This evening I got on my only Windows PC and installed it.   I have to say that I am very impressed with it.  Google stated a goal was to write a new browser built more for web applications and I think they accomplished that.  The speed is the biggest thing that anyone will notice.  I am amazed how fast web applications run and it works especially well with Gmail and Google Reader.

Google’s move into this market is to develop a better platform for Google to create web applications.  I believe that Google’s move is very similar to IBM releasing Eclipse as an open source platform for thick applications.  IBM then started porting many of their applications to Eclipse like Lotus Notes and some development tools.  I think this will help give Google a needed performance boost in their heavy web applications like Google Docs.

For those of you with Windows PCs around, I recommend you try it.  I am not sure that I am going to switch at this point but it seems like a very promising platform.  I haven’t seen any scheduled release dates for a Linux and Mac release but I hope it’s coming soon.

I was very impressed with Podcamp Ohio.  It was well organized and provided a lot of good content.  I heard they had 132 attendees at the beginning of the day but never heard an updated number.  I would guess they at least broke 150 which seems pretty good for a new conference.  I don’t think it’s been decided but if they do it again, I will definitely attend next year.

Version 2.x is now a premium product but version 1.4 is still free.  The 1.4 UI looks old but it still does a great job.  The download is small and the exe doesn’t require installation.  I highly recommend using this tool if anyone needs to find where all your disk space went on a Windows machine.

On the Linux side there are 2 tools that do similar things.  Gnome has included a tool called Disk Usage Analyzer and KDE has the tool built into Konqueror.

I have read about two ways to switch over your data.  Mythtv released version .20.2 yesterday that has native support for Schedules Direct or you can tweak the XMLTV grabber with a new url.  I would normally recommend waiting for the distributions to include packages of the new Mythtv version but we are under a tight schedule and I don’t know how fast they will have updated packages.  I will probably go with the second option for now.

The mail is basically a full Gmail account just with your own domain on it. You still get the 2 gigs of storage per mailbox and a great spam filter. (Did I mention they bought Postini.) You also get the ability to link up each mailbox with other email addresses from other domains. Plus, you can configure it to pull in mail from up to 5 other accounts via POP. All of these features are standard for a gmail account, it is just nice to setup your own domain with all those features but without the headaches of management. The only thing I noticed different from a standard Gmail account is that it automatically adds all users on that domain into your contacts.

I really had not spent any time with Docs and Spreadsheets until I played with Google Apps. It is really pretty nice for standard word processing and small basic spreadsheets. Both apps seems a little slow compared to a it’s desktop application equivalent but still very usable. They built many ways to import your docs into the system and many export options. I noticed in the Docs and Spreadsheets section there are different access level settings for people inside your domain and outside your domain. I believe all the rest of the main sections are the same as with normal Google accounts just with some extra integration added in for your domain.

I have not spent any considerable amount on time with the calendar, chat, launch page or site builder. The only thing that I really feel is missing is a spot for some non-public content. I would call it something like an Intranet. A place for all employees to post information about their business without making it public to the world. It is possible that Google already provides this service but I couldn’t find it.

Now all these features do come at a price. The price is ads and your privacy. Google has a stated policy that they keep all pieces of information about you so they can improve their services. I know they stated they run all search data through an anonymizer after 18 months to 2 years. So they are collecting lots of information about you, especially as you use them for more and more services. It really comes down to the fact that the more they know about you, the better ads they can serve.

They also have an enterprise version which gives you some extra features. You get 10 gigs of storage and resources reservation for calendaring. It costs $50 per user per year. I believe if small businesses are looking for an easy solution, this should really consider one of the Google Apps offerings as an option.

-= Info about application ‘VoiceMail’ =-

[Synopsis]
Leave a Voicemail message

[Description]
VoiceMail(mailbox[@context][&mailbox[@context]][...][|options]): This
application allows the calling party to leave a message for the specified
list of mailboxes. When multiple mailboxes are specified, the greeting will
be taken from the first mailbox specified. Dialplan execution will stop if the
specified mailbox does not exist.
The Voicemail application will exit if any of the following DTMF digits are
received:1*CLI>
0 – Jump to the ‘o’ extension in the current dialplan context.
* – Jump to the ‘a’ extension in the current dialplan context.
This application will set the following channel variable upon completion:
VMSTATUS – This indicates the status of the execution of the VoiceMail
application. The possible values are:
SUCCESS | USEREXIT | FAILED

Options:
b – Play the ‘busy’ greeting to the calling party.
g(#) – Use the specified amount of gain when recording the voicemail
message. The units are whole-number decibels (dB).
s – Skip the playback of instructions for leaving a message to the
calling party.
u – Play the ‘unavailable’ greeting.
j – Jump to priority n+101 if the mailbox is not found or some other
error occurs.

The interesting part is “* – Jump to the ‘a’ extension in the current dialplan context.” This means if a line is added in the same context as the the voicemail(…) line, it will jump to the “a” extension if the user pushes the “*” button during the greeting playback.

Here is an example. If extension 100 that rings and then rolls to voicemail, the code might look like the following.
exten => 100,1,Dial(SIP/100,15)
exten => 100,n,Voicemail(100@default)

By adding a third line of code, the user can push “*” and jump to the VoicemailMain application.
exten => 100,1,Dial(SIP/100,15)
exten => 100,n,Voicemail(100@default)
exten => a,1,VoicemailMain(100@default)

After lots of work testing many different configurations, I finally found a way to get the Message Waiting Indicator working. I am using Avaya 4610sw phones with the latest SIP firmware from Avaya which is the March 07 release. The version of Asterisk is the current Trunk version.

There was some major work done on the Message Waiting Indicator code and SIP subscriptions in the Trunk and I believe that is what fixed it. All the new code should go into the future 1.6 release. I have heard it rumored that we should expect 1.6 around the end of 07.

The whole system works with voice recognition. The first thing it asks you is what city and state you are looking for information about. Next, it asks you for the name of the business. It will then list the top 8 results. It will iterate through them stating the business name and address. You can choose the business you want by saying “number 1″ or “number 2.” From there you can just wait and it will connect you or you can say details and it will give you even more information about that result. At any time you can say “go back” or “start over.”

The only issue I have had with the service was when I didn’t know which city or suburb the business was in.  I think this is a great service and I look forward to using it more.

I place the script in the h extension of the stdexten marco. The h extension triggers once a call is hung up from that context. The first and only priority for the h extension is a System() call. It calls this shell script and passes many parameters to it. The first parameter is the email address to send the email to. To make this work for the marco, I adjust the macro to have a third parameter which is email address. I would like to pull the email address from that extensions vm but that function does not exist and I could not figure out how to add that function in the C source code. If anyone knows a better way, please let me know. The script requires you have the mailx package installed.

• Download the script
• Rename the file processCallEmail.sh.
mv processCallEmail.txt processCallEmail.sh
• Put it in the /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin directory.
mv processCallEmail.sh /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/"
• Make sure the asterisk user has execute permissions on the script.
chmod 755 /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/processCallEmail.sh
• Add one line of documentation to macro-stdexten context on the line after ${ARG2}. ; ${ARG3} - email address to send emails about missed calls to
• Add the h extension line to the macro-stdexten context. exten => h,1,System(processCallEmail.sh "${ARG3}" "${CALLERID(num)}" "${CALLERID(name) }" "${DIALSTATUS}" "${VMSTATUS}")
• Alter the line that calls the macro to include an email address. exten => 500,1,Macro(stdexten,500,SIP/${EXTEN},abc@test.com)

Here is an example of an updated stdexten macro.
[macro-stdexten];
;
; Standard extension macro:
; ${ARG1} - Extension (we could have used ${MACRO_EXTEN} here as well
; ${ARG2} - Device(s) to ring
; ${ARG3} - email address to send emails about missed calls to
;
exten => s,1,AGI(ldaplookupphone2.agi)
exten => s,n,Dial(${ARG2},20) ; Ring the interface, 20 seconds maximum
exten => s,n,Goto(s-${DIALSTATUS},1) ; Jump based on status NOANSWER,BUSY,CHANUNAVAIL,CONGESTION,ANSWER)

exten => s-NOANSWER,1,Voicemail(${ARG1},u) ; If unavailable, send to voicemail w/ unavail announce
exten => s-NOANSWER,2,Goto(default,s,1) ; If they press #, return to start
exten => s-BUSY,1,Voicemail(${ARG1},b) ; If busy, send to voicemail w/ busy announce
exten => s-BUSY,2,Goto(default,s,1) ; If they press #, return to start
exten => _s-.,1,Goto(s-NOANSWER,1) ; Treat anything else as no answer
exten => a,1,VoicemailMain(${ARG1}) ; If they press *, send the user into VoicemailMain
exten => h,1,System(processCallEmail.sh "${ARG3}" "${CALLERID(num)}" "${CALLERID(name) }" "${DIALSTATUS}" "${VMSTATUS}")

To help me get started I grabbed an example from the wiki and used an example from it. Here is the example from the wiki modified for Asterisk 1.4. I updated the wiki with the relevant 1.4 information.

[outbound]
exten => s,1,NoCDR
exten => s,n,AMD
exten => s,n,GotoIf($[${AMDSTATUS}=HUMAN]?humn:mach)
exten => s,n(mach),WaitForSilence(2500)
exten => s,n,Playback(message-when-machine)
exten => s,n,Hangup
exten => s,n(humn),WaitForSilence(500)
exten => s,n,Playback(message-when-human)
exten => s,n,Hangup

The process recommended is to write an agent that will attempt to copy each document in the database to a new database. The technote has sample code that you could easily copy and paste with only a couple of tweaks to the filenames. I have never had a database that needed this but being prepared could come in handy in an emergency.