• Increased scaling and resilience
• Multi-node clusters
• More end user control through Outlook & iOS
• Skype for Business redirector
• Analytics 2 (Elasticsearch)

VQ Conference Manager 3.0 (“CM3”) was publicly shown for the first time 10 days ago at the Cisco Live event in Florida.

CM3 has been under development for the last 18 months and builds on the success of Acano Manager 2. Many things have changed, not least the name; we’ve reverted from Acano Manager back to VQ Conference Manager.

The objective with CM3 was to update the AM 2.x architecture to enable scaling, resilience and to provide user tooling and applications that would enable users to have more control of their conferencing experience and as a result of that, make more calls. In short, we want to enable the next generation of big systems and to drive up usage to further increase the return on investment customers are achieving on their Cisco Meeting Servers.

The internal architecture of CM3 has had a major rework and can be run as a multi-node cluster. Initially, this will be limited to a two VM node cluster which will then be increased over the next couple of releases. The cluster approach solves two problems: scalability and resilience. If components in the cluster fail, the system will detect the failure and restart the failing component. In the first versions of CM3, the database is not replicated and therefore represents a potential point of failure; as with the cluster size limitation, this will change in a future release. Another change for a future release will to support “replica master nodes” so that if the current master node fails, a replica master node takes over the role and the system continues running. In terms of scaling, it’ll also be possible to “scale-up” or “scale-down” the system to add, for example, more instances of the web-server to handle larger numbers of users using either the web user interface or the API based applications.

In terms of enabling end users to have more control over their conferencing, we’ve added a range of new applications: An Outlook Add-in that works on Office 2016 and Office 365 which allows users to see activity on their Spaces from within Outlook. Not only that, they can drill down into active calls, see who’s in the call and perform actions like change layout, mutes, set importance or remove people from the call. And create new Spaces or update/delete existing ones – for example, changing passcodes. Select a Space and Inject HTML details into Outlook Emails and Calendar invites to make it easy for other’s to “click to join” into calls. All from within Outlook and no requirement to go to an external website. The Add-in works on Windows, Mac and Office for Web applications.

We’ve also got an iOS Phone app that delivers essentially the same functionality as the Add-In.

There’s also an updated version of the current Outlook plugin for users on older versions of Outlook who can’t move to the Add-in.

And the final new app we will be releasing is a “Skype for Business redirector” plugin. This plugin runs silently within Outlook and replaces the default text injected when a user clicks on the Outlook “Skype for Business” button with details for the user’s CMS based Space.

The Scripting engine architecture and ‘scripting language’ have been replaced and are significantly improved. We’ve rationalized the available set of alerts and provide a wider set of “out of the box” HTML templates that include logos and icons.

The Analytics functionality we added in AM 2.x was OK but was a bit clunky and had limitations. We, therefore, decided to offer “Analytics 2” based on an amazing Open Source project called “Elasticsearch” and its visualization engine called “Kibana”  (also known as “ELK”). Analytics 1 will remain in the product for the foreseeable future but we envisage it eventually being removed. All Analytics data is copied into a separate Analytics 2 database (Elasticsearch) and, in addition, all the dashboard data for CMS licensing and bandwidth consumption is also now available historically (from the point in time you start using CM3).

Outside the new Applications and Analytics 2, functionality is essentially the same as AM 2.3 MR7. The UI, however, is much faster and the LDAP Importer pages have been improved and allow you to select historic log files to check what happened. You no longer lose the data if you leave the Importer page.

In terms of the system requirements and upgrade process:

• CM3 requires a new VM (or two) with a minimum spec of 4 cores, 16GB of memory and 200GB of disk space per VM.
• An update upgrade will be available for AM 2.3; install this and export the data. This copies out all the database and certificate data. Import this onto the new 3.0 VM. The process includes all audit and analytic data; this is then copied into the new Elasticsearch database. Historic CMS and bandwidth consumption data is not available in AM 2.3 and therefore cannot be carried forward so will start from the time the CM3 system was installed.

In terms of costs, there is no charge to upgrade from AM 2.x to CM 3.0 on a “like for like” basis. New functionality such as the Outlook Add-in is licensed separately. Analytics 2 in its base form is included as part of the package with an upgrade option available for customers who need to export data, set and mail alarms on threshold values. The objective is to enable you with masses of data and powerful visualization tools. VQ is now an OEM partner of Elasticsearch and can supply X-Pack license upgrades. There are no additional charges for multi-node configurations of CM3 (note: large clusters with multi-node Elasticsearch who have purchased X-Pack do require additional X-pack licenses for clustered Elasticsearch).

Windows customers will, I’m afraid, have to wait for the Windows world to catch-up with what is happening in the Open Source and Cloud worlds. CM3 is based on a Cloud technology from Google called “Kubernetes”; Windows Server 2019 will be available later this year and supports Kubernetes and Containers. Certifying CM3 against Windows Server 2019 is something we will do once it becomes available. We expect to offer Windows (and other) forms of Single Sign-On (“SSO”) relatively quickly; our recommended path for the majority of customers who use Windows because they need SSO will be to switch to the VM based version of CM3 that supports SSO (including Windows Authentication).

CM3 is the next step on the VQ journey; we’re very excited about the solutions it’ll enable and the problems we can help solve. We hope you like it too.

Availability is targeted for somewhere around July 16^th 2018.

I haven’t put out a blog post for some time; with the year-end looming, I thought it would be a good idea to put out a quick update.

Very loosely, 2017 turned out to be “Year of the PIN”. This might surprise you as much as it surprised me. As 2017 started to unfold, it became apparent that something we’d considered in the abstract during the design and development of the Acano Manager 2 platform had become a reality. With a twist. Our focus in legacy versions of VQ had been around call management: how could we allow operators and the service delivery teams schedule, launch and manage calls? In volume and make it fast.

We knew from previous product generations that predictability of call experience was key; calls had to work well and work consistently. If that happened, users came to like the in-call experience (great audio and video) and trusted they could use it for business calls. Calls worked. Every time. Usage normally grew relentlessly.

We therefore went to a lot of effort to design predictability of the in-call experience into Acano Manager 2.

The twist was the customers wanted to use not only different types of calls and exploit the ability to have multiple roles per call, they also needed some roles to have PINs and others to not have PINs. That would have been OK but there was a subtle change in how CMS 2.1 handled PINs. The year started with PINs (or, to be more correct, PassCodes).

With flexible PINs in place, we started to see wide adoption of Acano Manager’s coSpace Templates and the ability to define Service Tiers; different groups of users being able to make different types of calls.

Customers started switching audio conferencing workloads from external providers to on-premises CMS/AM. That does interesting things to the ROI models!

By mid-year, new large enterprise systems were being commissioned and going into production. coSpace Templates (and those pesky PINs) played a bit part in enabling them. We’ve learned the hard way about many of the obscure ways things can go wrong creating coSpaces and all the associated objects. In addition to a steady string of refinements into Acano Manager itself, we’ve also created some very useful tools to identify and fix coSpaces issues which will eventually find themselves in the product allowing the system to self-heal.

The “Year of the PIN” label should probably be more accurately defined as “Provisioning year” but it just doesn’t sound as good. It doesn’t stop there, other really good areas of progress include reliability/robustness, performance and new functionality. And plenty of bug fixes. We’re really pleased how the 2.x platform has matured since it was launched in April 2016.

The remarkable thing about the year is where we are at the end of it. We now have over 100 instances of Acano Manager 2.x installed globally. In November, one of the biggest systems managed by AM 2.3 went through the significant milestone of over 1 million calls (call legs) in one month; the system’s November call volume was over 33 million minutes. If we annualize the call volumes for systems we have visibility on, Acano Manager managed CMS systems are delivering approximately 1 billion call minutes/year. This is just amazing and we’re incredibly proud to be part of the global team (customers, resellers, Cisco and VQ) enabling this volume of calls.

If you have call volume data you could share with me, please let me know and we’d really appreciate it. We will not reveal customer names; the data will be aggregated and will remain anonymous.

Behind the scenes, we’ve invested heavily in how the product evolves and we’re really excited about how that is looking; expect more on that next year.

Oh, and one last thing…..

We’re hiring. If you or somebody you know is looking for a new challenge….we’ll be adding open positions onto the web site. The team say they really like working at VQ; some have even said it’s the best job they ever had.

Enjoy the rest of 2017 and have a great 2018.

Mike

In the third of this blog series Barry Pascolutti shares his thoughts and experiences on why VQ Conference Manager is as relevant in a smaller deployment as well as in larger deployments.

Are there any differences between large and small deployments?

In terms of feature sets, no. A user’s experience should be exactly the same whether they are in a large or a small deployment and CMS was designed to be scalable from the outset from small to medium enterprises all the way to large service providers; the idea being that if you need more capacity you throw another box at it and everything scales up like that.

Very large conferences are obviously different from very small ones. The user experience is different particularly because you can’t see everyone on the screen at once and you need more meeting control. You probably need a moderator in large conferences but the process of provisioning that conference should be identical, irrespective of size. The steps you take to start the meeting, join the meeting etc., they are all identical.

With larger scales you do have more redundancy. In a small deployment, you may just have a single box and so that’s going to be a single point of failure. With larger scales you have more to do with your dial plan – do you have a regional versus a flat dial plan, or do you need to consider least-cost routing. All those sorts of considerations are important but the day to day operations between a large scale and a small scale should be absolutely identical.

Does VQ Conference Manager as a product stand up to the rigorous corporate standards for video conferencing?

Absolutely, we do. We have a 15 year pedigree, delivering video conferencing management solutions and we have developed our system in collaboration with some very large deployments and global organisations. We have gone along this journey with them. Today VQ Conference Manager is used by finance organisations, healthcare, private sector, public sector, manufacturers– all sorts of verticals all over the world. Organisations with the highest and most stringent standards for policy and compliance requirements.

How does the VQ Conference Manager pricing model work for a small deployment?

We price on scale so it’s designed to grow with your requirements. So if you have a small deployment the price will be at the low scale and as your requirements grow we will price it accordingly.

Is provisioning important for small deployments?

Yes for small and large deployments. Your users can’t access the system until they have been provisioned and manually provisioning your users is going to be an administrative burden and overhead whether you are talking about 10 or 10,000 users.

Is integration with CMS licensing important for small deployments?

The CMS licensing integration is irrespective of deployment size. The importance of CMS licensing is not dependant on the size of deployment but more on what type of licensing you have. A shared multi-party license is a shared multi-party whether you have one or a 100 of them. With a personal multi-party, on the other hand, you need to make sure that you are using them when you are entitled to because there is quite a price difference between an SMP and a PMP. This true whether you have 10 or 10,000.

Is self-service important with small deployments?

Yes. Although it is easier for a video conferencing admin group to scale down to small numbers, i.e. the white glove, concierge operator managed conference, just because you can do a thing, doesn’t mean you should do a thing. You don’t set up audio conferences for example, for people. When was the last time you were asked to set up a very simple audio bridge? Everyone knows how to dial into their own audio bridge and it should be the same with video conferences. The technology is definitely there to make it simple, pretty much the same as dialling into an audio bridge, so we should use it. This is certainly true of large organisations but you should do it for the smaller ones too. And then when you are ready to scale that service, if your organisation grows, you can grow the size of your video conferencing deployment because your users are already used to self-service. That self-service paradigm will grow as your deployment grows.

Is controlling video from one place important with small deployments?

I think so. One could argue that the view from the CMS web admin presents pretty much the same information as the view from the operator view of VQ Conference Manager. But it doesn’t allow the same call control. You can see what’s going on but you can’t control what’s going on. The requirement to provide operator control of video conferencing exists however large your organisation or video deployment. You still have a need to control that conference.

Is Analytics important with small deployments?

This is another example of something that is important irrespective of size of deployment. Even if you have one call and one user, you still need the historical data to track your usage and you also might have issues you need to trouble-shoot.

And even what we are calling a small deployment might still involve participants from outside your organisation and might involve large numbers of participants. One shared multi-party license is not limited in the number of participants you can include in the conference. You are only limited in the hardware scale. So even with what we are calling small deployments, the scale could be very significant and that has the potential to mean you require Analytics and Reporting.

So, if you are considering a small deployment, or indeed a larger deployment of video conferencing and you want to see how VQ Conference Manager can form an integral part of your conferencing toolset, I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Click here to arrange a Product Demo

If you’re planning to roll out a new service to your users, you’ll probably discover that most people don’t like change. Change is unpopular and disruptive. For example, if you choose one business messaging tool and everyone adopts it and is happy with it and you suddenly make a policy decision to move to a completely different messaging tool, that kind of thing is hugely disruptive to your business. It takes months during which your staff are less productive than they would be. The same is certainly true of video conferencing.

So that means when you plan your video conferencing service – how people interact with the service, how people use the service, how people create their Spaces, how people behave in the meetings, the policies you define for access codes and your dial plan – you have got to have that right at the beginning so you know that how people use the service and behave will be the same, not just next year but in 5 or even 10 years time.

You need to have a toolset that allows you to do this.

So, what toolset?

Good management software can be the difference between a successful video conferencing service and an expensive failure. So when you pick a management platform, here’s what it needs to be capable of if it’s to be viable in the long term.

1. Self-service – the only way you are going to deliver a video-conferencing service which will grow sustainably is to offer your users self-service. This means your users can – and have the confidence to – create and dial into conferences themselves. They can schedule their conferences using tools already familiar to them. They need to be able to control their calls, adding people to the conference, know how to control and edit their PINs and be confident that their Spaces are always available. To scale it’s key that they are self sufficient. It doesn’t scale if they have to rely on a service delivery team.
2. Consistent and tailored in-call experiences – not only do your users need be confident that their Spaces are always available, they need to know what everyone in the conference is experiencing – i.e. screen layouts for you and the other participants and that the in call experience is consistent, each time they make a call.
3. Automation and reporting – you need to ensure your administrators and call operators have the tools they require to sustainably manage and maintain a video conferencing service. The larger the service grows, the more important this becomes.

For example, they need ways of keeping tabs on large numbers of calls and spotting potential problems before they affect your users. Automated alerts are therefore a must-have, as are analytics tools that show how all aspects of your service is operating.

Administrators also need an easy way of provisioning the service for users and maintaining appropriate access to the service as people join, move roles or leave. Particularly in larger organisations, these sorts of changes happen daily, so manually updating the video conferencing service user database isn’t viable. You need a management tool that integrates with your enterprise user management system and automatically keeps itself updated.

Then there’s reporting, which will play a vital role as your video conferencing service grows. First off, when you make a big investment like this, your sponsors will want to see it delivering returns, so your administrators need tools that enable them to demonstrate this. Second, because your service will invariably grow, you need to be able to forecast when you’ll require further capacity. And thirdly, these forecasts will provide the evidence you need to support future business cases for expanding the system.

So that’s the tools – what else does VQ do?

There’s probably a lot riding on the decisions your organization makes about its video conferencing tools: you need to ensure you make the right choices for the long term. This is why it’s best to minimize risk by choosing tools that have proven themselves capable of supporting businesses as they grow their video conferencing services.

VQ has proven itself on this growth journey.

In terms of scale, we have 100’s of customers, including some that are very large. One of our biggest customers has 50,000 users and that is across a CMS estate of 8 nodes. Another customer has a similar size CMS estate, and they are using our Analytics reporting engine which reports 20 million minutes of conference per month. Across all our customers, we are confident that within a year, we are going to see 1 billion call minutes per year.

VQ goes on the journey with customers.

This particular customer started small and VQ were with them all the way. Prior to CMS, with their previous conferencing infrastructure, VQ was their conference management product of choice. We have been on this journey with them for a number of years now, from their first, initial small handful of calls, right up to this 20 million minutes per month.

So if you want to see how VQ can form an integral part of your video conferencing toolset I’d be delighted to hear from you.

You can arrange a Product Demo from info@vqcomms.com