Here’s some take-aways from my last Enterprise Voice Mashup project. Thought I’d record them for posterity… share them with who cares

• The up-front planning was very critical, and helped the back-end go much smoother. Our program manager was excellent, and put together a cross functional team that really covered the bases. Our team included a security team member, the Active Directory engineers, the phone engineers, a representative from the IS and IT departments, the support team, a test engineer, our team and the manager. As you put together your teams, remember these departments.
• It really took about a day to integrate into each enterprise system, even when the specification was pretty good. Issues like inconsistency in the databases and directories, legacy issues like dial plans and overloaded active directory servers, and issues with connecting non-Microsoft devices all added to the delays. In the future, good projects will allocate a day to each interface, then a half a day to test the interfaces after installation.
• Our interfaces into the Enterprise IT system included Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server and the Cisco telephone system. H.323 and Skinny were the deployed protocols in this implementation. SIP was not.
• It’s possible that our Linux box was the first our brothers in the IT and IS departments needed to manage. Everything is from Microsoft. From a political and business perspective, it’s probably a better solution to provide them with a “box” than a software solution. Organizations know how to purchase and maintain “boxes”. Non-Microsoft software… not so much.
• We used Adhearsion on top of Asterisk as the heart of the application. It’s been rock solid. One really, really good choice for us was to use the Ruby exception handling to catch any errors in the code, and then to dial a real human being in response to any program error.
• Recording voice prompts is pretty straightforward, but took us five iterations before we were happy with the results.
• Using a “dial by name” like approach to inputing remote data works fine… unless you have a Blackberry. If you do, then you look at the keypad and say “Hey! There’s no letters on this thing!”

As LignUp expected, there’s a market for deploying Voice Mashup boxes… When the Enterprise starts to put that line item on a budget, companies like them will do a fine business. So far, though, those lines don’t exist. The work that we find is work that we create. The CIO simply does not have voice mashups on the top of the IT list. The good news is that the CFO will love the savings, and will eventually demand the CIO add one.

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