The difference between a close to perfect manual, marketing and ... well the stuff what you get on your computer-system when you start connecting VoIP / Skype boxes : Vosky Exchange.

Well, I just started actively setting up and testing the Vosky Excange 9040 box from www.Vosky.com. Of course it comes out of the box as a perfect solution. And that is the way it should be. It is Skype Certified too. After all, most problems will be solved by the support services afterwards. In this case you’ll be dealing with Skype support (if you are lucky), the Vosky Actiontec Hardware Support, and the hardware Vendors of the PBX you are trying to connect to the VoIP Skype Cloud via this box. You also might be talking to your ISP provider and why not to the router / adsl suppliers… Lot’s of parties to deal with. It’s always an obstacle course to get something working. Get ready to take some high jumps.

Unwrapping the boxes leave me with a good feeling. Nice accompanying letter, good manuals, last minute user manual addendum. All is properly wrapped. I even got a chart for the steps to follow during installation. It is neatly presented and all fits together. Judge for yourself.

It’s a quite small box too. Here I have put it next to my swiss army knife and skype WiFi netgear phone.

So that covers the unwrapping of the box. Let’s now see if it working. I am taking the approach here of the careful user (first read the manual, the connect all the pieces, follow procedure and steps). I assume that somebody with the skills a LAN-administrator must be able to set this up on his/her own.

I am installing the Vosky Exchange 9040 with 4 USB-port and 4 phone ports to a Panasonic Hybrid PBX (KX-TA308). It’s a type of PBX you would find in a small medium sized enterprise (let’s say 20 / 30 phones and a key-phone to program the PBX. The rest of the phones I am using are simple PSTN – phones. You press 9 to get a PSTN-dial-tone. You can call to internal extensions. That kind of setup. Simple and basic.

The purpose is to add a cheap VoIP / Skype dial-tone to this setup without having to touch the world of the user. Nobody will be running a Skype on the internal LAN except for a PC that serves as a “Skype Server”.  So that should lower the support problems. The are some roaming users that will be using laptops on the outside of the enterprise. They will calling in via their Skype.exe to the main company Skype ID. Let’s find out how that works in reality. The thing is this : you won’t find many vendors that will take on the battle to get Skype implemented on the workstation of their clients just like that, because they have to provide all the free support. It might also put a load on the LAN and honestly many IT-managers are not accustomed to have p2p applications run in their network. I have seen some firewall-systems go totally bezurk to when you put Skype in the network. But that is not the point. The point is that you can’t manage the Skype Clients as they are now. It’s not easy, not say impossible to make reports and that is where boxes like Vosky (running on 1 Windows XP station) come in as a handy solution. You don’t need to be busy with the end-users. They can still run their own little Skype clients and you have some way to manage the extra VoIP dial-tone. In most organizations (unless you are in computer-geek environments) just want basic and simple solutions. In this case we are talking about adding something on top of the PBX that provides a seamless experience to the users. There no need to change something on the hardware-level (phones) on the inside. User behaviour will slightly change, but there are not extended trainings and configurations needed of the clients. Simple things always work. Simple things cost less too. Don’t expect SME to pay easily for their support… Support is a “shitty” business. Just look at Skype, they don’t have a call-desk / help-desk number you can call… Try the Skype forum… Call Vosky. It is something we shall try later. Whatever happens, well Vosky / Actiontec did add a support-template on the cdrom for the Vosky Exchange 9040 : SupportTemplate.xls (59 KB)

Installation. First step.

I am installing this system on a PC / Windows XP Pro / P4 / 2.8 ghz / 1 gb ram / 80 gb HD. Fully Updated. Totally Clean. It only runs a Skype 2.6.0.101. I already got a problem which is that my Activation Email for the Vosky Box does lead to nothing coming back from Vosky. Hm. . Maybe they don’t work in the weekend.

Well I can always do this later. I do wonder what this activation code will give me extra.

Then something about the firmware update.

We continue the setup. Some apache web-server windows are started and I get proper instructions to do this and that. Just follow what is said. Okay clean enough.

But then disaster. Arffffggghkk. Two times in a row. Rebooting PC resulted in no difference. We are already Stuck. Who do I call ?

Anyways the crash was due to the incompatibilities with the public Skype beta 2.6.0.101.  So Installed the version that Vosky Puts on this CDROM and all is clear now. What is needed to do is actually change the password of the user-account in Vosky and match it to the windows accounts. (extra users accounts in windows setup with a specific password to launch secondary skype sessions on the same computer).

I could fix it after having changed the windows-accounts user01, user02, user03, user04 limited accounts to account with full administrator rights. Only then a 2nd, 3d and 4th session of Skype could be started.

Once the user01,02,03,04 account where given admin right then the different usb-channels could be activated and linked to the port of the Vosky 9040 device. In sequence.

So finally I got it working (I have four extra dialtones now on the PBX) and now I am going to check out the user interface and setup / link toward the PBX. We’ll get there. See next blog.