Audio on your Intranet

Continued from page: 1

Friday, April 12, 2002

Software: Voice Paging 

A voice-paging application lets you broadcast messages across all or selected members of a company. The benefit: a simple and cost effective way to make public announcements, share information and manage crisis situations by quickly sending critical voice messages to the intended recipients. 

One application is NetBeeper from Network Programs India. It works on client/server model, and uses VoIP and IP multicasting technologies. Every machine has both the client and server installed. It works on Win 9x/NT/2000 machines, having a speaker and microphone. The server application is used to broadcast voice messages across a group of clients. 

The server has a simple interface, with the look-n-feel of a mobile phone. It has four main buttons: Enable Call, Disable Call, Paging and Stop. A Call From edit box that displays the IP address of the client machine in case of a point-to-point conversation. The status of the server at any point is also available in another edit box on its main interface. 

The Client, too, has four buttons: Enable, Disable, Ack/Reply and Quit. Its edit box shows the status of the client. As soon as you start the client, paging will be enabled by default. You can use the disable button if you don’t want to listen to any broadcast messages. The Ack/Reply button is used to start voice conversation with the server. 

Once installed, you’ll have to make a few configuration settings using the NetBeeper Configuration tool from Start>Programs>NetBeeper>NetBeeper Configuration. You’ll have to provide the IP address of the server and the multicast IP address on which you want to wait for the broadcast messages. It works fine with the default value.

The way the software works is: You click on the Paging button on the server application to broadcast a message across to the clients and speak your message using a microphone. After the message has been sent across and you wish to hear a response from the client, click on the Enable Call Button on the server. At the client end, the user will have to click on the Ack/Reply button to initiate a conversation with the server. Post this, a pop-up message appears on the server machine showing the client’s IP address trying to initiate a conversation. It’s up to the server to accept or reject a conversation. The client application sits in the system tray and you can keep it running continuously.

While the application is simple to use and works fine, it has a few limitations. For one, you can’t restrict the broadcast to select clients. It will go to all clients having NetBeeper installed. Plus, there are two separate GUIs for the client and server, which the user has to shuffle between during usage. Apparently, Network Programs is planning to make these changes in their upgrade version to this. The cost of the application is also pretty steep at $100 per seat.

For more see www.networkprograms.com

Neelima Vaid

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