New H-dot standard ties in directories

The new H.350 standard ratified this week by the ITU is designed to marry videoconferencing and SIP voice-over-IP directories with the traditional corporate directory. The H.350 protocol is at its core an LDAP object class used to better define all the attributes and calling information associated with SIP, H.323 and H.320 endpoints, be they phones or videoconferencing units. For end users, this means one-stop shopping when looking up a person’s contact information in the corporate phone book. Not only will you get the standard phone number, you’ll also have the person’s associated video endpoint. An example of an H.350 enabled directory can be found here.

Even better is on the management side of the house. IT managers can leverage H.350 to centralize the management of the various endpoints in their organization. By storing all the dialing and connectivity attributes centrally, it saves the IT person from having to go around to each unit individually to program it. As Adi Regev of Radvision told me, H.350 could make a video endpoint more like a Instant Messaging client – as soon as you login, it’s yours. In the Radvision view, the personal data would be downloaded from the LDAP directory and passed on the gatekeeper, which controls access and bandwidth. Regev things this type of centralized management will be very important when videoconferencing expands more to the desktop and to users connecting in from home.

As of this writing, Radvision is the only company I know of implementing H.350. (They were part of the development group.) For it to really take off, all the big vendors (i.e. Polycom, Tandberg, Sony etc.) will have to embrace H.350.