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!

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?

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?

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!

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!