June 2001

The following letter refers to Tom Keating's Cc: in the May issue of Communications Solutions:

Tom:

I'm glad to notice that I'm not the only one feeling the same frustration you expressed in your column. I have been dealing with NMS, Dialogic, Audio Codes, Blue Wave, etc. and it's always the same problem over and over. Fortunately, things are changing, but probably not within the PC arena. The CompactPCI area, however, is actually a better fit for the telecom market. Plug-and-play has been a dream for quite some time now and several initiatives have finally come up to "commoditize" this market.

You mentioned H.110. The second most interesting interconnection mechanism that is coming up today is Ethernet. PTI has initiated a new working group within the PICMG (2.16) and have so far been very successful. People are using Ethernet to interconnect card between themselves, but it needed to be implemented in the same way H.110 was. That was the issue that PTI has initiated. It relegates the PCI bus to power and ground, but at least there is no need for any complicated, proprietary APIs, and most of the socket-based applications can communicate with each other regardless of location.

More and more S/W protocols are written around socket to take advantage of this feature, which also brings the level of availability and serviceability to a higher level. But don't go down that path... I just wanted to let you know that your article was very interesting.

Regards,
Philippe Chevallier
Senior System Architect -
Telecom Business Unit
Motorola Computer Group

The following letter refers to the April issue of Communications Solutions:

Hi Tom,

Regarding the TMC Labs review of VBVoice in the April issue, let me first say that we here at Pronexus are very pleased with the review and the resulting Editors' Choice Award.

Under "Room For Improvement" you mentioned that the product would be improved with some sort of log protection so that information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and account information isn't broadcast in the application's channel log session.

There is, in fact, a simple way to block out the log output for security purposes. By checking the Mask log Digit property in the Terminations page of the GetDigits control, you can block the log output. The log output is displayed as Protected. Note that you can also call the GetDigits Initial Setup Property:

GetDigits1.MaskLogDigit = True for the same effect. 
Log output?
ch 1 digits received Protected'
16:51:52-> ch 1 exit via node 0 <Password'> value Protected'

Sincerely,
Karen McClelland
Marketing Communications Specialist
Pronexus, Inc.

People interested in contributing to Communications Solutions are welcome to view our editorial calendar online and contact the editor who handles the appropriate section (Enabling Technologies, Corporate Solutions, Interactive Commerce, Next-Gen Networks/Services). Our editorial guidelines can be found here. Please contact managing editor Carol Drzewianowski with any questions.

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