The public test site for Pronto, which offers you the ability sign up and create a test account has a new feature available today for alpha testing. Accounts created on this site may now be accessed with the AirSync protocol. If you are interested in testing this feature and have an ActiveSync capable mobile device, you can test the CommuniGate Pro platform's wireless synchronization capabilities with the following steps:

1. 
   
2. Create an account via the "Sign Up" link of http://talktoip.com if you do not already have one.
   
3. Generate some data worth syncing. You may create messages, calendar items, contacts, and tasks.
   
4. Connect your wireless ActiveSync capable mobile phone or PDA to the talktoip.com server.
   

If you do find problems with this it is worth investigating general troubleshooting steps for the protocol. One good example is this online guide written by Chris De Herrera called "ActiveSync 4.x Troubleshooting Guide - Firewall, VPN, Proxy Issues". If you do find any issues with this feature and may send me a report, please include information about your device, software versions, and a description of how you configured your device. Comments, feedback, and bug reports may be sent directly to me or posted via the comments feature for this article.

It appears these Flash players were posted by Adobe earlier this month. I don't know of anyone who has tested these yet with Pronto!, comments are welcome if you have.

Adobe Flash Player Download Center Solaris SPARC

Adobe Flash Player Download Center Solaris x86

In an article titled "Web 2.0 needs Adobe to 'do the driving'", Tom Yager writes about Flash as a useful medium for advanced applications delivered via Internet Protocols. Pronto receives some attention as a good example of how a very complex application can be delivered efficiently to many internet connected end users for daily use.

I like the convenience of running Pronto! in a browser, however I was pleasantly surprised by how well it runs in the Adobe Flash Player 9 Standalone Players (Projectors). I found a copy of the standalone player on Adobe's Flash Downloads web page. I tested Pronto with the Flash Player 9 build for Intel based Macs. While I have only used it for about one hour, it seems to run faster than it does in the browser (which is pretty fast already). Some browsers throttle plug-ins and limit system resources when there are multiple and/or tabbed windows being used. the Standalone Flash Player with Pronto made these issues disappear for me. If anyone tests this on another Operating System I would appreciate any comments confirming that this also works well on other Operating Systems.

There is one important change to the default Pronto URL that is required to open Pronto from the standalone player. The URL must end with /pronto.swf in order to explicitly tell the player what application to open. For example, if you sign up for a free Pronto account at http://talktoip.com, you can open Pronto with this URL in the Flash standalone Player:

http://talktoip.com/Pronto/pronto.swf

Choose Sign Up if you wish to create an account.

It is possible to use codecs other than G711 with CommuniGate Pro. The server was always capable of connecting two SIP clients with whichever codec both clients agreed to use. This works well but does not address the need to use a codec other than G711 when terminating calls on the server. Previously, the included CGPL applications such as Auto Attendant, Voicemail and the Back to Back User Agent (B2BUA) could only be used with the G711 codec. The inbuilt Media Server now provides a few options in recent builds of CommuniGate Pro.

Media Server Settings

Currently the quickest way to test the media server is to install the Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) on a system with CommuniGate Pro and use that system as your external media server. This can provide G729 and G723 transcoding options. A test only build of CommuniGate Pro that uses the external IPP libraries is available for Linux at:

http://www.communigate.com/pub/stuff/Linux/CGatePro-Linux-5.1-11cIPP.i386.rpm

This information contained in this post does not provide sufficient information about the licensing issues required to use other codecs or libraries with CommuniGate Pro. Please investigate how you can legally obtain or license the codec you wish to use. The licenses we sell only apply to our software. If you are in a jurisdiction that requires you to pay a fee to have a right to use these codecs, it is your obligation to pay those fees directly to the codec right owner.

Information about the Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) is available online. The Intel
® Integrated Performance Primitives 5.2 - FAQ provides more information about license terms and/or license fees for using Intel IPP samples.

Please note that CommuniGate Pro does not implement these codecs and there is no code in CommuniGate Pro or any of our software that implements these codecs or libraries. Our license is issued exclusively to enable a particular CommuniGate Pro installation to use external software libraries, it does not provide any additional rights for those external software libraries. CommuniGate Systems does not sell, provide, or distribute these libraries.

When all is installed properly, the CommuniGate Pro Media Server presents these additional codecs in the Settings -> RealTime -> Media. Even if the install is all performed correctly, you may see the additional codecs as inactive. We are still testing these features and a test key may be required. If you attempt this and encounter the codecs as inactive and you are interested in testing this please contact me for more information.

It is recommended to test this by running a CommuniGate Pro installation separate from your lab or production installation with the codecs installed. This separate installation is available to other CommuniGate Pro systems as an "External Transcoder". It is best to test with most recent version of CGP available. The most recent versions of CommuniGate Pro contain the configuration option necessary to connect to the external transcoder.

Basic steps for testing:
1. Acquire the Intel IPP Library
2. Acquire licenses for whichever codecs you wish to use
3. Install the test IPP version of CommuniGate Pro and the Intel IPP library on another server, this becomes your Media Transcoding Server
4. Configure your main CommuniGate Pro installation to use the Remote option in the External Media Servers configuration found at Settings -> RealTime -> Media in the administration interface.

Network World publishes a Unified Communications newsletter and recently featured an article about the Pronto! client at the end of June. Pronto has improved much since this article was written. Pronto test accounts are still available at http://talktoip.com.

Unified communications Pronto!
Unified Communications Newsletter  By Michael Osterman, Network World, 06/28/07