These are the most common, current Cisco products that are used at organizations that have between 100 and 3000 hosts on the system. The links go directly to the datasheets, and bypass all the annoying marketing and obsolete product links that are found on the Cisco website.
People start businesses every day. I live in Georgia, just north of Atlanta, in a part of town where retail storefronts have been multiplying without end. Many of the businesses are branches of larger corporations, or franchises. Some of them are independent stores. Every single one of the franchises and independent stores were opened by someone who had the courage to invest a significant portion of their savings into their dream, then work hard and sacrifice to help it to succeed.
Those are just the visible aspects of entrepreneurship. For every storefront business that opens up, there are just as many if not more businesses started by people in less visible locations. There are office parks without storefronts tucked away around every corner, and home based endeavors like services, multi-level marketing, and online businesses.
I started a business in just about the most unsound way possible. The errors I made were numerous. read more »
Money is tight these days, and only the most essential projects are getting funded. In the data networking realm that means all projects have to show tangible immediate benefits, and save money to boot.
In the Return On Investment discussion, these can often times be split out into hard dollar and soft dollar cost savings. Hard dollar costs are what the organization pays out in cash every month, quarter, and year. For example, PBX lease payments, voice trunk line charges, or call center staffing level, are all examples of hard dollar costs to which savings can be applied. read more »
Last year we learned a lesson about POE switches the hard way. Cisco had some nice new gigabit phones start shipping, and had been shipping gigabit POE switches to power them. One of our customers wanted gigabit ethernet to their desktop, so we specified the gig phones with the gig switches. Since all the switches were going to be in one closet, we recommended four 48 port POE switches, along with 120 POE phones. Everything was going great, until we started putting the phones out on the desktop. read more »
Even though it is very convenient to look up pricing for servers, switches, routers, firewalls and the like online, that is the worst way to purchase. I have been on the inside of IT sales for a long time, and can give you many reasons why you should by from a local Value Added Reseller, as they are known:
1. Best price. If you talk with a local reseller, and either pretend or actually let them help make a recommendation read more »
The Asterisk open source phone system has always been a favorite of mine. I used it to help me out of a SIP jam a few years back, and for many years I have wanted to be able to put together a good system for customers using Asterisk, but have not been able to create something sufficiently compelling.
Although I primarily work with Cisco Unified Communications, and think it is the best overall UC system in the market, I had become frustrated when trying to come up with designs for less than 100 phones that were competitive from a standpoint of features and price.
For example, there was one company just down the street read more »
I have talked with a number of public safety organizations over the last few years about how they extend network connectivity to patrol officers that make stops. The benefits are tremendous. By having the ability to run a car tag and a driver’s license through the Georgia Crime Information Center, the officer is able to immediately identify individuals with warrants out for their arrest, stolen cars, and any number of other issues.
The ability to run this information through the GCIC database is always available, by calling in the information over the radio, and having it looked up, but at that point it sometimes becomes more trouble than its worth. read more »
Two and a half years ago Cisco came out with Call Manager version 5. There were a few notable changes in this release. Besides running on linux, it was the first version that supported both SIP phones and SIP trunks. As fortune would have it, one of our customers at the time had more prescience than I, and had researched the cost savings capabilities of using a SIP trunk for PRI replacement. Since I have never shied away from deploying the latest Cisco voice technology, we agreed to put the system in place.
The cost savings of the SIP trunk is what funded a majority of the deployment. read more »
OK, I have all the basics in place. We use a great mail filter at work, and I hardly ever get spam or phishing email, and have never gotten a virus by email. Still, I was getting about 20-30 emails that I would delete without reading, every day. Finally last week I started to do something about it.
I could have taken the shortcut of putting blacklists on the mail filter, but I felt that was not yet necessary. Instead, I decided to see what could be accomplished by a concerted effort of unsubscribing from the drip marketing campaigns that were aimed at me. read more »
I was on the phone with a customer the other day discussing issues with the current installation we were doing for them. Even though all the web filtering system was set up properly for them, the customer had an expectataion that we would set it up in a different manner. The scope of work was unclear, and the lead deployment engineer said that we had had the discussion on how to set it up, with customer agreement, but apparently there was a communication gap at some point.
Because we value our customer relationships, we decided to do the additional work at no cost. read more »