[geeks] Phone system suggestions?

[Eric Railine]

On 9/22/05, Nate <nate at portents.com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> So day job is moving, and not too long ago added the phone system to
> the list of many things I manage.  It's a Panasonic hybrid system
> (analog/digital over two wire RJ-11), and maxes out at 96 lines (half
> digital, half analog), but the company could outgrow that (and
> managing it is a PITA), so it's time to look at something else.
> Would you guys recommend Asterisk?  Or something else?  I'm mostly
> concerned with something that's pretty easy to manage, flexible, and
> not crazy expensive...

There's been a number of good responses to this post, though I think
noone's asked a couple fundamental questions:
- what are the business requirements for the phone system?  An
extension for every employee?  Voicemail for every employee?  Simple
hunt groups?  Simple IVR?  Complicated IVR?  ACD?  What kind of
reporting, and to what level of detail?
- What do you have for a LEC connection, and what do  you anticipate
in the near future - just a number of POTS, a PRI, multiple PRIs,
etc.?
- Where do you/your company draw the line between "not crazy
expensive", expensive, and "crazy expensive"?
- Do you already have all your cabling run that you're going to need
for the extensions?  If you've already got phone lines run anywhere
you need them, going with non-VOIP might make the most sense, but if
you have to run new cabling anyway, the total cost might be cheaper
with a VOIP solution.
- How important is your phone service to your business?  That's not a
flippant question.  In today's environment of a PC-for-every-employee
and a browser-for-every-customer, people tend to forget how important
simple telephone service is to your customers,  your sales people,
your support staff,  your accounting department, etc.  You can lose
a/multiple servers for 5 minutes and no one might notice.  You can
lose your network for a minute or two, and few people will notice
and/or will assume it's their client.  Lose your phone service for 30
seconds and you will be amazed at the number of people you have at
your desk demanding an immediate answer and an unqualified assurance
that it will never occur again.  How important phone service is to
your business should be one of the strongest indicators of the kind of
phone system you need and the level of outside/VAR support you should
have for it.

Having said that, and having admin'd multiple Mitel PBXes over the
last 6 years, I can wholeheartedly recommend them for serious business
use.  While not friendly to your average PC user, anyone comfortable
with CLI (though most of the interface is actually menu-driven, sort
of like ncurses) can pick it up fairly quickly and comfortably.  Most
importantly, they're *very* stable - I had several years of 100%
uptime, and the downtime for the others was always in a service window
for a specific upgrade or change, with a single 5 minute exception
otherwise - and easily expandable as your needs/company grow.

My 2 cents, anyway.

Eric