I hardly ever use instant messaging. The reason isn’t a laudable desire to avoid distractions. It’s because I simply forget to open that IM “silo.”

We’re so used to working with applications that operate like silos — email, document editing, instant messaging, media players — that we don’t notice it until someone brings it to our attention.

What’s more, for those of us who have difficulty staying focused in the best of cases, the between-applications shuffle provides endless opportunities for distraction and time wasting. For example, it’s taken me four days to finish this story.

Mill Valley, CA-based IP communications company CommuniGate wants to help me out with its newest offering, Pronto!; a browser-based user interface that brings together e-mail, instant messaging, rich media, RSS feeds, and groupware.

Sold through distributors and service providers, Pronto! can be run by a service provider as a hosted service or on-premises by an enterprise. Business and consumer subscribers can use their Pronto! desktop through any Web browser, anywhere without installing any client software.

What sets the Adobe Flash-based Pronto! apart from other unified communications and office suites is that it brings multi-media into the mix.

The system marries two of today’s hot trends: Rich Internet Applications (RIA) — aka Web 2.0 — and unified IP communications. The interactive nature of the application is important; this is not simply a Web mail program. These applications work just like the ones physically on your desktop, says CommuniGate VP of Business Development Jon Doyle, and they are designed go seamlessly with the workflow.

“If you look at the way people work, they’ll have an email client open, they’ll have a media player open, they might be using a blogging tool or working on a document,” explains Doyle. For example, Pronto! integrates your calendar and your email and lets you drag and drop video from your desktop and publish a video press release seamlessly.

Pronto! is designed for small to mid-size businesses with 20 to 200 users — the kind that don’t have the time or resources to invest in managing an in-house system like Microsoft Communicator. Pronto!’s sweet spot is with small-to-medium size legal, medical and media firms.

It’s an underserved market, according to Doyle.

“With Microsoft you have to have Exchange, Active Directory, Live Communications Server, a PBX, the Office suite,” says Doyle. In other words, lots of software and equipment to install, configure and manage.

“If you look at small companies, they don’t have an IT guy to set up Microsoft or Lotus,” he continues. “They can’t have five or six products to deal with. It might be all right for Delta Dental but not for the dentist down the street. Pronto! is technology ‘baked’ to be useful.”

The system’s secret sauce is Adobe Flash. The first reason is security, according to Doyle.

“Flash is inherently secure because it runs in memory space,” he explains. “Flash is a binary that runs in memory space within the Flash or Shockwave layer, and is far more secure. Java, AJAX, Javascript [other technologies used to build RIAs] open security holes because they can execute exploits, and thus can be used by hackers to get into the PC.

“That’s a big thing for us,” Doyle adds, “because we didn’t want to unleash a whole series of fixes.”

Easy handling for multi-media is another benefit, says Doyle. “Multi-media plays inside Flash. Ajax and Java [other technologies for building RIAs] call up a player,” he explains, “and players are a security hole. Once you let it play, it’s on your PC.”

Finally, with Flash Lite bringing RIAs to handsets, Pronto! gets to go along for the ride. “Over the next 24 months you’re going to see a lot of Flash Lite,” says Doyle. “Providers are starting to look at it for games, data applications. If you start a Java application on a cell phone,” he adds, “it’s not intuitive.”

So what’s next? First up in September will be integrated voice services; either through a CommuniGate plug-in or built in capabilities in the next version of Flash Player. After that, Doyle says, “really creative packages of software — voice messaging, SMS, email, all crafted for special uses.”

Now excuse me, I have to go open my IM program and see if any of my old friends from high school want to chat.

Unified communications just got more interesting today. Mill Valley, CA-based CommuniGate today launched the Pronto! client interface, based on Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex 2. Targeting both businesses and service providers, Pronto! unifies all Internet communications — from e-mail and IM, to chat, rich media, and groupware — in a single client interface. Later today I’m going to get a demo. More to follow.

VoIP pioneer Packet8 is also getting on the unified communications train, integrating Microsoft Outlook into its Virtual Office hosted PBX.

Shoretel is making it easier for customers to buy with its no-down, 100 percent financing Managed Services Program. Costs stay fixed for 10 years.

No download, no software, no computer. That’s the promise of Rebtel’s new mobile phone VoIP calling service. Try the beta here.

And speaking of mobile VoIP, Mark Ismach recently filed a patent for a method of allowing any mobile phone to place VOIP calls directly. Back in the 1990s, Ismach registered the trademark BIOS (basic input/output system). At the time, manufacturer Phoenix Technologies’ BIOS systems were used in just about every computer made and Phoenix was forced to remove the word “BIOS” from its products. The effect of Ismach’s latest move could be chilling for the mobile VoIP market.

From the lemonade-from-lemons department: Milford, CT telecom equipment company AbleComm has been sitting on a warehouse full of old rotary phones for the past 30 years. Now retro is in and the company is doing a land office business in “New Old Stock” phones, refurbished phones, and reproductions of Western Electric phones from the 1930s through the 1960s. I’m getting a red rotary dial model for my kitchen — the same one my in-laws got in 1955.

For small- and medium-sized businesses, going all-VoIP is not an easy decision.

Fortunately, the switch-over, which can result in substantial savings and add bold new capabilities to tired old office phone systems, can be done in baby-steps: Purchase an Internet Protocol (IP) based phone system, but keep the PSTN lines, for now.

It is indeed possible to integrate VoIP into an existing office analog system, keeping current phone services intact while routing costly toll calls out over IP. Until recently, though, the hardware needed for such integration was difficult to use and expensive.

There are two ways to route calls between VoIP and the PSTN: subscribe to an Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP) or keep the PSTN lines and purchase equipment to make the conversion.

Keeping the PSTN lines requires VoIP gateways to convert the PSTN signal to a VoIP signal. For analog lines, these gateways need a Foreign Exchange Office (FXO) port.

Until recently, most reasonably priced VoIP gateways had only one or two FXO ports - enough ports for home use, but too few for small businesses and remote offices.

The average price for a four FXO port VoIP gateway was $400-$500, until Linksys released the SPA400.

The Linksys SPA400 is an attractive low-cost ($295) four FXO port solution that costs $100 less than its peers.

The official position from Linksys is that the SPA400 will only work with the Linksys SPA9000, but we’ve figured out how configure the SPA400 to work with other systems.

We share the the Open Source PBX Asterisk and the CommuniGate Pro Internet Communication System configurations at Voxilla.com.

CommuniGate released version 5.1.1 of the CommuniGate Pro software today.

The 5.1 release came out last week, but had some bugs.

I’m working on a product review for another product. When I get to a point where I can stop, I will try out the new release. I have an open SIP issue to test and see if it was fixed with the new release.

Here are the major points from the release notes:

5.1.1 22-Oct-06

• XIMSS: the Calendaring, File Storage, and Task management operations are documented.
• XIMSS: many operations are renamed - the old names still can be used, but XIMSS applications should be updated before 5.2 release.
• SIGNAL: only the presence SUBSCRIBE with the adrl+xml content subtype are processed as "self-subscriptions".
• Admin: the Log Display Size Limit Preference option is implemented.
• SIP: strict-route processing moved from SIP Server to SIP Client.
• Bug Fix: WebUser: 5.0c1: if the login page was opened using the wml/imode/imodejp references, the response Content-Type was not set.
• Bug Fix: WebAdmin: 5.1.0: updating any Settings->General page put incorrect data into the Main.settings file, making it unreadable by 5.1.0 after server restart.
• Bug Fix: WebAdmin: 5.1.0: the MIB link did not work.
• Bug Fix: Admin: 5.1.0: if a postmaster account is replaced with a different object (Forwarder, Alias, etc.), the server shut down in 10 minutes due to "no postmaster password" situation.
• Bug Fix: Platform: 5.1.0: a bug in Microsoft Visual C++ optimizing compiler caused various problems in the Win32/Intel version.
• Bug Fix: MEDIAPROXY: 5.1c4: re-INVITE operation did not reset the "remote port" data, causing communication problems for clients that switch ports during one call (such as voice/fax gateways).

There’s probably little data tracking this, but the PBX is no longer limited to the business setting.

It’s a safe bet to say that many of the thousands of installations of the popular open source Linux-based Asterisk PBX) and off-shoots such as TrixBox, FreePBX and others, are chugging away in private homes helping to create a fledgling internet phone connectivity system that is poised to give pricey international carriers the fits.

The home PBX is not yet simple enough for the casual computer tinkerer, but given the pace of development, that day is probably not far off.

Or it may have already arrived.

It’s still a bit of a secret, but some users of the Communigate Pro (CGP) internet communications server have discovered that the recently released version 5.1 of the powerful system is now free for up to five users.

This means home users (and micro-businesses) now have full use of Communigate’s suite of communications tools (including an industrial-grade email server, contact server, calendar server, XMPP-based IM server, PBX, Flash-based online access tools and full-fledged web server) that can be installed on dozens of different platforms, including Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OSX (install it on a Mac Mini, as we did a few weeks back, and prepared to be impressed).

Jon Doyle, Communigate’s VP of Business Development, confirms that the company, well-known for its email server solutions among large enterprises and internet service providers, has decided to make a five-user version available for free, though “no official announcement” will be made until November.

“We’re doing the Community Edition for two reasons,” Doyle said. “Communigate Pro comes packaged with several open applications and a simple but powerful programming language and we expect that there will be a lot of interesting uses and capabilities added by the community.”

“Just as important, though, is that we see the future as having a domain for any house,” Doyle said. “All communications, including phone calls, will go to that domain.”

It’s all part of a future Communigate sees built on open communications standards.

In time, Doyle predicts, “there’s no concept of tolls or location-based services as there is in legacy communications networks or closed networks such as Skype’s. User@domain is the address space, or identity, for all forms of communications on the internet; whether it be email, voice, video, presence information, instant messaging or web sites. It’s all open standards communications, whether in your business, your home or in your car.”

To Doyle, a household computer server is the natural progression of the growth in recent years of home networks. He envisions the Communigate Pro Community Edition server to be the backbone for all communications in a home where it is installed.

And because CGP version 5.1 includes a software-based session border controller, which overcomes the sticky NAT difficulties that has hindered the VoIP-standardized SIP protocol, it allows for remote registration of devices right out of the box.

“It means you can send a low-cost ATA to Brazil,” Doyle said, “and have it register with your CGP box in San Francisco. Calls between the two locations are free.”

The way CGP treats a user account is different than how Asterisk is configured. In Asterisk, any device that registers with the server is addressed separately, and no two devices (IP phone, ATA, etc.) can have the same log in credentials or share the same extension (though macros can be used to direct incoming calls to more than one device).

CGP, on the other hand, allows multiple devices to register with the same credentials (usually, the same as the user’s email credentials) and to share extensions. What this means is that a single account can have various devices attached to it (i.e.: a phone at home, one in the office, a WiFi enabled mobile, or an IM client running on a laptop connecting to CGP’s built-in Jabber-like server). The user sets his or her extension as an alias to the email address, and when someone dials that extension, all the devices attached to the account will ring.

Another aspect of CGP that differs is how voice mail is handled. Besides managing voice mail over the telephone, a user can listen to messages sent to his or her email account, and can forward or delete the messages (which erases them from the server) on an email client such as Outlook or Mac Mail.

Doyle believes that CGP’s built-in web server will also be of great use in the home. “We think that people will quickly develop tools to easily publish home photos or a family blog, without need for an outside server.”

In order to facilitate use of the CGP Community Edition in homes where broadband internet access does not include a static IP, Doyle said, a plug-in is available that allows seamless interaction with No-IP.com, a service that allows a URL to point to changing dynamic IP addresses.

It may seem a stretch for a company like Communigate to move from the enterprise space and the ISP right into the home. But Doyle points out that more than 125 million around the world are now end-users of the CGP email server, and “the leap into the home is not that great.”

“CGP has shown that’s its architecture scales up cleanly, with less resources, and less administration than any other platform,” Doyle said. “It also scales down because of that same architecture.”

Doyle expects that a series of documents to help new home users of CGP will be available on a community web site at the end of November.

Communigate Pro can be downloaded for free at http://communigate.com/download.