Having Been the Primary Person in Charge of Implementing All of Our Company S Voip And

Taking Charge of Your VoIP Project

Reviewer Name: Israel Lang, Systems Engineer

Reviewer Certifications: CCNP and Cisco Voice Specialist

Having been the primary person in charge of implementing all of our company’s VoIP and IP Telephony projects, I was more than interested in Cisco Press’ Taking Charge of Your VoIP Project (ISBN 1587200929). This book, by John Walker and Jeffrey Hicks, does an excellent job providing a good overview of most of the issues that one encounters in a VoIP project.

The book is broken up into eight chapters, with topics ranging from VoIP Basics, Planning for VoIP, QoS, and Security. Each chapter averages between 20 and 40 pages. The authors use a style, which will for the most part, not scare away the non-technical among us. Two chapters are slightly more technical than the rest, but this is probably out of necessity. The book is around 270 pages, which I was able to read through in about four hours with a moderate amount of distraction from the TV and kids.

As the back cover states, the book is written in plain language and each chapter builds upon the next. You learn about the standards and protocols involved with VoIP, how they interact, and also the hardware and software needed for a successful project. The authors do a great job explaining the budgeting and planning process. I particularly appreciate that this book does a good job presenting the facts and not just serving as a marketing mouth piece for Cisco.

In the future, I plan on providing a copy of this book to other members of my team who frequently are involved with the sales process so that they have a good working knowledge of the technology. Furthermore the book will serve as an excellent reference for our pre-sales and project management folks in helping communicating the project progression and planning steps needed. Lastly, I plan on getting a few copies into the hands of key people at sites that are even remotely considering a VoIP project. I feel that this book alone, in the right hands, could close the gap of understanding and provide at least a couple of sales.

I wholeheartedly recommend this to sales people, project managers, CEOs, CIOs and anyone else that doesn’t have the time or necessarily the desire to wade through the technical manuals that is needed to talk intelligently or understand VoIP. I think the time spent reading this book will be well worth it for anyone who works their way through it.