Posts made by coliver

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-technical-preview-for-enterprise

@Dashrender I'll see if i can't find it. Someone had linked it at the other place.

I've got it sitting here as well. I could put it on one of my servers for you but I don't know the legality of that.

Have you tried downloading the one for enterprise customers?

@JaredBusch said:

@coliver said:

Agreed, although remember that every call is at this point is an external call. So it would count twice as far as bandwidth is concerned.

Every call is external, but with only 10 phones how many in house calls are happening? Those are the only ones that take double bandwidth.

Good point, just thought it would be something to be made aware of.

@JaredBusch said:

Any box you got can do it since you have no VM infrastructure at that site. I would honestly host it though for 10 phones and only 2-3 simultaneous calls.

The bandwidth usage will be the same and you will have it in a location that does not fail (generally speaking). So even if your internet went out, the PBX would still take calls and route them to voicemail.

You could easily log in and create a new route and send all calls to the main office temporarily when something happens.

Agreed, although remember that every call is at this point is an external call. So it would count twice as far as bandwidth is concerned.

@ajstringham The FCC has requirements of number portability for both landline and wireless phones but the clause was that the providers had to be in the same service area. There are some service areas in the nation that are only serviced by one telephone company/provider.

@Dashrender said:

What do you recommend for a PC for this setup? spec wise.

A virtual machine.... if you can't do that basically any old thing will work for this. @NetworkNerd walked me through that a couple of weeks ago.

@Dashrender Yep, that is exactly what I am referring to.

@Dashrender One of the other things that I ran into is to ensure that you can get service from a SIP trunk provider that isn't your ISP. I am in a very rural part of NY and there is only one entity that services our area.

@ajstringham said:

@coliver said:

@Dashrender said:

@coliver said:

@Dashrender said:

@coliver said:

It depends on how many concurrent calls you have. Although a 2Mb upload may be a bit of a bottle neck.

It might be a 15/3 - but that would be the max.

I think they have 2 normal phone lines and the fax, so 3 calls max.

You could probably get away with it if it is just 3 calls... but again if someone starts listening to Pandora while another person is sending some sort of attachment you may run into issues.

I'll kill pandora and all other streaming services at the sonicwall.

Good luck I would have a riot on my hands if we attempted to do that here...

Why not just QoS it? Once you get this setup, allocate SIP traffic as highest priority on the network and then filter down from there, with sites like Spotify and Pandora having lowest priority.

That would work, I've had iffy results with some QoS at the firewall though, it may just be the Astaro that I was using.

@Dashrender said:

@coliver said:

@Dashrender said:

@coliver said:

It depends on how many concurrent calls you have. Although a 2Mb upload may be a bit of a bottle neck.

It might be a 15/3 - but that would be the max.

I think they have 2 normal phone lines and the fax, so 3 calls max.

You could probably get away with it if it is just 3 calls... but again if someone starts listening to Pandora while another person is sending some sort of attachment you may run into issues.

I'll kill pandora and all other streaming services at the sonicwall.

Good luck I would have a riot on my hands if we attempted to do that here...

@Dashrender said:

@coliver said:

It depends on how many concurrent calls you have. Although a 2Mb upload may be a bit of a bottle neck.

It might be a 15/3 - but that would be the max.

I think they have 2 normal phone lines and the fax, so 3 calls max.

You could probably get away with it if it is just 3 calls... but again if someone starts listening to Pandora while another person is sending some sort of attachment you may run into issues.

This is a perfect opportunity to go to VoIP.

@Dashrender

I have a 15/2 cable internet connection (don't want to upgrade it) - would this be good enough to support SIP trunks?

It depends on how many concurrent calls you have. Although a 2Mb upload may be a bit of a bottle neck.

I also have a fax line at this office for a traditional fax machine I'd rather leave in place - would a SIP to POTS be OK for this, or would I need to continue paying for one POTS line?

You can continue using the POTS line if you want but Asterisk now supports a single fax line for free on various distributions. So you could use the PBX to handle faxes, or give each individual user their own dedicated line which emails the fax to them.

@ajstringham said:

@coliver said:

@ajstringham said:

@StrongBad said:

I think that you can use LibreOffice on Linux to fill in Word forms, but I am not sure.

And this right here is a very nice reason why Word DOC/DOCX will never be the standard form. Either the person has to have paid software for you to guarantee it will work, or your are relying on free software to be able to pull it off, and without an equivalent to Adobe Reader but for Word documents, businesses, government, etc will never do that.

Actually LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice have excellent Doc and Docx support. There are some advanced functions that I don't think are there yet but for most everything else they work as anticipated.

They do NOW but even if it wasn't in the past year or two, it wasn't something that was supported 5 years ago. Also, their compatibility for maintaining custom formatting is still not even close to perfect. I've seen documents opened in LibreOffice that were generated in Office 2010 or 2013 get majorly screwed up, in terms of formatting.

To be fair I've seen documents opened between versions of Office where the format was just as messed up as porting it to an OSS application. Either way though your point stands.

I have been having this issue today as well.

Windows 8.1 using Chrome 37.0.2062.124.

@ajstringham said:

@StrongBad said:

I think that you can use LibreOffice on Linux to fill in Word forms, but I am not sure.

And this right here is a very nice reason why Word DOC/DOCX will never be the standard form. Either the person has to have paid software for you to guarantee it will work, or your are relying on free software to be able to pull it off, and without an equivalent to Adobe Reader but for Word documents, businesses, government, etc will never do that.

Actually LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice have excellent Doc and Docx support. There are some advanced functions that I don't think are there yet but for most everything else they work as anticipated.

@Mike-Ralston said:

@ajstringham Windows 8 and 8.1 users are supposedly getting 10 free.

I thought I read on ZDNet or WinITPro that this wasn't going to be the case. I could be mistaken though.

I hope it is cause that would be a great deal.

I've always played the healer when I play with any group both video game and tabletop. I haven't met a female gamer who prefers that role, not saying they don't exist just saying none in my experience.

If it said he needs a long range nuker or tank then I'd agree with it.

I know you said RPG, but the Warcraft Series (Warcraft Orc & Humans up to Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne) have some of the best story telling of any RTS. May not be your genre but still worth a shot if you like a good story.

@ajstringham said:

@milnesy said:

What about Fallout 3? I had it for the PS3 and all the DLC and it was amazing. One of the best storylines in the main game and all 4 dlc's. Fallout New Vegas was... ok.

I've heard about the Fallout series. Who are your enemies? I've heard their good, and I have I think New Vegas for 360, but haven't played it.

Oh... you haven't played Fallout 3/New Vegas? You're missing out think of it as a Elder Scrolls game set in post-apocalyptic 1950's US. The world is your enemy and the story line is fantastic. A lot of people didn't enjoy New Vegas as much (the main plot line was swiss cheese) but the side quests and additional fluff were great for a fan of the series.