asterisk

Network users demand connectivity apps these days. One of today's "must-haves" is instant messaging. Personally I find I use IM very seldom, but the newest generation of employees have grown up with SMS and IM and grown to expect it. It makes me realize I'm getting old when I see these "kids" and their SMS and IM.

IM clients produce their own security issues, such as viruses, social engineering, exploits and eavesdropping. Opening your network to just any IM client can be a scary proposition, not to mention a huge productivity hole. Attempting to block IM clients can be a technical nightmare with your users staying just one step ahead of you in the "block" and "bypass" game.

I've taken another approach to solve this problem by providing an IM client to each workstation. Rather than just allowing everyone access to Yahoo! or MSN Messenger we've installed our own OpenFire server. In addition to providing instant messaging between employees in all of our offices, including remote offices, we've integrated it with our Asterisk phone system so that it can report the on phone / idle status of any contact. Adding the extra phone system integration seems to have been key to helping our users find a value-add with the system. It also reports incoming caller-id on a user's desktop as a little pop-up window making it invaluable.

This is a near perfect solution. I run an Asterisk Vo/IP system for my office, and eGroupware with Cyrus for our mail system. We migrated from Microsoft Exchange some time ago and I've never looked back.

With eGroupware, we were able to replace 99% of the functionality of our Microsoft Exchange server with open source software. With sieve filters users can set up an unlimited number of server-side mail filters, something you can't do with Exchange anymore, and the web interface works much better with Firefox than Microsoft's web access. Our Asterisk phone system integrates into the mix and will deliver voicemail to the user's e-mail box.

Now, with my Blackberry I can download and play those voicemails without ever having to dial into the phone system, because they are wav files attached to e-mail that is picked up by my Blackberry. I'm feeling so "connected" right now it's not even funny :-)