Disruptive Telephony

(Originally posted at http://dyork.livejournal.com/256998.html)

Tom Cross over at Techtionary.com dropped a note to let me know that his team had released a 'fastcast' on the topic of "SIP Essentials". Not having a clue what a "fastcast" was, I found the answer in Tom's news release:

Fastcasts are fast-track audio/video animated 10-60 second advertorials for web, webseminar, PC and iPod formats.

Not sure how much traction the word will really get, but there you have it. Tom's SIP tutorial looked quite interesting in the bit that I explored, with sections on:

• SIP Basics
• SIP Trunking
• SIP QoS
• SIP Firewalls and Security
• SIP Applications
• SIP TCO-Total Cost of Ownership
• Integrated/Converged Access
• Key VoIP Options – IAS, Hosted, Managed
• SIP Total Tutorial with Future Outlook

(Gee, any guesses as to which one I chose first?) Clicking each link takes you to a flash-based tutorial with audio and animation. The ones I looked at were quite good. A nice contribution to the education around SIP... and definitely good for folks trying to figure out what SIP is all about.

Tom's making it available at no cost right now so I'd recommend people check it out.

Just one note of caution... once you enter one of the tutorials, you do need to listen to all of the audio for a page before pressing "Next". If you simply press the Next button to move through the slides, you suddenly find yourself with multiple streams of audio all mashing on top of each other! (And yes, this is the voice of experience writing this...) Kind of neat if you need the effect of people talking over each other, but not terribly helpful otherwise. Outside of that issue, otherwise I found the sessions quite useful. (At least, the ones I went through... I did not go through them all yet.)

Technorati Tags: sip, techtionary, tutorials, voip, voip security