What is this blog about?

I want two things. I want to dokument my findings about different issues. Probably mostly technical stuff related to my day to day business. The the other one is to share these findings with you.

My main work has been Avaya related stuff for a long time like voice (mostly IP Office) and networking (Wireless LAN, Switches, Identity Engines Portfolio) as well as different UC applications like CTI and fax.

I see two major challenges these days. First is to integrate the phone system with other applications and the other is monitoring and automation.

Don’t we all know the challenge that a customer calls us to tell us about an unexpected behavior? And do we have historical logs to take a look what happened? So my first will be to check for the opportunities to create a logging of IP Office that runs 24/7 without the need to have a user logged in on a server and that will be restarted if the server has been rebooted after Windows Updates installation.

My goal is to use standard tools and open source tools to work with. Do you want to buy a license for every customer’s server to install specific tools? Best will be to just have to extract a ZIP archive containing all the stuff we need and run a script to make the server ready to continuously trace. My favorite script language is Powershell because it is available on every server as long it is not too old.

Enough for now. Let’s start doing some work. I appreciate your feedback in any case. I would like to see your comments if you see that I have an error in my thoughts or if you think you have an idea I didn’t think about before. I will be happy as well if you just like my ideas.

Have fun, Florian