Vocera Communication System

Boldly talking over the wireless LAN

In "Star Trek: The Next Generation," characters in the 24th century communicated by tapping a badge and speaking ("Picard to Engineering"). Magically, the badge would contact the person no matter where they were on the ship. Here in the 21st century, Vocera has introduced a wireless LAN-based  interactive voice response system that uses lightweight badges similar to the "Star Trek" system.

The Vocera Badge connects via an installed wireless LAN to a Vocera server and is operated largely by voice command. (As an option, you also can connect to analog phone lines by connecting Vocera to a PBX, Centrex or other system.) With a bit of work, these no-hands communicators can become very useful where wireless LANs based on 802.11b deployments are working.

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In "Star Trek: The Next Generation," characters in the 24th century communicated by tapping a badge and speaking ("Picard to Engineering"). Magically, the badge would contact the person no matter where they were on the ship. Here in the 21st century, Vocera has introduced a wireless LAN-based  interactive voice response system that uses lightweight badges similar to the "Star Trek" system.

The Vocera Badge connects via an installed wireless LAN to a Vocera server and is operated largely by voice command. (As an option, you also can connect to analog phone lines by connecting Vocera to a PBX, Centrex or other system.) With a bit of work, these no-hands communicators can become very useful where wireless LANs based on 802.11b deployments are working.

Vocera doesn't control the most critical component of the system - the 802.11b infrastructure. We found that if a wireless LAN can be "killed" or has "bare-spot reception," so can Vocera. But when configured correctly, Vocera can operate during very high wireless LAN network loads without losing quality or functionality. It won't replace a PBX or your business phone system, but this can augment and "cut the cables" for mobile employees. Companies that use walkie-talkies might find the Vocera system sleeker, more feature-filled and less cumbersome.

The system

Vocera shipped us a preconfigured Dell 4500 server with Windows 2000 Advanced Server installed. Normally we prefer testing the components that end users/deployment personnel would use, but Vocera ships 100% of its server systems through value-added resellers, which are required to deploy a ready-to-run/configured system. So we let Vocera ship its server almost completely configured. However, some work on the server was required (see How we did it ).

The Vocera server includes a base platform (the Dell 4500 in our case), Win 2000 Advanced Server (Win 2000 Professional can be used and we recommend that), Vocera software, Nuance  voice-recognition software and an optional multiport Intel/Dialogic phone board. The total Vocera software installation took about 10 minutes.

The badges (we received four) are based on 802.11b (other 802.11 variants are not available) and initially are programmed via a configuration download through an access point. The access point requires a specific IP address (in a specific range) to download the configuration. Installation is more difficult than it needs to be. Whether the choice is static or dynamic IP address, each badge must have an initial wireless LAN adaptation setup procedure. This ritual is oddly cumbersome as all configuration must come from the wireless LAN - there is no equivalent to a cell phone "base station-to-PC" connection for initial configuration.

After some additional minor glitches, we configured the badges and set up the group/user database. Vocera cannot read an Active Directory or otherwise use Lightweight Directory Access Protocol  or another directory service to import user or group information into its database. Vocera uses the MySQL database and Apache/Tomcat Web server (which requires shutting down or moving Internet Information Server's Web service ports if they were installed).