[Blink] Support for rules on outgoing calls

Egidio Corsini egidio.corsini at gmail.com
Sat Jun 9 11:01:22 CEST 2012


Hi Adrian,

I appreciate your answer and I'm definitely not willing to discuss your
philosophy or cost/benefit based choices. I'll keep testing on Blink to see
whether it's philosophy leads me to a better user experience than the one I
was guessing, admittedly starting from my peculiar experience.

Thanks
Egidio

On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 10:51 AM, Adrian Georgescu <ag at ag-projects.com>wrote:

> Hi Egidio,
>
> Your comments are reasonable, so is worthwhile arguing with you from my
> perspective ;-)
>
> On Jun 9, 2012, at 7:48 AM, Egidio Corsini wrote:
>
> Dear Adrian,
>
> to answer your last point from a user perspective, I'd say you are right,
> in a perfect world. I agree that letting the server sort out general rules
> is the cleanest idea. Unfortunately the users don't always have access to
> server's configuration and in these cases an option to quickly sort out a
> blocking issue without changing the server configuration is very handy.
>
>
> I would not pass the responsibility for fixing all the addressing that is
> poorly designed into the network to the client. This can translate into
> infinite work generated by the mess of dealing with phone numbers. Better
> handle this into the corporate PBX, which has more knowledge about all
> these rules that may even change often. You cannot expect enterprise users
> to correctly manage their own translation rules, this is the job of the IT
> department.
>
> I believe I'm in a fairly typical situation for an enterprise:
>
>
> After hundreds of thousands of downloads and several years in service in
> many places including large corporations nobody came up with such requests
> for advanced number management. Imagine what user interface will sit on
> top. Complexity, ugliness, all the bad stuff that comes with managing phone
> numbers. Look at Skype and you will understand why Voip applications using
> SIP has less users.  Because of entrenched thinking that phone numbers form
> a central place of a real time communication application.
>
> Enterprises always have centralized VoIP server infrastructure where all
> these rules are provisioned and configured.
>
>
>    - VoIP infrastructure between several country
>    - VoIP phone
>    - Internal numbering
>    - External prefix
>    - External calls routed locally, International calls routed as local
>    where possible
>
> Into this environment a typical User
>
>
> This is subject to interpretation...
>
> will have a VoIP phone with an address book downloaded from the server.
>
>
> So that server is the one responsible, that is the source where things
> need to be normalized. The VoIP server and address directory are usually
> synced and configured by the same IT department.
>
> Hence internal calls are sorted through the local address book while for
> external calls the user will know what number to dial. On a desktop client
> you would expect a little more.
>
>
> I won't debate the usefulness of what you ask as it certainly adds value
> to those who need such features, like you.
>
> 20 IFs  and tons of arbitrary regular expressions belong to a server
> configuration file rather than a client with an intuitive GUI.
>
>
>    - Integration between the server distributed address book (I know this
>    can be a mess and to be honest I haven't seen any client doing it properly)
>
> And for understandable reasons, is close to impossible as you cannot
> always  guess in a client what the server already knows. Better solve this
> in the server.
>
>
>    - Seamless integration with your local address book (where by seamless
>    I definitely do not intend: change your address book in order to comply
>    with SIP rules...)
>
> As a user I would expect the highest level of integration possible between
> whatever contact list (server based, address book, LDAP, XML, Outlook,
> social networks, etc.) and the client used to place SIP calls. This in my
> humble opinion is core area for any client willing to replace a VoIP phone
> or willing to enable a mobile office.
>
>
> As a generic SIP client we aim to strike a good balance between features.
> VoIP is just one feature of Blink, not the only one. Most users just us it
> for VoIP but the software is good because we always aimed at a broader
> feature set and phone numbers.
>
> Probably this is different if I'm a user of an external SIP server where I
> have to deal exclusively with external numbers. In this case I would not
> see the necessity to rewrite number. But I've never been into this
> situation, so I can't really say what would be the experience.
>
> Thanks anyway for the interest shown in answering my question. To remain
> in the perfect world I would still suggest to build a use case scenario for
> an enterprise user and see whether you can really do everything server side
> or the need for some rules still exist.
>
>
> The current feature-set seem to meet most of the requirements that we
> received from our enterprise customers. In the end is a cost/benefit issue,
> and development for corner cases with no visible return is a waste of
> resources.
>
> Last but not least, phone numbers are a poor addressing model from the
> past and Blink started from a completely different philosophy.
>
> Adrian
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> Egidio
>
> On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Adrian Georgescu <ag at ag-projects.com>wrote:
>
>> This is a good idea, applying such routing and translation rules in your
>> PBX or Voip Server.
>>
>> Expecting a generic SIP client to sort out the mess of the many phone
>> number formats of external phone directories is not.
>>
>> Adrian
>>
>> On Jun 8, 2012, at 6:51 PM, A.M. wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > On Jun 8, 2012, at 12:35 PM, Egidio Corsini wrote:
>> >
>> >> Thanks for your answer.
>> >>
>> >> As an example of what I'm saying you myght want to have a look to the
>> Acrobits softphone client for iPhone where you have arbitrarily complex
>> number rewrite rules for a single account. This is very handy if you need
>> to use an account for intranet and external calls.
>> >> Having to modify the addressbook for this purpose would be a)
>> extremely time consuming b) would have significant impact (i.e. my
>> addressbook is in sync with my mobile and this change would impact the
>> ability to have standard phone numbers for Italy in the form of +39
>> xxxxxxxx)
>> >>
>> >> Is this feature in your roadmap or am I the first one to ask for such
>> an option?
>> >
>> > This is the sort of routing that is typically handled by a sip proxy.
>> Generally, your organization's sip proxy is responsible for routing, not
>> the individual phones. (It's the same with old POTS phones.)
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> > M
>> >
>> >
>> >
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