My family’s company back home has been running a ColdFusion-powered site that I wrote for them yyeeeeaaarrrsss ago. My sister, who is now running the marketing department, wants to do an overhaul of the site, because it has been yyeeeeaaarrrsss since the first version.

Obviously, I’m not available to help them out full time – y’know, being four states away with a wife and two kids and all – and she’s found it impossible to find anyone with ColdFusion skills back in Pittsburgh. She’s made the decision to use PHP as the technology for the new site.

Kinda speaks for itself there.

Weird that I’ve been a small time evangelist for ColdFusion all these years and recently all I’ve been hearing about is how people are deciding to not use it any more.

What’s going on?

One of the critical elements in this was the fact that ColdFusion developers, specifically highly talented ones that can architect enterprise level applications, simply did not exist in the marketplace. There are too few of them, and they are all currently employed, and the cost of developing someone of this caliber was simply too high and would take too long.

I’ve read far too many times in the past 12 years about how Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe does not make the appropriate efforts to get the ColdFusion development platform into the hands of kids early, when they are learning development, so that when these kids coming out of college enter the workforce they know Microsoft or Java technologies, or both, and then may possibly, occasionally, touch upon a couple of features of the ColdFusion platform years later.

The result is more and more business decision makers not even considering it as an option. Technology aside here people, look at it from a business perspective. Ok, fine, ColdFusion is a great platform. It has lots of features and is easy to learn.

So what?

I need to hire 9 people right now who have vast, deep experience in building mission critical applications that perform at the highest level, scale with the organization and the user base, and are extensible so that we can keep making it better.

Having gone through this process many times myself… I’m sorry but ColdFusion doesn’t cut it. I love the platform, I love the people, and the community, but if I got funding to build a major application or system, and needed a large, experienced development team, I would not choose ColdFusion.

Now, once the system got off the ground and the underlying architecture was solid and we needed to start expanding the system, making sub-projects from it, then sure I’d consider hiring a few ColdFusion developers because you can build applications very quickly with and perform some integrations more easily.

Bottom line is that, while I’m sad to see another promising ColdFusion shop being slowly dismantled over the next two years, I can’t say I disagree with the decision.

It sucks.

Two weeks ago, I was up to 58 hours and last week I was over 70. This week, I’m on track to hit that mark again. I’m telling you, it’s nowhere near as easy at forty as it was at thirty. Every night I go to bed utterly exhausted. When I get home at night and spend time with my daughters, I find doing simple things to be tiring and my patience level has significantly decreased.

My dreams, almost always very strange, become absolutely psychedelic when I’m this tired and for about eights nights in a row now, I’ve woken up ready to start writing a book. Perhaps this is how Stephen King comes up with all his weird ideas.

I see some light at the end of the tunnel, and by the time the holidays hit, I’ll be ready for some serious R&R. I’ll just tell my wife to hide the eggnog from me this year.

In short, it highlights how neutral technology is. It can be used for malicious purposes, but at the same time can be used to protect.

As a self-described technologist, I recall many fond times of staying up until 3 a.m. learning the latest programming languages, design patterns, and software projects. My ability to learn and absorb technical issues and apply them to business problems has always been a source of pride for me.

Lately, though, I’ve been finding that my thoughts about technology are starting to wander into previously unknown territory. It all started one day when I realized that in the technology-driven culture of youth today, that it is inevitable that the day will come when my daughter will know more about some technologies than I will. Whether it be through conscious study or the latest tech fad of which Dad is totally clueless, she’ll have a store of knowledge that surpasses mine and I have to be prepared for that.

Many people I have talked to over the years see “Technology” as something inherently evil because their exposure to it is limited and they only see media coverage that shows how it can be misused. I can’t blame them. You’ll never see a story on ABC news about how involved parents were able to protect their children. It’s not newsworthy.

Most of us have watched shows, or at least heard of, how Internet predators have ingenious ways of getting to young kids. Today, the tools are fairly rudimentary: IM clients, MySpace pages, web cams, and text messages. Monitoring these activities might be daunting for some parents, but is laughably simple for someone with my technical savvy.

However I can’t stop thinking about what will be available in 12 years when my daughters are becoming young women, start making forays into broader social circles, and explore new things. I find myself sitting on the couch while my daughter dances to a catchy Bunny Town song thinking of inventive ways that I can ensure her safety without becoming an overbearing parent that unduly invades her privacy.

Thankfully, others in technical fields share my concerns and find interesting and effective ways to help combat threats to children (see how Google is helping).

There are a lot of angry, misguided, immature, and simply disturbed people in the world with easy access to a computer. By keeping my finger on the pulse of technology, I will ensure that I can always find ways to battle those who wish to abuse it to the harm of my children.

I’m also a wired kinda guy. I know the Xbox and Tivo will both work wirelessly, but if I can plug directly into the network, I always feel better. The problem is, since I’m renting, my ability to effectively get a wire from upstairs to downstairs is significantly hampered. No drilling, no modifying the existing wiring the house, etc.

To my delight, as I was wandering around Best Buy last week (had to replace my monitor cable since the dog had chewed through it), I stumbled across a box from Netgear – Powerline Ethernet Adapters. I wish I had known about these back when I lived in Pittsburgh. I had wires running all over the house and in the walls. These would have saved me a lot of weekend hours and sweat.

In this article, I’m going to cover the meat of what had to be done to get it up and running. The process itself was not hard, however, there were several kinks that had to be ironed out before it was running smoothly.

Hardware

We, being the happy-go-lucky geeks that we are, decided to buy our own PBX hardware, with embedded Asterisk software. We found the Ipeya SIPS listed on eBay where they sell their IP PBX as a package with 5, 10, or 20 phones included. The price couldn’t be beat when we compared with buying the phone and PBX seperate from another vendor.

Software

Unfortunately, the software on the Ipeya is fairly weak and unintuitive. It’s perfectly suited for personal or home office usage, but trying to squeeze the functionality we need for a small business is a lesson in patience. It’s a custom UI built on top of the Astersk system for VoIP, and provides an adequate interface to the major sections you need to get yourself up and running.

One of the big problems right now is that out-of-the-box solutions are few and far between and none I have seen to date are mature enough to be a sleek, sophisticated solution for an Asterisk UI. VoIP is a new technology and the software support has a long way to go to catch up.

Before buying your software, be sure to insist on a thorough test drive with the vendor to see how easy it is to navigate and make changes to your system.

I’ll start with some basic terms that I had to learn and understand before I felt capable to actually picking a VoIP provider and hardware/software. Each term below is linked to the Wikipedia definition (if it exists, otherwise a link to related website) for the technology. Please do further reading on your own if needed.

VoIP – Voice Over IP
PBX – Private Branch Exchange
SIP – Session Initiation Protocol
IAX2 – Inter-Asterisk eXchange protocol
Asterisk – Software PBX solution
POTS – Plain old telephpone service
RJ45 – Eight pin telephone cable
DID – Direct inward dialing number

Picking a VoIP Provider

This is the first step in the process and the most important. I met with five (5) different vendors and ended up learning different things from each person/group who came in to meet with me. Since this is a new technology, it’s important to meet with as many local providers that you can locate because some of them will try to blow smoke up your ass, others will be new players in the market and have limited knowledge, while others might be experienced pros with multiple clients successfully running VoIP solutions.

Out of the five vendors I talked with, only one spoke with knowledge and confidence during our meeting and ended up providing us with the best quote. When speaking with vendors you want to make sure that they completely understand your needs. Here’s some basic things to consider when starting down the VoIP path.

1. Do you have qualified local providers? In essence, they’re re-sellers of national providers, but you’ll get better customer service.
2. How many phone numbers will you need?
3. Do you want to have POTS lines as backup (in case of power failure, or for fax machines)? How many?
4. Do you want to buy and configure your own PBX hardware or have the VoIP provider manage that service?
5. Do you need unlimited long distance on all of your lines, or just specific ones (e.g. customer support)?
6. How many call paths will the provider give you on each DID line?
7. Do any local providers support the IAX2 protocol or just the SIP protocol?

Talk to your provider in depth about what your company needs and then ask them to provide you with a detailed plan about how they would set up the system. This is the best way to weed out the hacks from the pros.

To Own Or Not To Own?

Are you going to buy and maintain your own PBX? This is a very important question you need to consider before going to any vendor, and there are many issues to consider before arriving at an answer?

1. Does your company have a secure network?
2. Is anyone at your company capable of learning the Asterisk software?
3. If needed, can your run new ethernet cabling required for the phones?
4. Is someone at your company an expert at network administration?
5. How much Internet bandwidth do you get in your office location? Plan on using a solid 768k upstream to handle the voice packets.

If you didn’t blink at any of these questions, then you most likely will be able to handle running your own PBX. If some of those questions looked like Greek, you might consider letting your VoIP provider handle the administration of your PBX.

Even if you don’t host your own PBX, many VoIP providers now provide an easy-to-use Web interface to your PBX so you can customize features such as call-forwarding, call waiting, hold music, auto attendant messages, conferce calls, voice mail, etc.

Cost of Service

How much cost savings do you get from VoIP instead of POTS? The savings can undoubtedly be substantial, and can pay for the installation and maintenance of the hardware within a few months and at most a couple of years. From all of the vendors I talked to, here’s an average of the costs involved in VoIP.

1. Unlimited VoIP lines: $53/month/line
2. Metered VoIP lines: $11.50/month/line
3. Metered usage rate: $0.029/minute
4. POTS lines: $21.50/month/line

Now, let’s compare those costs to what a traditional PBX cost structure might be. I’m even going to be very liberal in the monthly costs.

1. Unlimited POTS lines: $90/month/line
2. Metered POTS lines: $21.50/month/line
3. Metered usage rate: $0.17/minute

Just in line maintenance costs, you can save up to $37/month/line, which is huge. In addition, you can save up to 15 cents per minute on usage. Just take a wild guess at your monthly phone usage for your company and make a quick calculation on your savings. I think you’ll be impressed. It’s well known how much money a VoIP solution can save a company, but the one lingering doubt that many companies harbor is Quality of Service. I’ll touch on that in a later part, but I’ll just hint that QoS may depend more on you than the VoIP provider, and can easily be improved if there are issues.

Summary: Part I

So far I’ve covered the basic issues involved with VoIP solutions, and none of them are simple. If there is a short list of things I want you to remember from this article, they are:

1. This is a new technology, so be prepared for growing pains
2. Many providers are still learning themselves, so look for the ones who know the most
3. A good level of technical knowledge will be very helpful when making decisions

Lastly, don’t be afraid to ask as many questions as you need before feeling comfortable with a VoIP provider. If you feel that they can’t answer your questions, or are leading you down a path that you don’t want to go, walk away and move on to someone who will help you install the system that is right for you.. not for them.

Part II