A few 5.1 bug reports have come into CommuniGate and they will be releasing 5.1.1 in a few days.

If you haven’t upgraded your production environment yet, wait for that release. One upgrade is always better than two in a production environment.

Release 5.1.1 will fix a disappearing settings issue and add https support to Pronto.

I upgraded our CommuniGate Pro Internet Communications application server to version 5.1 today.

I put together five upgrade tips to make the upgrade a little easier for others.

Need more tips or have tips of your own to submit? Check out Voxilla Tips.

CommuniGate released version 5.1 of their Internet Communications application server today.

This release is the latest major release of the software and adds a number of improvements and new features.

For more information see the CommuniGate release notes and check out Voxilla.com for the upcoming product review.

I hate writing about something that we sell through the Voxilla Store, but news is news (and no-news is no-news) and our friend Andy Abramson gave us the opening.

A German company, 4S newcom, is pitching an IP PBX that is loaded on an Apple iPod Shuffle (news?) and runs on a Mac Mini (no-news).

The system, called iBlue, will begin shipping on November 6th, to coincide with the VON Europe conference in Berlin.

An entry level system will be priced at 2,999 Euros (about US$3,750) and consists of a Mac Mini (version not disclosed), an iPod Shuffle, and five snom300 IP telephones. The low-end offering licenses up to 250 users and allows 30 concurrent calls.

It’s an interesting enough idea to get some notice from VoIP bloggers like Abramson and Rich Tehrani. But as Abramson points out, a Mac Mini based PBX is not new.

For the past year, we (meaning Voxilla) have been working with the folks at Communigate Systems (based across the Golden Gate from us in Marin County) to get the company’s full-featured cross-platfom internet communications server into the business marketplace. You can read about the product here, (please pardon the shameful internal linking).

The Comunigate Pro server runs on dozens of platforms, including Mac OSX, and comes with a SIP-based PBX, full switch, session border controller, an email server (like Microsoft Exchange, but it actually works) and an XMPP-based IM server. We run Communigate in our offices.

When five of us went to Boston for the VON show last month, we set up Communigate Pro on a Mac Mini to provide telephone service for all of us at the booth. Though the spotty internet connectivity at the Boston Convention Center provided a challenge, Voxilla Director of Engineering Eric Chamberlain got the system up and running with relative ease. The total cost for hardware and software for the system Eric set up is less than US$1,800.

The set-up was definitely a big hit at the booth. Quite a few people were startled to see a full-fledged communications server on such a small (and Mac-elegant) footprint.

We don’t sell the Mac Mini and I prefer to use the iPod as it was intended. But the Communigate Pro-Mac Mini system is slick and easy to set up by the Mac-savvy, and doesn’t have to cost a pretty Euro.

If there is one thing the schlep to Boston proves, it’s the versatiltiy of IP communication technology.

Voxilla is a small company and because we recognize the value of presence at our industry’s premier confab, we’ve got every one of our key players outside the shipping and fulfillment department here, thousands of miles away from home base.

While it might be nice to spend our time here schmoozing and socializing, cementing relationships with people and companies we only ever have a chance to meet on-line or on the phone, negotiating new alliances, and even nosing around for new and interesting developments coming over the horizon — all the things an industry event like VON is designed to produce — we actually have a business to run.

So what we’ve done the past three days is move our operation across an entire continent, though you’d never know it by calling us on the phone.

The mobility afforded by IP communication technology allowed us to establish an East Coast outpost in a matter of hours, proving that IP telephony works.

Many of the exhibitors here show off the latest and greatest iterations of the technology, but the devices are “dumb.” They are here, you can see ‘em and touch ‘em and hear all about how they work in any number of deployments in the real world, but in large measure it’s theory.

Here in the Voxilla booth, the PBX solution we’re selling is the PBX we’re using. The IP phones we’re demonstrating are connected to our PBX and live to our offices in San Francisco, Montreal, and Manila. Our PhoneLabs cell phone stations are synched to my cell phone and we have two separate analog phones making and receiving wireless calls on my Cingular account.

Now, if I could just find time to do a little schmoozing.