The softphone experience
By Jason Meserve, NetworkWorld.com, 03/29/05
When I told the Network World IT staff of my Skype experiment they said I should try out the company's softphone technology instead. Ok, I was game. I like trying new technologies and if it worked, it would eliminate the need for me to use my home line when telecommuting (not that it's a major issue.) Friday, the guys installed a new Cisco VPN client and Avaya Softphone on my Windows 2000 machine. We tested it out at the office on a 'Net connection outside our firewall. Everything seemed to work fine.
The only concern was a potential drop in call quality when using certain applications, specifically our content management system, which has a Web-based interface written in Java. Today (well yesterday as I write this after midnight), I worked from home and gave the phone it's first trial run. Everything logged in properly. I was able to turn on the telecommute option for my normal line (the Softphone is on a separate extension) using the Softphone. I even called home number and left myself a voicemail to test the quality. Then I tried to do a little work on our Web site using our CMS...
I didn't test the call quality while working with the CMS interface, but I did run into problems. The main content window where you search for articles, images, etc. creates a pop-up window for each article or item you want to edit. Whenever I made an edit and tried to close the editing window, all of IE would close and result in an error. I tried it with a few different articles and the same result. Then I tried it with Softphone turned off. Problem solved. Turned the phone back on... same problem.
Now I am back to the old setup and will use the Softphone for backup and travel situations, unless someone comes up with a fix for my Avaya/CMS conflict.
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