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!

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.

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?

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.