InGeniusBlog.com

InGenius is proud to be one of the finalists for a VON award for our innovative online application - the Mitel Application Builder. Winners will be announced at the VON show.

Application Builder is a tool used to build HTML applications which run on Mitel’s large-screen 5330 and 5340 phones.

Currently, you can build screen saver applications, and hospitality applications - and we’re planning to add many more applications over the next year.

Application Builder is innovative in that dealers or customers can sign up for free, and build trial applications for free. The tool supports online demos - you and your customers can see what your application will look like in our online phone simulator - then when you’re happy, download the application to your Mitel 3300 switch, and phones.

InGenius is happy to be in the company of many excellent finalists, including Alec Saunder’s iotum, another Ottawa firm.

Update: Well, we didn’t make the top 10, but we’re pretty happy with the exposure and recognition of our hard work. Thanks VON!

We’re pretty excited around here! Our Intelligent Directory product is now available through Mitel. I’ve talked about Intelligent Directory before (check out the details here) - ID is an application that runs on your Mitel 5330 or 5340 phone, and provides a simple on-screen searchable directory of all your corporate contacts (from your corporate Active Directory), as well as your personal Outlook contacts.

The application has been in trials since May - it’s solid and really useful.

We have had to work very hard to make the application as responsive as possible when running on a Mitel phone. The CPU in the phone is nowhere near as fast as a desktop PC’s CPU - so you have to apply a ton of optimizations and special techniques to ring every bit of performance out of the device as possible.

In fact, we’ve made performance improvements throughout our beta cycles, improving performance by 5 times. We’ve also streamlined the User Interface, and added features as requests came in from our beta trial customers.

Some examples:

• The application used to run in “Corporate Contacts” mode or in “Outlook Contacts” mode. We found a way to largely get rid of this modality, and allow you to choose where your search will take place right when you are entering the characters you want to search for.
• We introduced the concept of “Favorites” and made it easy to add any Outlook or Corporate contact to your favorites list.
• Doing queries of your Outlook contacts through the exchange server was quite slow - something people complained about. So, we have changed the product to cache any Outlook contacts you save as “Favorites” so that they pop up very quickly.
• We added the ability to refine a search - if you enter a few characters of someone’s name, and get back too many results, you can easily refine your current search to narrow down your choices.
• We added AJAX style interactions on the phone pages, so as you click between pages, only the data on the pages change - none of the graphics or underlying code on the page have to reload.

The application has ended up being very usable and friendly.

Intelligent Directory is available here - download the application, the user guide and installation guide.

If you want to purchase the application, the Mitel part numbers are:

• Intelligent Directory 30 Pack:  51011224
• Intelligent Directory Presence Option 30 Pack:  51011225 (This upgrade to the basic product provides LCS presence indications on the phone beside each directory entry that is shown)

Have fun!

We’re heading off to Las Vegas Sunday for Mitel’s Forum 2007 show. Last I checked it was only 105 degrees in the shade…

We’re hoping that it will be a pretty exciting show for us. We’ll be demonstrating the following:

• Integrated Office Navigator
• Integrated Office Companion (Just became generally available Friday June 22!!!!!)
• Intelligent Directory (Coming out next month)
• Our New Online Hospitality Application Creator (See below)
• Our Emergency Broadcast Application

Find all this, and download it to play with at www.ingeniussoftware.com/mitel.

Our stuff will be highlighted in a ton of booths at Mitel Forum - though we’re not personally in any booth, we’ll be wandering around and available to talk. Look for our red InGenius shirts.

I’m giving a couple of presentations (Tuesday June 26 4:00pm and 4:20pm) on developing HTML applications for Mitel’s phones, and on Integrated Office Companion and Intelligent Directory. It totally sucks that I only have 20 minutes per presentation I’ve got an hour’s worth of slides…

If you’re interested, here’s the slide decks: Forum 2007 HTML Toolkit Presentation, Mitel Forum 2007 IOC and ID Presentation.

We’ll be demonstrating our Emergency Broadcast Application as well. This HTML application allows a centrally based administrator to trigger an emergency broadcast to every 53xx phone in a building or a whole site. The phones display an emergency message, with an escape route map or other graphic, and the phones play back an audio message at full volume. You can choose from a bunch of pre-defined broadcasts, or create one on the fly. This is a really terrific application for getting the message out in an emergency - whether or not people have PC’s or are near a PC. Simply put a bunch of Mitel 53xx phones throughout the buildings or campus. This product is in development now.

Another terrific application we’re demoing is an online hospitality application development tool. This is just SO COOL, you have to see it. We’ll be putting a demo online pretty soon. This application allows dealers to go online to our web site and create a complete Hospitality HTML Application for a hotel. Basically, you answer a series of questions online, fill in the appropriate extensions, choose the options you want, and it spits out a file ready to be uploaded to a Mitel 3300 Switch. You can demo the application on line - show it to the customer, test it, tune it, then deploy it when you’re done. It comes with tons of ready-made content like a welcome page, green statement, restaurant templates, airline speed-dials, LIVE weather forecasts, etc. YOU WILL BE BLOWN AWAY by this application, and the dealer’s customers will love it. Very cool.

If you want to meet up in Las Vegas, get in touch with us at “rich at ingeniuspeople dot com”

I mentioned a few days ago that my patent application had been picked up by ZDNet and Alec Saunders. I’m excited to report that today, it was on Engadget! It’s interesting to be mentioned on a blog I read daily!

References:

• Engadget,
• Textually,
• Mad4MobilePhones,
• Alec Saunders,
• Russel Shaw’s IP Telephony blog.

And HERE on this blog.

Our latest application, Intelligent Directory, is in customer trials now - and should be released to the public in June!

To quote the marketing material:

The Mitel 5300 Intelligent Directory application provides a simple, intuitive on-screen searchable directory of both corporate and personal contacts right on your phone display. The 5300 Intelligent Directory application is available on Mitel 5330/5340 sets.

The 5300 Intelligent Directory Application and Presence Upgrade automatically pull information from three different sources:

• Microsoft Active Directory Server for corporate phone numbers
• Microsoft Exchange Server Contacts for personal contact phone numbers
• Microsoft Live Communication Server for presence information in the case of Presence Upgrade.

The 5300 Intelligent Directory application lists names and phone numbers, and allows users to search on the phone for names and numbers, using the very familiar keypad search that users are accustomed to on their cellphones and handheld devices.

Key features:

• Extremely intuitive and easy to use – phone numbers are where you need them, on your phone.
• Instant phone number updates. When a new person is added to the centralized Microsoft Active, their phone numbers are automatically available to all 5300 Intelligent Directory users.
• Less administration, less expense, more accuracy. No more need to separately maintain corporate phone books for internal use.
• Up to 5 phone numbers can be displayed per person (corporate, cell, home, etc.).
• One-touch dialing - numbers selected are instantly dialed.
• Automatically displays a dynamic list of recent calls on default home screen.
• Add your favorite numbers to your home screen.
• Uses Microsoft dialing rules to automatically insert dialing prefixes when numbers are dialed.
• Supports Hot-Desking. 5300 Intelligent Directory requires users to enter their password to access personal contacts in Microsoft Exchange.

With Presence Upgrade, LCS Presence status is displayed beside the contact name, indicating whether he or she is available. With just a glance at the phone, users can determine whether and when to make that important call.

The application is structured as a .Net application that runs on Microsoft’s IIS Web Server, and uses a web service to connect to Active Directory, Exchange, and LCS. The architecture is shown below:

The application will be available soon - check HERE for updates.

And, if you just can’t wait, try it out on our HTML application demo page HERE!

I was surprised this week to discover that a patent application we had submitted a year ago was “in the news” on a few blogs.

We first got wind of it through Alec Saunder’s excellent VoIP blog - HE was surprised to see a reference to the Ottawa Senators in a patent application - just our little nod to the team!

And Alec found the patent app through Russel Shaw’s IP Telephony blog over at ZD Net. Russel apparently scans all new patent applications, looking for interesting VoIP applications, and ours made the grade.

Our patent application covers some of the applications that InGenius’ TelML technology makes possible on IP Phone sets with larger screens. Stuff like News, Weather, Sports, and advertizing on you kitchen phone. Very cool stuff - that we’re implementing now for a number of customers.

In fact, we’re releasing our first TelML-based product in the next couple of weeks - it’s called Intelligent Directory, and it allows access to your corporate Active Directory, including presence, from the screen of your phone! Think of it as a super intelligent and useful phonebook, that ties into your Active Directory,your personal Outlook contacts, and LCS/OCS for presence info - with easy searching based on name or company. It’s a great application, only possible due to Mitel’s adoption of our TelML technology on their desktop screen phones.

I’m down in San Fran for COSN - a networking show for school teachers, and adminstrators. Mitel has a booth here, showing a cool school telephony app we put together, and a broadcast app that the Mitel Custom Apps group put together that uses IP speakers to broadcast throughout a school.

Feedback is along the lines of:

• “COOL” you can take attendance using a phone.
• OR, uhm, WHY would I want to take attendance using a phone?

Really, the coolest stuff we’ve done is the broadcast alert using the phones themselves. You can go to a web page on a PC, select a broadcast alert message, click “Send” and the alert shows up on every phone in the school - complete with blinking lights, a message on screen, including an evacuation route map, and an audio announcement that plays an alert sound, and says what to do. What’s cool, is that this uses the built-in voicemail system in the 3300 for the announcement - so no extra hardware required. Very cool.

One company with some cool stuff here is Promethean - they have a very nice looking educational application, with lots of interactive stuff, and these really cool little remotes that let the class interact, vote, and contribute to what’s going on. Their UI looks REALLY good - very clean and easy to use, yet powerful.

My brother is flying down tomorrow - we’ll be touring the town, including dinner at Chez Panisse, one of the best restaurants in the US! I’ll let you know how that goes…

Here are some pictures from San Francisco.

We spent the final day of the Expo part of the show doing tons more demos of our software, and zipping around to all the other exhibitors, checking out their wares, and scoring some freebees for the kids back home.

Some thoughts:

• Microsoft is really entering the VoIP market. They’ve clearly identified this as a major source of revenue for themselves, and are demoing a pretty solid solution. But, not perfect. The phones they’re using do demo their stuff are really cheap USB phones. Sure, they have a handset and speakerphone, but these are not business quality phones by any means. At a time when most phone manufacturers are adding hi-fi audio, these phone sets just don’t cut it. Also, their system is good for basic business use, but the larger manufacturers have been spending years adding needed features for hotels and businesses that really take advantage of the telephony platform - from things like sophisticated voicemail features for hotels (clear your voicemail when you check out) to things like twinned cellular phones that cleanly handle a call being answered on the cellular. Also, your phone system is dead when your server or your PC is dead. This is really a show-stopper for anyone with some real-world experience with Microsoft’s product line. Microsoft is certainly a force we’ll all have to deal with, but they aren’t there yet for anything but the 3-10 user office.
• I was really surprised at the offerings from Cisco, Avaya and Nortel. From the point of view of the services we can provide on a phone (full, sophisticated, web applications) - the competitors offerings are terrible. Many of them rely on a Citrix backend - you need to set up and install a full Citrix server to use it. And the applications you can develop can only use plain HTML. So, forget any of the cool live presence applications we’ve developed. You are stuck with static content on the phone. And, all three have terrible displays - very small, hard to read, very difficult to format content for, and they have very few push-buttons - so it’s terrible for navigation. Really the dark ages. If you are interested in any sort of interesting content on your phone, forget about Cisco, Avaya and Nortel. Go with Mitel.