to forward brian@nosaturn.com to my normal gmail address, I deleted that function in the Synthetic Records when I added all of the Resource Records. any email to the @nosaturn.com are now going to O365, but there are no aliases setup so my test email was returned undeliverable. This was a simple fix though: just add brian@nosaturn.com as an alias to my profile, check again and boom it worked!

Next, i can send and receive Skype messages, and in this case it's to and from my work Skype account. This shows that Microsoft federation is working. I attempted a video call and it started normal but reverted to an audio call telling me that my testing account did not accept the video request.  

I will have to clean that up later since it's time to work!

If it doesn't kill me, it makes me stronger.

Yesterday I wrote about how a bunch of Collaboration Meeting Rooms decided to self-immolate. Read "This thing is going to kill me." for the backstory.

Since I wrote about the problem I need to update my progress. I am diving much more into how TMS and TMSPE work and connect to Conductor to build a CMR, but in the meantime I need a work around for those who lost their CMR.

Here is a short summary of the temporary workaround. Don't' forget that

Steps to proceed:

1. Identify the bridges that were deleted 
2. Compile a list of TMS-based CMRs and CCAs
3. Merge and reconcile this list, then prioritize the ~50 deleted CMRs
4. Add new CCA based on the deleted CMR 
5. Inform users that their bridge has been restored and how it is different
6. Update the SMR Template in TMS so that if a new CMR is created it would be in a range that does not conflict with any of the CCAs or existing CMRs

The new CCAs will be built as such:

• Name and Conference Name = the CMR name
• Incoming Alias = ((bridge\.%EmailName%|%VideoNumber%)@vc\.%domain%\.com|(bridge\.\.%EmailName%|%VideoNumber%)@%domain%\.com)
• Priority = using the video number from the CMR (this will make them easy to identify later)
• Conference Template = HD Meeting
• Role Type = Participant
• Allow Conference To Be Created = Yes

Differences from a TMS-managed CMR and a Conductor Conference Alias:
• Users will not be able to use the TMS portal to edit them
• CMRs are linked to an Active Directory account so they are deleted when an employee leaves
• If a number (or URI) exists in both TMS and Conductor, the CMR will be connected (this is unrelated to Priority anywhere, it seems to be a default function of the system)

Once this is complete, I will research a little more to see if there is any other possibility to move the CCAs back. During this time we can resume using TMS to create and manage CMRs. If I could not move the CCAs back, then I might as well move the remaining CMRs over to Conductor just in case someone hits the “Regenerate CMRs” button.

Definitions:

TMS = TelePresence Management Suite

CMR = Collaboration Meeting Room (aka video bridge or jabber bridge)

CCA = Conductor Conference Alias

This is short because I have to go do this :)

This thing is going to kill me.

Today was a long day.

Our environment for Cisco TelePresence has a Telepresence Management Server with Provisioning Extension (TMSPE) and  a Conductor to manage the TelePresence Servers (Bridges) and multiple separate Active Directory Domains. TMS polls for accounts that should be allowed to use TelePresence resources and users can build a Collaboration Meeting Room (CMR (video bridge)) from there. We had 2004 CMR built through TMS.

Yeah. Had.

As best I can gather, a user profile is built by TMSPE. When certian parameters of their synched AD profile change TMSPE changes (?) the profile and if there is a CMR connected with that profile it is considered "out of sync".    Don't reconcile these out of sync CMR's because it deletes them and you won't sleep for a while because of that.

If a CMR is out of sync and you regenerate it they (at least in my case) get marked for deletion. We lost 50. And those 50 were not the ones you want to lose. They are gone however and I mourn their loss. I. Trying to bring them back the remaining 150 are now out of sync.

When you have a Conductor, you can build conference aliases manually. There is an API that TMSPE uses to build CMR's on the Conductor and the CMR is pretty much a conference aliases but it is held separate and is not in that list of conference aliases. There's a tool to search for the CMRs, but that's about it.

There is a magic goo that binds TMSPE and Conductor for those CMR's and they get held in a SQL database (tmspe I think was the name). I could restore that and fix everything. But that would make for a much shorter story and require that I have a backup.

Now I'm left with figuring out how to fix things. I am so super lucky that I exported the CMR's before regenerating everything. I know who had a CMR, but there is no way to use TMS to generate a replace ment CMR that has the same video number (which is what everyone uses instead of their video address).

I could manually build new aliases in Conductor and build a matching template to give them a pin.

I could tell everyone to build their CMR's again too. But with the remote possibility of an infrastructure overhaul in a few months I am reticent to cause that jumble only to have a do-over.

Should I leave you with something witty and positive?