Unified Communications Junkie

I’ll be at geek fest Southeast TLC 2017, hope to see you all there!

Transforming the partner organization

Most value added resellers, channel partners and other service delivery organizations have been taking stock of themselves lately as the industries they serve have been undergoing landscape shifts.

For a long time, the recipe to be a VAR (value added reseller) has been simple; sell the installation, maintenance and support services of someone else’s products to an entity in need of those products…

If you have followed this blog for awhile you’ll recall the post, Weekend Trunking Therapy where I demonstrated how to use an Internet based YATE PBX as a SIP proxy and signal conversion tool for Google Voice by using a SIP User Agent between a Cisco IOS device and the proxy.

In that post, I used a Cisco 881SRST router acting as a CUBE and also CME (SIP and SCCP). That alone has actually been a…

The evolution of professional services in the technology industry

The Evolution of Professional Services View as PDF What is this?

The changes that are (and have been) happening in the technology industry recently have caught the attention of many people. For those of us who work in the professional technical services space; these changes have been of particular interest because of the implications they have on how we conduct business. I’ve recently spoke on…

OpenSSH cipher issue with CUCM SFTP DRS

This is an important announcement for anyone that uses OpenSSH, and by extension any software that uses OpenSSH. A coworker (Evgeny -see, I told you E) and I discovered this issue today by way of using Linux with OpenSSH as a SFTP>DRS target for UC Manager.

Applied to context; in OpenSSH 7.2p2 (and possibly other recent versions), which you’ll likely run into in recent, package managed Linux…

Is it possible? Yes. Is it so simple a Caveman could do it? No.

I have created a Slack to Spark migration tool called MOSS (Move from Slack to Spark) and it works reliably and consistently.

I’d like to tell you that I’ve created a single file with a button called, “go” and all you have to do is click it to migrate users from Slack to Spark. The reality is there just isn’t enough parity between…

Get started with the Cisco Spark API with PHP

This will be a short post; not much content -just referencing an API wrapper class to use with Cisco Spark’s API (V1). This wrapper class is written in PHP and requires a MySQL database (for full implementation). The wrapper class also demonstrates The Cisco Spark Oauth implementation.

https://github.com/ryanthuff/sabb

CUCM PRI to SIP conversion outbound and inbound calls ring busy

In this post we’ll be working with Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified Border Element and SIP. We’re going to walk through a troubleshooting scenario and examine the cause and the “why” behind the cause as well as a path to resolution.

Your company has an existing UC system that uses a T1/PRI in it’s gateway for PSTN access and they have asked you to convert it over to SIP. Easy,…

Configure a T1 PRI in a Cisco 4000 series router

It has been a bit since my last post … busy mostly. I decided it was time to get something up, before my Google rank starts to slip :). This post will be covering an old technology (but still relevant) on new equipment.

The voice T1 PRI configuration has been a staple for Cisco IOS for some time now; although seen and used less each day, it is still a relevant technology to understand and…

Live, on-demand streaming media, one of the newer craze’s of the Internet can be used with Cisco Spark too!

Natively as of this writing, Cisco Spark rooms do not support RTMP however; Cisco Spark rooms currently, will parse YouTube hyperlinks and host the YouTube video player in the room.

Thats all we need to get streaming media into a Cisco Spark room! In the same sort of style as Twitch.tv, we…

On February 16th 2016 I’ll be hosting a live botwar using a Cisco Spark room! In true rock em’ sock em’ style, I’ll have 2 bots battling each other (digitally) in a Cisco Spark room. The bots are equipped with defense and attack capabilities and have a variety of armament. Each bot has 100 hitpointsand is built to try and keep it’s hitpoints from reaching 0. Each bot can launch attacks that cause…

Receive real-time AMBER ALERT in Cisco Spark room

This post is dedicated to showcasing another practical use of Cisco Spark. In my previous post I demonstrated how you could support a full-stack analog faxing solution with Cisco Spark. In this post I will demonstrate how you can receive real-time AMBER ALERTs in Cisco Spark rooms.

The basis of the solution is from an older developer technique called, ‘screen scraping’. The term refers to a…

Support for analog PSTN Faxing in Cisco Spark

In this post, I am touching on a polarizing topic in the UC (save telephony et, al) industry, analog faxing. If you support faxing or users that fax, you likely loath the topic. If you are a user of faxing you generally fall into 1 of 2 categories; you don’t see a way to do your job without faxing OR (and is more often the case), you would like to not fax but your job/industry demands otherwise.

Public ChatBot for Cisco Spark

Jixator Prime

Jixator Prime is a free and reusable RoomBot for Cisco Spark rooms that I’ve recently created. Jixator is one of many types of awesome ChatBots (shoutout to @cloverhound @eplus) and that have been developed recently for use with Cisco Spark rooms.

I originally created Jixator because I was bored one night and the PlayStation Network was down for maintenance, then it dawned on me…

I’ll be the first to admit, Cisco Spark has sent me off the reservation a bit lately. I have been playing with it heavily. The concept of the base Spark infrastructure has been around for a bit (Slack, Flowdock, Jostle … etc) however, what has me intrigued with Cisco Spark is the ability to have API features access and interact with Cisco’s Collaboration products. That’s where the real Disco is.