Voice over Internet Protocol - VOIP

Voice over Internet Protocol, also called VoIP, IP Telephony, Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone and Voice over Broadband is the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or through any other IP-based network, VoIP technology users a software which is used to conduct telephone-like voice conversations across the internet. VOIP phone service is often cheaper than traditional phone service, and is becoming more popular for both business and personal calls

Lowratevoip is one of several Internet telephony services (also called VoIP-service) of Betamax GmbH & Co. KG in Germany. Formerly Lowratevoip was a service of Swiss based Finarea SA. Lowratevoip uses a client software with proprietary protocol, but can also be accessed via SIP-protocol. Lowratevoip features low call rates. Subscribers can mutually call for free, and call for free to fixed lines in selected countries worldwide (0 pennies per minute and no start tariff) for a limited number of days after payments to Lowratevoip

There are alot of VOIP-services, click on the link "Comparison of VoIP software" to view them in a table

Building your own VOIP
There are serveral ways which you can use to build your own VOIP network, some of which you need a big invistement, and others are cheap; one example method which is commonly used nawadays is Asterisk

Asterisk® is a complete IP PBX in software. Released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL), Asterisk runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX including many advanced features that are often associated with high end (and high cost) proprietary PBXs. Asterisk® supports Voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware

Making Money on Intenet - try Google AdSense

AdSense is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. Google is also currently beta-testing a cost-per-action based service.

The underlying technology behind AdSense was derived originally from WordNet and Simpli, a company started by the founder of Wordnet — George A. Miller — and a number of professors and graduate students from Brown University, including James A. Anderson, Jeff Stibel and Steve Reiss. A variation of this technology utilizing Wordnet was developed by Oingo, a small search engine company based in Santa Monica founded in 1998. Oingo focused on semantic searches rather than brute force string searches. Oingo changed its name to Applied Semantics, which was then bought by Google for $102 million in April 2003, to replace a similar system being developed in house

Google Search Appliance

The Google Search Appliance is a rack-mounted device providing document indexing functionality, that can be integrated into an intranet, document management system or web site using a Google search-like interface for end-user retrieval. It is manufactured and distributed by Google, and is aimed primarily at the corporate market.
The device is supplied in a number of models, ranging from an entry-level appliance capable of indexing up to 500,000 documents, to a full rack of appliances, which can handle up to 30 million. Sales are operated on a licensing scheme which starts as a two-year contract for maintenance, support and software updates

Google Mini
The Google Mini offers the simplicity and power of Google's enterprise search technology. An integrated hardware and software solution, the Mini offers true plug-and-play installation and can be purchased online. Whether you're looking to search your company's internal information or your public website, the Mini has the features for your business.
Search your corporate data and improve employee productivity With the Google Mini, you can offer employees relevant and secure search across intranets, file servers, and business applications. Employees' familiarity with Google's user interface from searching on Google.com will facilitate adoption in your enterprise, and instant access to corporate information will make them more productive.
Add search to your public website for increased conversion rates and page views If you operate a public website, you probably already know that your visitors rely on search to find products and information on your site. When visitors cannot find what they search for, they leave your site. With relevant search results, they'll be more likely to purchase from and return to your website.
The Google Mini's relevant search results and customizable user interface make it a perfect solution for website search. Integration with Google Sitemaps also makes it easy to submit your website for inclusion in Google.com search results.
The Google Mini works with over 220 different file formats and its integration with existing security systems ensures that employees can only access information they are supposed to view.

My current duties as technical project coordinator

Job Summary
Responsible for regular contact and examination of contributions by the project’s stakeholders, encompassing user representatives, service providers and others as a appropriate, bringing about a “meeting of the minds” as to requirements and/or performance according to established policies and guidelines, and reporting so that corresponding action is taken.

Functions and Responsibilities

Coordination

• Maintain contact with owner’s stakeholders to ascertain project requirements and/or level of satisfaction with progress and performance.
• Maintain contact with the project’s service providers to ensure timely activity, integration and efficient use of resources to meet requirements.
• Produce detailed reports and notifications as appropriate.
• Take pro-active or corrective action if authorized to do so.
• Coordinate inspection and report progress of the work.
• Coordinate practical details of the transfer of the care, custody and control of the final product, including assembly and transfer of operational and maintenance documentation.
• Create, deliver and insure project delivery notes documents with the company clients.
• Create, deliver and insure project signoff documents with the company clients.
• Create, deliver and insure project work order documents with the company clients.
• Work hand in hand with project managers throughout the project phases and insure that
  project execution is smoothly met.
• Identify risks and reply them to the project manager and occasionally propose solutions.
• Coordinate meetings, and write its minutes and insure that Attendees get their copy of the minutes of meeting documents.

Business Modeling

• Help in modeling the business of the client and creating a business case
• Help in developing a product vision
• Work with business owners and business analysts to identify, prioritize and document business requirements
• Facilitating sessions and working with business owners and business analysts to drive out detailed functional requirements
• With the help of the development team, transforming business/functional requirements into high level technical requirements and designs (including user interface)
• Work with the TTL, DBA, System Admin and business owner to identify conversion points for legacy system.
• Working with project team to develop support materials and processes.
• Capture and create a common glossary.

Requirements gathering and documentation

• Gather, analyze, and prioritize customer and business requirements
• Requirements proper documentation

Handling requirements

• Understand the clients requirements
• Clearly define the deliverables of the project
• Makes sure that the client requirements are properly documented in clear way to the client and the technical team

Change Management

• Help in establishing a change management and control plan and make sure it is executed
• Own the process of creating new Change Requests and follow it while executing.

Deployment

• Onsite project updates deployment.
• Makes sure that a deployment plan is created and executed.
• Manages the clients Beta testing and solicit feedback.

Quality assurance

• Functional test Analyst (with the help of the Unit Leader and the and System Analyst)
• Identify system defects and propose technical solution if applicable

Risk Management

• Help in creating a risk management plan
• Identify issues and mitigate risks

Project Tracking and Monitoring

• Define a process for tracking and monitoring the project.
• Follow up on day to day activities of the team.
• Report any possibilities of delay and changes on the plan.
• Report project status.
• Handle minor exceptions and problems.

User training

• Conduct training sessions on the company products
• Insure that client are fully aware of any functional and workflow aspects on any of the company products.
• Help in creating products manuals.

Customer satisfaction

• Insure customer satisfaction by fulfilling their needs using excellent communication skills.
• Handle client exceptions and problems

New projects prospects

• Identify prospects and guide clients to certain product which fulfills his needs
• Propose solutions to clients in which may lead to new prospect

Sales/Pre-sales

• Conduct onsite technical presentation on the company products.
• Full awareness of company products technical details.
• Deliver and follow up on payment invoices with clients.

Technical Project Coordinator in the Middle East

Who’ve heard of this position before! I bet that no one has, or if they do, then they don’t know what exactly this role carry.
Working as Technical Project Coordinator for the past 4 years now, has opened my eyes to a whole new world, not in management as this role is classified under, but on most important skill that any business need and can’t continue without, it is “Customer relationship”; a relationship is defined to be a bind between two things, and in our case, a customer relationship is the bind between a business and its customers; Not all business owners realize the important of having a healthy relationship with their customers, they often do the otherwise and instead of gaining their trust, they just loose it by simply laying on them; You may ask how this can be? Simply laying to a customer is by not sticking to a deadline, hidden prices, support or even sticking with the meeting agenda.
Now, in a company that has its customers in the same place as their business, project managers usually maintain the relationship between a client and the company that he works for; however, project managers in IT field sometime do not know how to furnish or even maintain the trust, as they do not have a business business-oriented mind, since all what they’ve did before upgrading to a project managers was purely technical with almost no interaction with clients; technical project managers tends to be very strict with clients, and this might cost the business to lose potential future leads.

In a multiregional IT business, technical project coordination is solution for the above scenario, project managers can relief themselves and focus on their ultimate goal which is “deliver the project within the its budget and meet the client requirements”

Now, here comes the role of project coordination; unlike IT project manager, a coordinator goal is to maintain the client relationship beside other important roles which is to communicate “everything within reason” between the client and Project manager and vies versa; gaining trust is simple; however maintaining the trust is the difficult part; sometimes the business itself tries to destroy the trust that has been built in months by a simple irresponsible 1 minute phone call between technical developer or even a project manager and the client; a project coordinator relationship with the client is built on trust, no lies of any kind, no hard talk, the customer is always right; having person to fight with the customer when he is right is something crucial to maintain the trust, project managers however, sometime do not accept this and they believe that they are always right; form a project coordinator point of view, the customer is always right when he has the right money; despite the fact that the client always come up with new requirements and amendments after signing off the requirement gathering phase or even before delivering the project before a week, then if the client is willing to pay, then we should obey without any delay. Convincing the project manager to obey is not an easy task to do, however it’s doable and it’s the right thing to do.

Maintaining trust means that the client can talk to the coordinator freely, which might lead sometimes to new opportunities as clients start seeking advises from the coordinator; I’ve personally brought around 10 projects to my company by doing so. Clients trust can even reach to the point where they can ask the coordinator on a new feature costing and whether he should take it or not; using the trust, a coordinator can propose new business ideas to the client, which he might give to the company that the coordinator works for or not, but its another way to maintain the trust

Technical project coordination in middle east, is almost the same as human resource role their; the company expects you to lie on your clients, in the human resource case employees are their clients; I personally refuse to do that, as I believe that trust is the key to keep a client

A thought to think of now, imagine a technical project coordinator as a project manager!!!

Projects I've successfully coordinated

• Al-Jazeera English web portal
• ASPIRE sports academy portal
• Doha Securities Market – DSM
• Qatar football association portal with state of the art match casting system
• Qatar knowledge base economy - KBE Qatar
• Ministry of Economy and Commerce – MEC
• Qatar Islamic Bank –QIB
• Al-Khaliji Commercial Bank
• Qatar Financial Center secured intranet portal - QFC (internal project)
• Qatar Financial Center Online portal - QFConline (internal project)
• Qatar Financial Center eLibrary based on GoogleMini solution (internal project)
• Qatar Financial Center Firms internet portal
• Barwa holding
• Qatar foreign information agency multilingual website
• Rased secured internet website (internal project)
• State Security Bureau secured intranet portal (internal project)
• Qatar National Olympics Committee - QNOC
• Gulf warehousing Company - GWC
• Al Sharq newspaper
• Raya newspaper
• Gulftimes newspaper
• Qaradawi