Most of my customers use AudioCodes appliances in their Skype deployments in one form or another; SBC, analog gateways, recording, management, phone devices. So, when AudioCodes announced that SBC 7.2 firmware is now GA, I had to go get it. I won’t bore my gentle readers with the exhaustive listing of the 30+ enhancement and session capacity updates – the document that outlines that stuff is 70 some pages – and I had to buckle down to get the entire thing digested. Suffice it to say that this is a big update. What I am really interested in is the promised GUI changes and the “click the GUI to configure” claims.
Having downloaded it the other day, I upgraded the firmware on my Mediant 800 SBC and started kicking the new tires a bit.
OK, file loaded. 28.8MB of spotless CMP file. I guess I will click on the “reset” button and hope I don’t have to figure out the “reset to factory” option I think might exist. Well, I clicked the “reset” at 1309 PST…and waited.
The Results are In
After picking my teeth and looking at some Olympic Games results, at 1317 PST I am able to login to the upgraded SBC. I think the watchword here is PATIENCE. This is a total update for your firmware. 8 minutes of patience is not too much to ask for, right? And, we have the new goodness that was advertised:
Let’s open a few pages to see if the advertised goodness actually is goodness and not pure market-speak.
A few minutes pass – did you sit here reading this same sentence in a loop or did you check those Olympic results for yourself? Alright, I have poked around a little. Things in general are the same…but some things have moved. Not a huge issue, but it will take a bit of adjustment/learning. The overall look and feel is certainly AudioCodes, yet refreshingly updated. Like the header CSS?? layout…
And the promised GUI view of the relationships is certainly there also – very helpful for those of us with limited brain capacity.
And as further advertised, clicking an element in the Topology GUI view as shown, does indeed dump you into the tree to configure the element you selected. Maybe now even *I* can figure this thing out, eh? And while I am saying nice things, the linking between configuration elements along with “EDIT” right next to the element you want to change is….very welcome.
1.5 “not so nices”
While I am at it, there is a sorta not so great thing. The old GUI used to have the type of device shown at the top of the page – that seems to have gone away. I forget what I am doing very easily, and it was nice to have the reminder of what device I was accessing. And no analog gateway version (boo hiss).
Two more “nices”
One nice thing, well, actually two – is that when you change something, the “SAVE” selection on the top row gets a red box around it. And (genuflecting towards Tel Aviv) when you resize your browser window, the contents shuffle and resize. Finally.
Conclusion
A big update for the AudioCodes SBC – it took a bit of time for the “burn and reset” but my SBC came back to life without losing a single iota of configuration. The topology click to configure part is really nice. I sure wish they had a version for my MP118FXS gateway. Overall, I think this update is a winner. Login to your AudioCodes account and get it today!
YMMV
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