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Drupal

VoIP Drupal with Tropo How-to Part 1: Configuring3

by shidan on January 6, 2012 in ,

As promised from my post, Exploring Telco Clouds with VoIP Drupal, Tropo & Twilio, this is the first part of a how-to and hello-world for VoIP Drupal with Tropo as the backend service.

The first step is to install Drupal version 6.x as the VoIP Drupal module won’t work with earlier versions or Drupal 7.x. There are many how-tos for installing Drupal and the process is quite painless so I won’t be reviewing it.

The next steps are to:

  1. Get an account with Tropo over here.
  2. Install the VoIP Drupal module in the standard way you install modules, it can be downloaded from here.

Next, configure Tropo:

  1. Logon to Tropo with the account you created.
  2. Create a new Tropo application for your site:
    1. In “Your Applications” section which you will find on the account page, click on the link “Create new application” and choose “Tropo WebAPI”.
    2. Fill in with a name of your choice in the application name field.
    3. Fill in the URL field with either of the following patterns, depending on whether you have enabled clean URLs in Drupal:
    4. Now press the “Create Application” button on the screen.
    5. Activate your application tokens:
      1. Click on “Outbound Tokens” > “Voice”, a pop-up window will appear with a “Launch Token” button. Press the button.
      2. Repeat the same procedure for the Messaging token.

      (Note: These two tokens are required for the Tropo configuration in your Drupal site, so make sure you copy them for future use)

  3. Now you can go ahead with associating a phone numbers with your site. Tropo provides both a default Skype and SIP address for your application. If you want to associate additional phone numbers with your Tropo account, follow these steps:
    1. Click on “Add new phone number”, a pop up window will appear.
    2. Choose a phone number from the list and press the plus (+) sign shown on the right. The phone number you enter will be a new inbound number for your site. (Add any additional numbers you want and close the pop up window).
    3.  You can view all the numbers/addresses in the Tropo applications’ settings where they are all listed.

    4. Note: If you want to use a specific number as the caller ID for all calls made from your site, follow these steps:

    • Navigate to your sites admin > voip > call section
    • Enter the new number in the “caller id number” field. The field takes in numeric digits only.
  4. Now you can associate instant messaging networks with your site including GTalk, MSN, Twitter:
    1. Click on the icon for the IM network you want to add under the “Instant Messaging Networks” section in the Tropo application.
    2. Fill in the username and password.
    3. Click on the “activate” button located to the right.

Now you must configure VoIP Drupal:

  1. Install the voiptropo.module and enable it.
  2. Set Tropo as the VoIP server:
    1. Go to admin > voip > servers
    2. Click on the “configure” link under Tropo
    3. Using your Tropo credentials, fill in the “Username” and “Password” field.
    4. Fill in the “Messaging Outbound Token” and “Voice Outbound Token” with the tokens you saved when you configured the Tropo service:
    5. Press “Save”. This takes you back to the admin > voip > servers page
    6. Now select the ‘Tropo’ option
    7. Press the button ‘Set default voip server’

  3. Now enable outgoing calls (outbound) to be made from your site:
    1. Go to admin > users > permissions
    2. Look for the “VoIP Module” permissions
    3. Enable the “make outbound calls” permission for the roles desired in this location
    4. Press the “save permissions” button

That’s it; you now have finished configuring VoIP Drupal and are ready to start building your application, which I will cover tomorrow when I get some time…

Exploring Telco Clouds With VoIP Drupal, Tropo & Twilio1

by shidan on January 3, 2012 in

Every telecom related software and product that I have been involved with the last four years (and boy does time fly fast) has been on the device side and long gone are the days when I lived and breathed server side solutions. During the past holidays, I decided to take a peak back at the other side and see what’s new, especially with open source and Telco cloud services.

It turns out not much; you have a few new services like Twilio and a few of new “high level” middleware solutions. One of these that caught my eye was VoIP Drupal a project started by folks at MIT’s Media Labs and Center for Civic Media.

I decided to take it for a spin. In addition to Asterisk and Freeswitch, VoIP Drupal actually supports both Twilio and Tropo which was an added bonus for my exploration.

I must say, my overall sentiments on Telco clouds haven’t changed these years, telecom infrastructure as a service should no longer be about start-ups. You are dealing with a mature market and an overabundance of well developed technology platforms; the value adds that a start-up can provide are going to be small and easily reproducible. This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in the Telco cloud, to the contrary, telephony is really hard and anything that makes bringing voice communications to the web easier is valuable.

Playing with Twilio, my impression was that they have done a great job in creating an easy to use system, but with quite limited functionality. The service is also very easy to replicate.

Tropo, on the other hand, pleasantly surprised me … Voxeo is taking a different approach and moving beyond a platform for telephony (phone numbers) to a platform for true unified communications that supports a slew of networks including the PSTN (phone numbers in over 40 countries with SMS in US and Canada), Gtalk/Jabber, SIP, Twitter, AIM, Yahoo and MSN Messenger. Having one API that writes to all these services can be incredibly useful. Something else to note about Voxeo is they are not exactly a start-up; their voice platform is quite mature and feature rich.

Now going back to VoIP Drupal and why I think it’s brilliant. Well to start with, Drupal is brilliant:

• It has lowered the barrier of entry for webs start-ups more than any other framework to date.
• There are countless inexpensive and talented developers who can mold Drupal into virtually any web service you can think of.
• It has many existing solutions that can be easily customized to fit your needs.
• It has the confidence of enterprise companies and it’s being developed in a way to meet the needs of the future web.

VoIP Drupal is important because it empowers the millions of Drupal web developers to build virtually any telephony service you can think of, from a GroupMe clone to a Grasshopper type of service, without knowing much more than the standard Drupal abstractions … and it does this without tying you to any proprietary platforms and services. In fact, together with a solid backend, like Freeswitch, VoIP Drupal can serve the non-specialist as their own personal (and scalable) Twilio.

I‘m confident that providers who decide to ignore or compete with VoIP Drupal, instead of surfing its wave will get washed away sooner or later; VoIP Drupal will impact the decision of millions of developers when it comes to telephony integration and the best way for a cloud platform provider to stay relevant to non-specialist web developers will be to compliment and increase the its value (and any similar projects that might pop up). A good example of this type of value is Tropo’s ASR module which brings speech recognition to VoIP Drupal, a feature that is completely absent on Twilio BTW.

For the technically inclined, I’ve taken some notes that will make a good how-to for getting started with VoIP Drupal and Tropo, I will post it here in the next few days in case it might be of use.