Improving the Snom IP Phone Retrieve Button Functionality

(Otherwise entitled "Getting the Snom Retrieve Button To Work Even When There Are Only Old Messages to Retrieve")

If you use Snom IP phones, you may have discovered, as I recently did, that the Retrieve button doesn't work, at least by default, unless there are new messages in the mailbox. If the user wants to listen to a saved voicemail, they are out of luck and have to dial the special voicemail extension directly. The Retrieve button just sits there and does nada.

This created some confusion in a recent installation since folks learned to use the Retrieve button to access voicemail and then later, after a day or so of use, wanted to listen to voicemails they had saved. :-) Sure, I had set-up an extension to dial the voicemail system directly (intended for when people were out of the office) but it was pretty silly to have two different ways for users to get used to accessing their voicemail, depending only on whether they had new messages or not.

I poked around a bit and the fix was very simple.... In the web management interface go to Setup->Identity X-->Mailbox and set it to your internal mailbox extension.

(As an aside: I am overall pretty happy with the Snom 320 IP phones. Be careful what firmware revisions you are running -- stay away from 7.x unless you know what you are doing and keep things consistent across your installation).

VOIP Troubleshooting With (the free) Wireshark Packet Analyzer

Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer. Some may recognize it by its former name, Ethereal. It's free (and open source), runs on multiple platforms (including Windows and Linux), and actively developed. For those doing VOIP installations or troubleshooting existing installations, the latest release has some very handy VOIP specific support.

It will create visuals representing captured SIP and associated RTP connections. You can drill down by clicking on specific spots on the graph to pull up the associated packet(s). You can generate reports (as well as graph) jitter, bandwidth usage, etc. Various ways of displaying the data to get a better idea of what's really going on.

The screen captures at the beginning of this post are from Wireshark. They show a graph of a VOIP (SIP) call (and a half) between two Snom SIP phones attached to an Asterisk-based PBX (the green/blue/purple image). And an analysis of the associated RTP session (including packet loss, jitter, delay). WS can even playback captured VOIP calls (at least if using PCM/G.711/ulaw).

-jr

Sanitize All Possible Inputs

If you write applications, well, it's not just public web form input that needs to be sanitized...


:-)

-jr

Relationship Management for Non-Profits (Software)

This software package, CiviCRM, looks promising. It is an implementation of a "Customer Relationship Management" solution, but for organizations that don't really have customers in a commercial sense but still have plenty of relationships to manage. It's a bit like SugarCRM or Salesforce.com but designed for not-for-profit type entities.

If you are involved in a non-profit agency that takes donations or has volunteers, this software may help you optimize your relationships, boost your effectiveness, and provide some dashboard like functionality for managing your organization. Well, that's the theory anyhow. :-)

It appears to have an active community and developers. And a good amount of documentation, a FAQ, a blog, and user forums. All signs that bode well for a sustainable open source project, since many applications die off without achieving critical mass.

I have not used it. I ran across it while researching some other software. Since I know folks involved in managing several non-profits, I wanted give them a heads up to explore further. If anyone takes a closer look please let me know how it goes!

http://civicrm.org/aboutcivicrm

CiviCRM: A Free and Open Source eCRM Solution

CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

CiviCRM is a powerful contact, fundraising and eCRM system that allows you to record and manage information about your various constituents including volunteers, activists, donors, employees, clients, vendors, etc. Track and execute donations, transactions, conversations, events or any type of correspondence with each constituent and store it all in one, easily accessible and manageable source.

CiviCRM is created by an open source community coordinated by CiviCRM LLC, and the 501c3 non-profit Social Source Foundation.

There is a (amateur but it'll give you an idea) Introduction to CiviCRM video and some others here.