10 Feb 2003 dyork   » (Master)

The news about our teleworker product launch - So the news release was issued about one of the products I manage. Our teleworker product hits GA (General Availability) on Monday, February 17th. Only one week away... and everything looks good to go! All reported bugs have been fixed... we're just in the final week of trials... and then away it goes!

This solution is just winning raves all around from all of our resellers, our customers and pretty much anyone else who tries it out. The voice quality of our solution is so far ahead of any of our competitors.

The cool thing for me is that the solution runs on our Linux base platform. It's proprietary software that uses our own toolkits and libraries that have been engineered to work with our phone systems. But all of that is sitting on good old Linux underneath! There were naysayers that thought the software should just run on a Windows server, but our team showed the doubters that it could be done - and in doing so saves the company all those horrendous Windows license fees (and of course we don't have to worry about all the reboot issues).

So now we have a solution that allows a remote worker to have a phone in their home office that is simply an extension off of their corporate office using just their broadband Internet connection. We secure the communication, of course, and give the user all the features they would have at their corporate office. It's truly amazing.

The other day I did a demo here in Ottawa for a visiting customer from the UK. While there, I showed them how easy it was to program my phone as an (previously arranged) extension off of a phone switch in the UK. They then just dialed 9, got dial-tone in London, and called their office to check their voicemail. They were quite blown away.

It is, after all, the Internet, where you can pretty much kiss QoS goodbye, so the fact that it sounds as good as it does actually amazes me... but our developers did some great work. And we're certainly not immune to network issues. I've had calls degrade when a router was busy somewhere. But overall the stuff we've done for jitter buffering and other things like that has made the quality pretty darn amazing.

And it's just great to be involved with a product that is launching as well as this one is!

Babylon 5 - Season Two on DVD - Saw the excellent news on The Lurker's Guide today that Season Two is available for pre-order. It should ship at the end of April. Given that this is the pivotal season when things really start to heat up, I'm very much looking forward to seeing the episodes without commercial interruption.

Bio - It was pointed out to me that the biography I had up on my web site was woefully out of date... it still had me as President of LPI, a position I haven't held for most of two years now. It shows that I haven't been speaking at conferences lately... otherwise my bio would be up to date.

Insert part A into hole B - We have been searching for a new dresser for our bedroom for quite some time now and after deciding we were just to frugal to pay the big bucks at the nice furniture stores in town, we instead made the pilgramage to dear old IKEA. The only downside to that of course is that it is all self-assembly... I think the dresser had about 20 boards and (literally) 200 little screws, cams, nails and other pieces. Fun, fun, fun...

Curling championships - The only good news was that the Karcher Junior Curling Finals were on this weekend - men's final on Saturday at 1pm and women's final on Sunday at 1pm. So that was the middle of both days... assembling IKEA furniture with curling on in the background. (Why both days? Ah, because we purchased end-tables Sunday morning to do with the dresser...) Amazing curling in both of them. Well worth the time spent. Truly amazing to see these 20ish men and women curling as well as they do. (Of course, some of them are 18 years old and have already been curling for 10 years!)

The Chloe Journals - Planning for the first birthday party is now underway... relatives notified... many will be coming... ahh, the work that must be done! ;-)

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