What You Don't Know About VoIP Can Hurt YouWhat You Don't Know About VoIP Can Hurt You

I want the attendees to know the risks, liabilities, costs, and staffing obstacles that they will encounter.

You may think you know VoIP/IPT/UC, but there is always something to learn and best practices to follow. At VoiceCon San Francisco, I will be presenting the very popular tutorial workshop "IP Telephony/UC Basics to Best Practices" on Monday afternoon from 2PM to 5PM in room 132. Not only will the VoIP/IPT/UC technologies be covered, I will recommend what other sessions and breakouts would be best to attend for the first time attendee as well as vendors in the exhibit hall that would worth considering. The goal of this workshop is to ensure that the VoiceCon attendee will get the most useful information from the conference.Every VoiceCon conference, this workshop is the best attended session. Previous versions of this workshop focused on VoIP/IPT. It is now expanded to cover Unified Communications. I am surprised that about 20% of the audience has been to VoiceCon before and are now attending the workshop, which demonstrates that there is always more to learn.

Planning for VoIP/IP Telephony and Unified Communications is both similar to and different from preparing for a new and expanded communications network. This workshop outlines the steps in the process that are often overlooked and that cause pain--and cost money--as you migrate into production network environments. This workshop will give you insight into what the VoIP/IPT/UC vendors do not provide and what responsibilities you as a customer will be accepting. For example, what needs to change in the LAN closet? Will security be a problem? How real are the vendor TCO and ROI calculations? You'll also gain insight into how reorganized, converged telecom and IT staffs can lead to a successful deployment of enterprise IP Telephony. In the end, what are the best practices for the VOIP/IPT and UC migration?

The Best Practices recommendations are broken into nine categories:

* Software Management * Converged Organizations * Upgrading the Closet * Upgrading the LAN * WAN Design * WAN Performance * Security * Troubleshooting Performance * Fault Troubleshooting

Here is an example of some of the WAN Performance best practices:

--Buy extra bandwidth --Install QoS/Diffserv --Continually monitor the VoIP performance in real time --Verify the SLA delivery over MPLS --Measure server, gateway and network utilizations in 15 minute increments

Besides the best practices recommendations, I cover a wide range of issues you will encounter when implementing VoIP/IP Telephony systems. Unified Communications (UC) will be defined as well as the various vendor definitions. Who would benefit from UC services and how UC should be implemented will be discussed.

Many attendees think I am trying to convince them to avoid VoIP and IP Telephony. This is not the case. I want the attendees to know the risks, liabilities, costs, and staffing obstacles that they will encounter.

You do not have a choice. Soon you will only be able to implement VoIP/IPT/UC systems. The vendors are slowly retiring their TDM product lines. You will however be able to keep your legacy analog and digital phones much longer. IP phones will enter enterprises at a much slower pace than most vendors would wish.I want the attendees to know the risks, liabilities, costs, and staffing obstacles that they will encounter.