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.