Computerworld would like nothing better than to cancel my home office phone and route me through its Siemens HiPath PBX in corporate by way of a voice over IP link. I am one of a few early adopters of VOIP in a pilot here, so in-house expertise is at a minimum. To use VOIP I need to keep my VPN connection up all day long (a challenge in itself) and load a rather clunky application called OptiClient. After some false starts the client is finally stable enough to use from my home office (although as I write this from Computerworld's offices I notice that it has frozen up). But I'm still having problems. Whether these are true glitches or "features" of VOIP isn't yet clear. I'm hoping readers can help.
I agree with Robert that his experience in Corporate VoIP was not good so here are some rules that I have learnt with the 20 odd people we have remotely supported.
Rule 1: As a generalization, Soft Phones suck. They have the potential to make the experience really bad. Use good quality SIP phones like the Aastra 57i in the home that has plenty of features. People love familiarity of phones
Rule 2: Use home routers as VPN clients, not the computer. This is one less thing for people to worry about. Does this create another issue with security. Yep it does but access control lists can fix that. Does it make more work for the IT folks, yep, does it make the user happier, yep too.
Generally Speaking there are ways to use VoIP independently from the Corporate VPN using SIP endpoints. This however is a complicated setup for the security guys and is generally avoided and put in the too hard bucket but results in a cleaner experience for the user. The golden rule for network security is appropriate level of security for appropriate level of value being secured.
by Greg Royal
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