I didn’t. But, I was intrigued. (That’s a bad sign… as it usually means I’m going to stay up until the wee hours.)

It turns out to be pretty [...]]]> A few days ago, a reader of this humble blog asked if I knew a way to embed “Skype Presence” in a SharePoint Web Part.

I didn’t. But, I was intrigued. (That’s a bad sign… as it usually means I’m going to stay up until the wee hours.)

It turns out to be pretty easy-breezy, with a few caveats. I’ll explain those below. It’s easy because lots of stuff today is “widgetized.” A few minutes on the Skype site turned up some Skype web-widgets—– basically HTML code one can embed on a blog or web page — that gave me what I needed: HTML that would display Skype “presence” by Skype name (what I call a SkypeID).

Realize, I’m no code slinger, but it looked to me that one could simply modify the HTML, adding in different Skype names, and then stack it up in a CEWP. So that’s what I did.

That’s it. Once again, the Content Editor Web Part (AKA: CEWP) is a wily rascal. It can do the most amazing things. The HTML itself is pretty simple. It consists of a small scriptlet, and some basic HTML. Here it is in a screen shot:

I’ve highlighted the areas you need to change – basically substituting the appropriate SKYPEID in the yellow areas, and/or the appropriate “friendly name” at the bottom. That’s the basics.

My first attempted yielded the result above — a webpart with my Skype status and name. If you click on the “I’m Online” graphic, it launches Skype and tries to make the call (via Skype, of course).

Silly Rabbit, Trix is for Kids

I tried it, but some wiseass at Skype designed it so you can’t call yourself. (Grumble – what fun is that!). Anyway, this all once again shows how truly neat the CEWP is.

Now I decided to get fancy — after all it was still early. I decided to set up a nice format, a table, light border, etc. Just because, I also decided to see how it handled multiple Skype accounts in the same part.

Not a problem, it turns out. I just had to cut-and-paste the code, changing the embedded SkypeID in two places, and inserting a “Friendly Name” so that it looked nice on the screen. It’s all pretty straight HTML. No muss, no fuss, and — no kitchen drudgery.

Here’s the final screen shot:

Schizophrenic Skype Status

The caveats and other bits:

1. You’ve gotta have a Skype account to use this. And, you have to have Skype loaded to use the button to call someone. If you don’t have Skype, you’ve wasted your time reading this anyway.
2. This is just stacking up the standard Skype “Skype Me” widgets. You can find other ones here: http://www.skype.com/intl/en/share/buttons/
3. I’ve not a clue what kind of demand this puts on SharePoint — but since this is all “client-side” code, it shouldn’t be a problem.
4. The trick here is the Content Editor Web Part. Make it your friend.
5. I did this originally in MOSS, and then duplicated it in WSS, just to make sure that it worked in both environments. It does.
6. This Skype status does NOT refresh unless you reload the page. Hence just leaving the page loaded might result in inaccurate “presence” information. [I looked at a few methods to automatically refresh, but nothing seemed elegant, and the easy answer would refresh the entire page.]
7. Use at your own risk.

I’ve appended the final code below, and I put an exported copy of the webpart up here. Feel free to download and abuse. You’ll need to edit the code and insert the desired SkypeIDs and dup the sections for additional IDs.

Finally — and I say this seriously — Caveat Emptor and all that jazz. I offer no guarantees. I distribute this free of all responsibility and liability, use and/or abuse at your own risk. It should give you no problems, but if it does, well… I’ve left town, and I’m living with the dogs on the Dalmatian coast.

Content Editor Web Part – Code for Skype Presence embedded on WSS site.

Note the areas you’ll need to edit and change. You must replace the text “SKYPE_IDn” and “Friendly_Name” with a real Skype IDs and really friendly name.

“Damn,” I muttered, shaking off a sense of déjà vu. It was early morning, Sunday, December 23. The winds [...]]]> I woke up when I heard the snap, crackle, pop. A tree had fallen in the woods and I had heard it. Whatever the philosophical implications, the actual effect was that my power went out.

“Damn,” I muttered, shaking off a sense of déjà vu. It was early morning, Sunday, December 23. The winds were howling — gusts to 90 mph, or so the weather channel had predicted the evening before. Trees were snapping and cracking like Rice Krispies. “Damn,” I muttered, shaking off a sense of déjà vu. The earlier the hour, the more limited my vocabulary. “Damn,” I muttered.

I glanced at the clock. Now on battery — having achieved true cosmic Zen harmony with its VCR brethren — it was happily flashing 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. “Damn,” I muttered, switching my gaze to my backup alarm clock. It read 7:30 am.

It’s was a Sunday, the day before Christmas Eve, and I was without electricity. I thought to myself: “now, you couldn’t pick a better day to challenge the fading infrastructure of a once-great industrial state.” I then told myself to shut-up and stop being so pedantic — fading infrastructure, indeed. “Damn.”

Me and disasters, well, we’re on friendly terms. Part of my job is disaster planning, “Disasters R Us.” I get to ponder global pandemics, earthquakes, deep-fat-fried-Twinkies, extensive power outages, staff gone wild, management run amok, nuclear winter, printer jams, and printer jellies. It’s all part of the job. Since ICT is now central to people’s days, lives, and work, it’s my job to figure out what to do when things go pear-shaped.

Consequently, I try to have all the appropriate responses already lined up, ready to go. I was a Boy Scout; I am prepared. In the case of my Christmas Eve scenario I was ready to leap into appropriate action.

In this case, I pulled the covers over my head and tried to adjust the position of my patented personal heating unit (AKA Tanzy the Dog). Moving a sleeping dog is impossible, by the way. Dogs control space, time, and gravity. They can change their weight and size, at will. And, they’re also very fond of tennis balls. It was Sunday, for Pete’s sake, a holiday, during a holiday week, no less. I was going to sleep in whether I wanted to or not. Now that’s an entirely appropriate disaster response.

Experts have lots to say about disaster preparedness (pesky bastards); most of it is either unintelligible or shrouded in $10 words and $100 phrases that don’t mean squat. Personally, I have four simple elements: Avoidance, honest and realistic objectives, maximum flexibility, and clear communications. Let me explain:

1. Avoid the disaster in the first place — this is the most important rule and it’s the one that most people ignore. I prefer avoiding a disaster to living through one. Given a choice, spend your resources on avoidance. I like redundancy (hence the backup alarm clock). In this case, I should have bought that standby generator I lusted after when the world was going to end in 1999.
2. For those cases where avoidance fails you, at least be honest in your planning. Identify the processes and resources that are truly critical, and I mean truly. Having all your phones work is nice, having one that works is critical; having AC in the summer is nice, having heat in the Michigan winter is critical. Moreover, once identified, develop realistic and cost effective recovery objectives. Simply, that means figure out how you might easily resurrect the critical bits, cheaply, quickly, and without much fuss.
3. When you’re planning, admit you can’t know the future and don’t try. The objective is to give your future self maximum flexibility. Remember “Murphy’s Law of Combat” — No plan ever survives first contact intact. Designing a plan that tells you exactly what to do is stupid. Instead, design so you can roll with the punches. Be prepared — plan — to adapt, improvise, and overcome. Have options, have backups, have redundancy, and think on your feet. Worry only about the critical stuff (see item 2, above) and give yourself lots of lots of options.
4. Finally, plan on communicating. Plan to (and have systems that allow you to) talk to folks — your clients, your staff, your mother. Stress clear communications in your planning and in your responses. This is absolutely crucial and this is where most folks screw it up. All the planning in the world won’t do you a lick of good if nobody knows about it, or if nobody knows what to do. Have a backup communications plan, and have a backup of that.

Back to my wee disaster…That morning, Tanzy’s canine gravity control was in top form. She was immovable. I made due, wondering all the while how such a medium-sized dog could be such a huge dog, or is it the other way ’round? Nevertheless, she’s a great heater (dogs have a body temperature between 101°F and 102°F).

We get 4 or 5 major “outages” a year. Obviously, I’m on an alien flight path and the damn di-lithium crystals are playing havoc with the flux capacitors again. Perhaps, you say, I’ve been watching too much of the SciFi Channel? Maybe, it’s my karma. Nevertheless, we’re prepared. Batteries, flashlights, a small battery powered lantern, 10 or 20 gallons of bottled water. Duct Tape. We’re prepared, I like the process. I’m often tempted to put together the survival kit from “Dr. Strangelove”:

Survival kit contents check. In them you’ll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days’ concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”  (Slim Pickens speaking as Major T.J. “King” Kong from “Dr. Strangelove,” 1964).

Admittedly, my supplies are slightly different. (The Russian phrase book seemed superfluous and I couldn’t decide about the lipstick.) Nevertheless, we’re prepared. We’re prepared because when the power goes out, it’s not just the lights. We lose all niceties like water, phone, toilets, heat, internet, TV, garage door opener, and all my ‘puters. Prepared does not mean pleasant.

At 9:30 am I got up. The power was still off, and I started wishing again that I had succumbed to the siren call of Y2K and bought a standby generator. I made conscious decision to revisit that decision — avoidance is the best defense.

With great trepidation I realized it was time to brave Detroit-Edison’s (DTE) voice-mail-hell — the living example of how not to design your customer / disaster communications systems. So I woke my wife.

DTE’s integrated voice response (IVR) was designed by someone with the communications skills of an illiterate monkey. Perhaps, I’m insulting the monkey. It was designed to obfuscate, not communicate, to placate not to inform. Even that was done badly. During a disaster, you don’t want to trifle with people. You want a clear message, with clear instructions.

This particular IVR was not only irrelevant and condescending but inconsistent. Seemingly randomly, the option to press the keypad would disappear, and it would only accept a voice response. Moreover, its voice recognition system was lousy, only understanding if you mimicked it, imitating its lilting prosody, forcing my wife to sing “I don’t have one” when asked about a second contact number. After endless (and slightly chilly) minutes of punching buttons and singing into the phone, we heard a hopeful note: “please hold on while I transfer you to a customer service representative.”

If the journey was endless, the letdown was immediate. The system quickly interjected: “Actually, there are no customer service representatives available right now.” “Actually,” I thought? What strange phrasing. “Actually, I’m an idiot for actually getting my hopes up.”

“Please enter or say your telephone number and a customer representative will call you back,” said the IVR. To that, my wife sang a few more bars of “Yes,” “No,” and “I don’t have one,” it hung up. I went to gather firewood.

All in all, we must have called at least 20 times between Sunday morning and Monday morning, Christmas Eve. No one ever called back. Finally, on Christmas, we reached a human who told us our worries would be over by 5:30 pm, a repair crew was on its way. At 11:00 pm, still in the dark, I realized we’d been stood up again. I stoked the fire and vowed to get a generator. Two days later, the crew arrived.

I learned something. The DTE systems for both reporting problems and checking on the status of problems just did nothing except to force us to sing into the phone — Voicemail, the quickest way of telling your customers that frankly, you don’t give a damn. The web site (via laptop and blackberry) was designed solely with marketing in mind. It was also unusable via handheld.

Let me tell you, trying to navigate through buttons, icons, pictures, and swirly glossy things with a handheld does not make a good marketing impression. This struck me as another example of poor communications planning. Folks, pay attention, ’cause this is a lesson for me too:

In any sort of a disaster situation, most likely the tool you’ll have at hand is a cell phone. Moreover, the tool your customers, users, staff, or family will have is also a cell phone. Design your information systems, your communications systems, and your response systems with that simple fact in mind. Keep things simple and to the point, and communicate often.

This old dog learned from the experience. Girded by the experience, I decided that my various disaster recovery plans needed some rethinking. I needed some communications redundancy — and I needed to make things work via handheld and cell phone, the telephone is a simple and resilient communications resource, ubiquitous in its reach and adoption.

In the end, I went with a simple out-dial system, something that could be turned on or off at the flip of a switch, something off-site, third-party, and something that I didn’t have to maintain. In this case, a pre-programmable phone-tree service called “Call-em-All.” For next to nothing a year, it provides a turn-key automatic phone tree that can, at the drop of a hat (or crash of a tree limb), automatically call a preset list of folks and deliver a message. They even have nonprofit rates.

Be smart. When you plan for disasters, plan to communicate. Plan to communicate about its duration, impact, and consequences. People want to know what’s up, and they worry if they don’t know. Do that and you’ll weather it. Planning is easy; communications can be tough.

Note: Most of this was written in the dark, on a laptop. The laptop was charged using our hybrid Mercury Mariner (it is one giant battery after all) and the draft was uploaded using a wireless connection via my Blackberry (also charged off the hybrid).

I find it phenomenal how much of what defines this connected age actually is [...]]]> I think it was Alan Kay who once said (and I’m paraphrasing here): the personal computer won’t really be personal until you can wear it on your T-shirt. I think of that quote every time I see an IPod commercial.

I find it phenomenal how much of what defines this connected age actually is actually pretty “personal.” I used to say that the internet revolution was all about having a “one-to-one personal conversation with hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people.” But, I’m not sure I really groked just what I meant, just how essentially personal much of this communications and information revolution really is.

Technology Gets Personal

The fact is many of today’s really revolutionary technologies, and all those related gizmos and gadgets, don’t easily lend themselves to the needs of an organization. They are personal; either they don’t scale, or they don’t scale well. They’re not designed to. They are designed for the individual, for the consumer market, not for the organization.

The cell phone is a case in point. A cell phone is inherently personal. The billing, contracts, and rate structures all reflect this fact. Moreover, despite tax laws to the contrary, it’s almost impossible to accurately distinguish personal from business expenses, especially when you factor in the so-called “free minutes,” other rate plan permutations and other “features” designed to confuse the user. So too, blogs, social networking, and other Web 2.0 stuff is somehow just slightly ill suited to an organization — kind of like a pair of shoes that don’t quite fit. You can put them on, and they may look good, but wearing them for a long walk would be a bad idea.

A couple of other examples:

• Flickr works well for me, but is lousy for an organization. The same is true for Picasa. (See my post about my Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, here and here.)
• Del.icio.us has some “network” support, but it’s token at best. It’s a personal tool that you can bend to your organizational needs, but that bending takes work.
• Blogs, as I mentioned, are curiously unwieldy in an enterprise setting. Sure, they’re being used, but the underlying assumptions built into blogging — the philosophies inherent in the software — are ill-fitting at best.
• Information services like The New York Times online offer great individual access, but few offer any form of organizational subscription. The same is true of most magazine sites and even membership organizations where an organization is the actual member (such as TAG, COF, GEO, etc.).

All in all, these tools don’t scale well for the needs of what I call “SOB’s” — short for Small Organizations and Businesses. [How often do you get to make up an acronym like that!] And, while the tools don’t scale, expectations definitely have. Those larger than life expectations now drive demands in the workplace. It is somewhat ironic that the home-user experience — in terms of both applications and bandwidth — has surpassed the experience available in the workplace.

While small organizations struggle to scale, at home we luxuriate in megabits and bytes, bandwidth by the bucketful. We have servers at home, email at home, remote access at home, and video conferencing at home, wireless networking at home. Hell, I even have my own phone system tied into a VoIP provider so all my calls are “free” — yet those poor SOB’s (remember, that means Small Organizations and Businesses) continue to pay through the nose, by the minute, for plain old telephone service, and limp by, sharing with 20 or more people the same amount of same bandwidth I have at home, just for me. Poor SOB’s.

Scaling Mont Skype!

I set out to change at least a small part of this equation — and I took one of my favorites, Skype. I set out to scale Skype. Skype is neat. Skype is phenomenal. I’ve spent hours on Skype, conversing from Ashtabula to Antwerp, Brussels to Bali, with nary a glitch, nary a charge. I’ve even Skyped from hotels scattered around the world, using nothing but my laptop and an “all-you-can-eat” EDGE connection via my Blackberry. Free calls from here to there and back again. Skype is really neat.

As I mentioned, the only problem with Skype is scale. It’s designed for the individual, from interface to online directory. To roll it out to an entire organization is daunting and strangely expensive. First, you’d have to install and maintain the software on every desktop. Then you’d have to somehow manage tens or perhaps hundreds of individual (read: unmanageable) Skype address books. Finally, everybody needs headsets and microphones or the like. Hell, as I think about it, for one hundred people, at $50 a headset, it would cost, what? Five thousand bucks? Suddenly “free” takes on a whole new meaning.

Not to mention, I reckon half of those headsets would be broken, or disappear, before I’d even finished handing them all out. I imagine a scenario that all too soon might have me eyeing my dear colleagues, headset wires entwined in my fingers, pondering the pros and cons of the ancient art of the garrote. It’s not a risk I want to take. No doubt that’s relief to my colleagues.

The bandwidth costs also make me nervous. The thought of 20 or 30 folks, all simultaneously making Skype conference calls (probably to each other) gives me the willies. All this and we haven’t even talked about the security issues. At the risk of risking redundancy, Skype – out of the box – doesn’t scale.

Rather than live with these issues or eschew Skype totally, I decided to figure out a way to scale it. The need is there, and the pricing is attractive — especially internationally. In the NGO community across Europe and Africa, Skype has caught on like wildfire. Once again, the individual marketplace was driving expectations in the enterprise space. Time to adapt or die; besides Skype is neat.

What I Want:

The goal was to scale Skype by leveraging investments in existing equipment — those things called telephones that sit on every desk and that not-so-cheap PBX that sits in a closet and hums. Skype doesn’t do anything that a phone can’t do — except it lowers costs. In some cases, it eliminates costs totally. Skype maybe neat, but the pricing is revolutionary.

What I needed was something that would tie Skype to my PBX. I figured I wasn’t alone in the need, and necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. I went looking for that invention — a Skype-to-PBX gateway. All in all, my requirements were fairly simple:

• Something that would leverage my legacy (read: old) telephony infrastructure.
• Something that would offer centralized management and deployment.
• Something that would fit into my existing IT infrastructure
• Something that wouldn’t break the bank.
• Something that would do it all – allowing Skype to and from our PBX, transparently.
• Something that would let me shift some of our long distance over to Skype, to call regular landlines.
• Something designed with a “black box” mentality, without the need for lots of bits, bytes, cables and crossovers.
• Finally, something that would deliver a user experience equal to what Skype delivers to the consumer without gobbling up lots of bandwidth.

I looked for two years. I found it last month. We installed it last week. It works. It meets my requirements, and it scales things quite nicely. There are a few caveats. I’ll explain those below.

What I Got:

The solution, the magic box, is called VoSKY Exchange. (A bad name, IMHO – I’ve got too many “Exchanges” already). From this point forward I’ll just call it VoSKY (I pronounced it “voe” as in “snow” and “ski,” as in downhill. I try to put a little Russian spin on it just to add a bit of mystery). It’s made by ActionTEC. Find it here: http://www.vosky.com/

I looked at quite a few other options. Most were consumer-grade products designed to let you hook your home phone into Skype via your PC. That’s the last thing I wanted. There were a few “higher end” products that appeared pretty lame, almost fly-by-night.

[A note to would-be vendors — when half the links on your web site don't work, I have a hard time trusting your engineering acumen or your attention to detail.]

At first glance VoSKY tottered damn close to the edge on my “fly-by-night” scale. I worried a bit. Being an early adaptor can be dangerous. Moreover, the VAR experience was not what I would call “perfect.” Like so many other soft/hardware companies, VoSKY works through a VAR network, and I think we were their very first customer. It’s tough to train a VAR, teach them how to answer questions, return phone calls, and generally do sales and fulfillment like it should be done. I do get a certain perverse joy in it. <insert Evil Laugh here> But, it can be slow and torturous as well. I am not an easy sale. I usually have lots of questions and I tend to read the manuals (all of them) and then ask even more questions.

In the end, instead of the single “black box I wanted, I got two boxes — one VoSKY gateway server and one Dell box to function as a Skype server. Not perfect, but close. The first person to put this all in one black box will make a fortune.

Here’s what you get:

1. One VoSKY black box:First, you get a nice, rack-mountable box, and it actually is black; the size of a standard 19″ rack mount router. And, as you can see, it’s “Skype Certified.” I have no idea what that means. It has 1 or 2 USB ports and either 4 or 8 phone jacks, depending on model, to connect to your PBX. In phone-lingo, they’re called FXO ports. They look like regular CO (central office) phone lines to your PBX.
2. One Dell 1U PC/Server:You also get a PC, with XP (SP2) and all the required cables and other crap to connect things together. That includes one or two USB cables and power cables. You’ll need to provide the necessary telco cables to your PBX. We used a single cat5 cable and split out 4 pairs into RJ11c jacks on both ends, one set plugged into the VoSKY and the other four went to the patch panel and from there to four ports on the PBX.
3. Software:You also get a copy of Windows XP SP2 and a copy of the VoSKY software, VNC (for remote management), a copy of Apache TomCat (web server), and some of their utilities for managing address books via a web browser.

When it was all done, it looked like this:

(Note: the rack is really level; it’s me that’s slightly skewed)

Happy 4-port VoSKY Skype Gateway / Server

You can see on the picture (above) the blue cable that connects from the PBX to the VoSKY box. Note the little lights on the lower right. The Skype lines show up as “green” when they’re live, and “red” when in use. The in-use indicator is handy in case you want to reboot things. The black USB cable connects to the Dell 1U server immediately above it.

You need to provide:

1. Money: Our total cost, installed, for all the stuff (above), Skype setup, and the like, was roughly $4,000. Yes, that includes the Dell rack mount, and all the software, as well as on-site installation. (Not that they actually did much on site).
2. Skype Accounts: Four or eight Skype accounts, each with a minimum pre-paid SkypeOut credit of $10. You need to set up the pre-paid accounts so that you get a so-called Skype “business account.” This, by the way, was the toughest part.
3. PBX or other phone equipment: A PBX with four or eight free FXS ports, with hunt-group features on those ports — it will scale up to 16 ports, by the way, if you stack two eight-ports together.
4. A little thought as to:

• Where to put the equipment and how to connect it to your PBX
• What to call your Skype accounts and how to list them in the Skype directory. This by far was the toughest part of the whole thing — dreaming up just the “right” name. It’s kind of important as it shows in the public Skype Directory.
• How you plan on putting the inbound Skype address on your B-cards, letterhead and the like (hence the problem with dreaming up the right name).

Putting It All Together:

The whole thing assembles pretty easily. You install XP on the PC and set up user accounts for each Skype address. Per our standard setup for workstations with automated processes, we rig it to auto-login to the account, and set everything to start up on login. Included with the VoSKY setup is a copy of Apache TomCat that’s used to manage access to both public and private speed-dial lists. More on that below.

You then connect the PC to the VoSKY box via USB, and connect the VoSKY box to your PBX. Finally, once the PC is setup and the box is connected to your PBX, you set up your Skype accounts — in our case four of them — one for each line.

Each Skype account corresponds to a CO line on your PBX. CO lines should be set to “hunt” — so that when someone picks up a phone and dials “8″ for Skype, the PBX will hunt through the available lines and pick the first Skype line not in use.

On the inbound side, those CO lines should either be set to ring at your receptionist or to an auto attendant function on your voice mail system. Sorry, no direct dial. With our setup, you’ve either got to ring the receptionist and ask for someone, or connect to a VMail system and, from there, punch in a code or two to get to a downstream extension.

Here’s what the Skype PC looks like when everything is up, running, and happy.

VoSKY – Skype Accounts Up and Running

Skype Me, Dr. Memory!

I know what’s running through your mind now. How the hell does all this work? How do you actually make calls? How do you dial a Skype “name” from a telephone?

Well, first off, inbound calling, Skyping to the system, is easy. (“Skype,” like Google, has become a verb.) You just “Skype” our main Skype Name. That’s part of the magic, by the way. A single Skype Name that will automatically roll to the next Skype account if the one you call is otherwise engaged. All you need to do is list your single, master Skype account. Then it’s online, available to anyone with Skype. Whoopee! 

Finding Nemo – the Skype Directory

Making out-bound calls, Skype-to-Skype or Skype-to-phone, is a little more difficult, but there are some tools that ease the pain. These tools are all web-based, accessed through a browser, using that Apache TomCat server I mentioned previously. (TomCat is all set up and ready to go. It provides the management interface to the VoSKY system. )

Since Skype addresses are not numeric, making Skype-to-Skype calls from a telephone requires some sort of translator — something to convert numbers to names — so that Skype can handle them. To do this, VoSKY provides an intermediary “speed dial” system in the form of a simple look-up table.

The look-up table links Skype names to assigned speed dial numbers. Every Skype name needs a number, either in a pubic list, available to everyone, or in a private list available only to you via a secret PIN. To make things easier, there is a software tool that will grab addresses from an existing Skype address book and let you assign them numbers in your VoSKY “Private Contact” list. Once in, they’re managed via a simple web browser interface. It looks something like this:

My Skype Speed Dial List

Once it’s all set up, you have three options for dialing:

1. Dial direct to any landline or mobile number using SkypeOut.

   Dial “8″ for a Skype line and then dial the number directly just like a regular phone (with dialing prefix of “00″ followed by a country code, area code, etc, end it with a # sign, e.g., 8-00-1-810-123-1234#. Skype rates (cheap!) apply.

Dialing with VoSKY

1. Call a Skype address from the “Public Contacts” list:

   Dial “8″ and then dial a pre-configured “speed dial” number from the public VoSKY speed dial list, e.g., 8 – 100#.

2. Call a Skype address from your “Private Contacts” list:

   Dial “8″ and then dial your secret “PIN” to designate your private “speed dial” list and then dial the private speed dial number, e.g., 8 – “PIN” – 21#.

As I mentioned, inward calls are easy. You just Skype the main Skype name. If the gods are smiling, it should ring nicely at the receptionist’s desk… Ask for me and you’ll probably get my voice mail.