• Pasquale on "My company has blocked the use of Skype"

  OpenWengo works very well from Firefox. I have the same problem at work with Skype and other IM's. So I started using this voip service.

  A firefox extention, downloadable from their site, is all you need. Calls are cheaper than Skype and voice quality is almost as good. They also have several softphone versions, including a video version for the Mac (but it does not work very well...)

  The link: https://www.openwengo.com/index.php?yawl[S]=wengo.public.download&yawl[K]=wengo.public.download

  Let me know what you guys think!

  Pasquale

• Hayem on "My company has blocked the use of Skype"

  I have found webcalldirect which lets you place calls from the web,and voipcheap.com which gives you the option to call from app or through a website.

• julian.bond on "My company has blocked the use of Skype"

  My daughter is at Edinburgh University (UK). In halls in the first year (just finished), we couldn't get Skype to work. What they seem to be doing is to block the initial signon process. I believe that Skype's first action when starting up is to attempt a link to their login servers which have fairly consistent IP addresses. Block these and Skype won't work. They also have a forced proxy with Skype banned so even if you use your own remote proxy, you can't get to it.

  We also didn't manage to get MSN working although allegedly other people did manage it. By a delicious irony, the one IM system that did "just work", and for voice as well, was Googletalk. I guess either blocking Google was a step to far even for them, or Googletalk was so new that it hadn't hit their radar yet.

  As an aside, I have a friend doing some consultancy work in a large bank in the City of London. They're internet filtering was so bad that he was reduced to walking across the streets to Starbucks and using the T-Mobile Wifi just to get his work done. It's a complete mystery to me how the knowledge worker drones (like analysts) in their cubicles can actually do their job with that level of filtering. BT call the open internet outside their firewall "The Red Zone" because all sorts of dangerous things happen out there. We call inside BT's firewall "The Red Zone" because all you ever get is a STOP sign.

• jan geirnaert | tropicaljantie on "My company has blocked the use of Skype"

  I find it not so smart to advise an employee do things against the policy of the company. That policy is in place for a certain reason. Explaining how to bypass that is, well, a direct attack to IT-management and the Management in general. If Skype is blocked, there is surely a good reason for that. Maybe somebody should make a manual, how to bypass restrictions in a company in order to use Skype anyhow.

• continued in the Skype Journal Comment River: 200 fresh comments

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