Author: Adam Fowler

Nokia Lumia 1520 Quick Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

As I’m doing a bigger review elsewhere, I’ll keep this one brief.

Nokia brought out the Lumia 1520 earlier this month, so I grabbed one. Details on the phone are at Nokia’s site here: http://www.nokia.com/au-en/phones/phone/lumia1520/

Here’s the basic specs taken from that site:

  • Display

    • Display size: 6 ”
    • Display technology: ClearBlack, IPS LCD
    • Display resolution: Full HD (1920 x 1080)
    • Touch screen technology: Super sensitive touch

  • Photography

    • Primary camera sensor size: 20 MP, PureView
    • Camera Flash Type: Dual-LED Flash

  • Power management

    • Maximum 2G talk time: 27.4 h
    • Maximum 3G talk time: 25.1 h
    • Maximum music playback time: 124 h

  • Processor

    • Processor name: Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 800
    • Processor type: Quad-core 2.2 GHz

I’ve been using the Nokia Lumia 1520 for a little while now, and it’s grown on me.

I’d been using the Nokia Lumia 1020 before this, and wrote about it here: http://www.adamfowlerit.com/2013/10/04/nokia-lumia-1020-whinge/

Yes I had a bad start, but after getting a faultless phone it was a good experience.

I’m happy to say that I’ve had no such issues with the 1520 – the first one I got just worked which was a huge relief.

I do have one concern though, and I don’t think the Windows Phone 8 OS is properly calibrated to the size and resolution of this large phone yet. I have had multiple issues of typing and double pressing letters – which I’ve had someone else using my phone also do. Also, when scrolling around sometimes it takes it as a press on an item rather than a swipe to scroll. Maybe it’s just the way we’re doing it which is wrong, or maybe it’s been designed around smaller screens and resolutions. Either way, we’ll see if I do get used to it or an update from Microsoft or Nokia fixes it.

It’s a very large phone and does take some getting used to, but two points I’ll raise:

1. My wife disliked the Nokia Lumia 1020 as she wasn’t used to the OS and found it confusing. After handing her the 1520 she liked it – same OS (OK, almost the same, slightly different versions – Lumia Amber and Lumia Black) but the screen size made her immediately like the phone. I was suprised.

2. I briefly tried to type a message on a Samsung Galaxy S3 I was setting up, and thought ‘wow the keyboard keys are small’. Shows how quickly you can get used to a new normal, and it does worry me that I’ll now be stuck on giant phones due to this :)

Oh, the battery life is awesome on this phone too but makes me run it all the way down, as I don’t plug it in every night!

Anyway I’m overall quite happy with the phone, and look out for my ‘proper’ review soon :)

Polycom VVX 600 vs CX 600 on Lync 2010

Posted on by Adam Fowler

A few months ago, Polycom released Lync firmware for their VVX series of phones. Check out the different models here

 vvx600Polycom VVX600

They differ to the CX series in several ways – the CXs here are specifically built for Lync while the VVX is a bit more generic and will work with other phone systems. This might sound bad, but it does give Polycom a bit more flexibility in the functions they can offer.

Taken from here is a comparison of the CX 600 and VVX 600 phones at the bottom of this post.

Before I go any further, it’s worth pointing out that Jeff Schertz is the pro at this stuff, and a lot of the information was sourced at his blog so you’ll see several links there.

This post will also assume you’re fairly familiar with the Polycom CX series (particularly the CX600) as most people with Lync have these, or at least know about them.

There are a few key benefits of looking at the VVX series:

Firstly, there’s no USB tethering requirement to the PC for advanced functionality. You do have to install a small piece of software called the BToE connector. I’d highly recommend installing this, as you’ll get a lot more functionality out of your phone the same way a CX would via USB Tether.

Another benefit is the webcam addon that plugs into the top of the phone. You can do video chats through just the phone, which a lot of people expected out of the CX series but wasn’t possible. This gets closer to matching some of the extra functionality out of Cisco’s phone range.

The phone has a built in basic web browser, as well as the ability to remotely manage the device via a browser too. The CX series has neither of these so from a managability and usability view, the VVX is very tempting.

Oh and of course, the VVX has touch screen! It’s quite responsive, so no complaints about that.

The negatives or considerations of the VVX series that I’ve noticed so far are:

No dedicated light for presence. I’ve gotten used to this on the CX series, a nice glowing green/yellow/red indicator to remind you of your own presence. There is a small indicator on the screen showing your current presence, but it’s not very obvious.

You’ll also need to set up Lync to have the firmware for your phones to be ready to use. Jeff Schertz has great instructions here on how to do this – yes it’s a fairly detailed article but worth going through all of it.

You can’t just type in names to do a lookup like the CX series which I miss. It’s possible to do via the directory with a few extra presses, so the flow of doing name lookups is no-where near as smooth.

The actual layout of the menu buttons isn’t as nice as I’d like, but then neither is the CX. I don’t think you could place a VVX phone in front of someone who’s used to a CX phone and expect them to just ‘get it’.

Tips:
Read everything on Jeff Schertz’s Blog http://blog.schertz.name/category/lync/.
The default admin password for these phones is ‘456’.
The management page for your phone is just http://IPOfPhone
Hold 1,4,9 for a factory reset.
Hold 1,8,3 for a restart, or 1,0,3 for a full reboot.
Userguide available from Polycom here

I’ve only started with basic testing and there are a lot of things to learn about the VVX series as there’s not too much in common with CX, but it is worth investigating with the large amount of benefits that come with it.

 

Comparison:

 

Polycom VVX600

  

Polycom CX600
Manufacturer: Polycom VVX600 Polycom CX600
Price Range: $250 – $350 $250 – $350
Supports Version: Lync 2010, Lync 2013 Lync 2010, Lync 2013, Lync Online
Qualify Date: March 2013 February 2013
Firmware Version Tested: Lync 2013 – Polycom firmware version 4.1.2.25646 Lync Phone Edition 2013
Recommended Use: Full featured desk phone Full featured desk phone
Audio Quality: Wideband Wideband
Speakerphone: Yes Yes
Headset Support: RJ-9 port wired/wireless, USB port and EHS RJ9 port
Display: 4.3-inch Color LCD 3.5 inch QVGA Color LCD
Power: PoE (AC sold separately) PoE (AC sold separately)
Ethernet Ports: 2 port 10/100/1000 2-port 10/100/1000
Wall Mountable: Yes Yes
UC Presence Indicator: No Yes
Message Waiting Indicator: Yes Yes
View Contacts and Corporate Directory Users Presence: Yes Yes
Easy Configuration with PIN Authentication: No Yes
CODEC Supported: G.711 (A-law and u-law), G.729AB, G.722, G.722.1, G.722.1C, iLBC RT Audio, G.711, G.722.1
LLDP: Yes Yes
Browser: Yes
Add Multiple People to an Existing Call: No Yes
Boss / Admin: No No
Branch Resiliency: Yes Yes
Call Park: No Yes
E911 Support: Yes Yes
Invite Address Book Contacts to Call: Yes Yes
Malicious Call Trace: No Yes
Merge Existing Calls: Yes Yes
Music on Hold: No No
Private Incoming Line: Yes Yes
Search Global Address List: Yes No
Search Lync Contacts: No No
Uninterrupted Call Transfer to Mobile Phone: Yes Yes
Assign Contact Presence to Button: Yes
Integrated Video, Sharing Applications, Whiteboard, etc.: No No
One click to join conference call: No No
Search Outlook Contacts: No
View Outlook Calendar: Yes
Lync Server Managed Updates: Yes Yes
Lync Server Integrated Manageability: Yes Yes
Single Identity (Active Directory): Yes Yes

Forwarding a Response Group Externally in Lync 2010

Posted on by Adam Fowler

In Lync 2010, there are Response Groups. Read about them on Technet here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398513.aspx – in summary they are a way of getting a call to a group of users, with the option of an nteractive voice response (IVR). There’s a whole lot of options around it, but sometimes a scenario comes up where you want to force all the Response Group calls to another number that’s not a part of your Lync system (such as a mobile phone).

Assuming you have a working Response Group already (if not, here’s a guide http://blogs.technet.com/b/ilvancri/archive/2010/11/23/creating-a-response-group-in-lync.aspx), you’ll need to go into the Queue tab for Response Groups, choose your Queue and tick the box for ‘Enable queue overflow’.

Next, change the ‘Maximum number of calls’ to 0 which means every call is an overflow call, and set the ‘Call action’ to ‘Forward to telephone number’. In the SIP address field, you can now enter the external phone number to transfer calls to.

This external number should be in the format ‘sip:[email protected]’ so for an Australian mobile it’s +61 for Australia, then 4xx xxx xxx.

This seems simple so far, but when you test it you may find a problem where your call doesn’t get diverted. If you’re using a Lync phone, you may see a message around not having permission to make the call, or you may just get disconnected.

This is because by default, a Response Group doesn’t make calls so there’s no Voice Policy assigned to it. Voice Policies allow different features such as call forwarding and call transfers – all your normal Lync users will have one. Read more about it here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg412891.aspx

So, you’ll need to set a Voice Policy to your Response Group. If you’re not sure what Voice Policies you have, run the PowerShell command Get-CsVoicePolicy to list all of them, or Get-CsVoicePolicy username to see a particular user’s Voice Policy.

Once you’ve worked out the policy, Grant-csVoicepolicy -identity ResponseGroupName -PolicyName VoicePolicyName will apply the Voice Policy and will let the Response Group transfer calls out.

 

Xbox One First Experience

Posted on by Adam Fowler

On Friday, I happily collected my Xbox One and a few extra games and accessories:

Xbox One pre-order with Fifa 14 digital download
2nd Controller/Forza 5/Xbox Live 12 months pack
Xbox One Play and Charge Kit
Game – Ryse: Son of Rome
Game – Call of Duty: Ghosts

Lots of cool stuff to play with. By the way, this is all rather heavy. The Xbox One box could probably be used to stop a car rolling down a hill, and embarrasingly I somehow strained a leg muscle carrying it across town. My leg is still sore, and this goes to show how dangerous it is going outside. Some quick googling revealed that it’s 11.38 pounds shipping weight = 5.1kg!

In my eagerness waiting for launch day, I had pre-emptively downloaded the day one firmware update for the Xbox One from http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/system/emergency-offline-update due to it weighing in a 1.2gb, and wondering how bad the giant Microsoft Azure farms would handle this. That plan failed as the link was then taken down, and it apparently didn’t work anyway. The patch ended up being 500mb.

Anyway, unboxing and setting up was quite easy. Power and power pack, HDMI cable, Kinect 2.0 cable and Network cable all went into the back, and I went to turn it on. I instinctively pressed the Xbox One logo on the front of the console, which lit up for a second and then faded. 30 seconds later I was checking the manual to see if I’d missed something in the first power on – which I hadn’t, which led me to discover that the power cable had fallen out of the power pack. Plugging that back in made the touch sensitive logo work by some sort of mystical ability.

The console then asked for several bits of information, and then updated itself. At this stage I decided to go to bed and come back in the morning to start playing games. How wrong I was.

The next morning, I started queueing up all the free stuff like most people do. Xbox Video, Xbox Fitness, Recorder, Kinect Sports, Killer Instinct. Then I thought it’d be a good time to play Ryse, but after putting the disk in and seeing it had a required update, I decided to just load up all the games I had and leave the thing going for a few hours. That few hours turned into about 12 hours.

In my desperation, I even tried plugging in a 4G Telstra dongle into my ADSL router in the hopes of some better speeds. It was actually worse, and speedtest.net revealed about a 2mbit connection, while my ADSL syncs at 2.5mbit. It was at this stage yet again I cursed the new government for crushing any hopes I had of NBN, and the previous government for taking too long.

The setup journey was finally completed, and I had a quick 2 player game of COD: Ghosts. Seemed fun enough, graphics weren’t overly exciting. The next morning I tried Ryse, and that was a lot more impressive. A quite fun game where you’re chopping people up, verbally telling armies to open fire and so on.

Coming back to what the Xbox One can actually do, there were several nifty things I noticed. Being able to snap an application like a game recorder, and switch between the snapped on app back to the game was a nice touch. Also just recording a game native to the console, then being able to share with friends or upload to Skydrive was stupidly easy. Here’s a clip I uploaded:

The Kinect itself I haven’t really used yet, apart from it auto identifying me and logging into my Live account instantly which is pretty cool. Voice commands seem to work quite well too – shutting off the Xbox just by saying “Xbox turn off” is nice. A full list of the voice commands is available here: http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/kinect/voice-commands

The updated controllers aren’t too different to the old ones, and they’re fairly comfy to use.

WP_20131123_09_02_54_ProI managed to bring up this error just by trying to play with my avatar. Not just wrong, but terribly wrong.

I could go on and on about it, but overall it seems like a decent machine. It seems like they’ve set a lot up to be future proof and a lot more functionality will come which is good.

If you’ve come here to find out if this is better or worse than a Playstation 4 – well I haven’t used one yet, and previously liked my PS3 better than the Xbox 360. I went Xbox One because PS4s are sold out, and I didn’t plan that far ahead :) I think both consoles will be good so you shouldn’t be disappointed whichever way you go – but do you want a sole gaming machine which will do that role a bit better (PS4) or something that does a lot of things like Kinect, TV passthrough etc (Xbox One)?

Full Mailbox Access to All Mailboxes in Exchange 2010

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I’ll start this out by saying ‘Full Mailbox Access to All Mailboxes’ is generally a bad idea. It should be done on demand with the appropriate approvals and paper trails, but there are times when this may be needed – for example a service account for 3rd party software that has to read or add things to everyone’s mailbox in the company.

In my last post “End User Management of Distribution Groups in Exchange 2010” I explained how the new Role Based Access Control (RBAC) worked. Although this can be used to configure many things, it won’t give you full access to a mailbox as it’s an Active Directory based permission.

You can manually do this on a per mailbox level by either using the Exchange Management Console, or the Exchange Management Shell by following the Microsoft Technet documentation here and it’s fairly easy to convert this to all mailboxes in powershell, but that won’t help you with newly created mailboxes after running the command.

Yes you could run a daily task to get around that, but an alternative is giving AD access at the database level. Any existing or newly created mailbox will get permissions this way.

So, with that all in mind, the Exchange Powershell command to run on a particular database is:

Get-MailboxDatabase -identity “[mailbox database name]” | Add-ADPermission -user [username] -AccessRights GenericAll

If you don’t know what your databases are, just run ‘Get-MailboxDatabase’ or if you want to just apply the permissions to all databases:

Get-MailboxDatabase | Add-ADPermission -user [username] -AccessRights GenericAll

You can apply this to a AD group rather than a user which I’d suggest (no changes to the command required apart from typing the group name rather than user name), because it’s then easier to manage the members of the AD group than re-run this command. Also if you apply the settings to a particular user, and that user launches Outlook, all mailboxes they have full access to will auto-load into their Outlook session. Not ideal if you’ve got hundreds!

If you’d like to know more about the Add-AdPermission command, and the possible AccessRights settings check out this Technet article.