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Finding the Right Business Phone System?
KodaK asks: "I've recently been hired by a small-but-growing financial firm to be their systems administrator (Non ex transverso sed deorsum), now they want me to evaluate and recommend telephone systems. They want call reporting, and they also want visual call management. I've looked at Asterisk, and while I'd love to play with a system like that, I'm not skilled enough to put together what they want out of it in the timeframe they need, so I've been looking at PBX systems like the Alcatel OmniPCX Enterprise and Artisoft Televantage. However, I don't know enough about phone systems to effectively evaluate them. What should I be looking for? Are there really any differences, or are they all pretty much the same? The Artisoft is Windows 2000 based and that scares me from an availability standpoint (hey, VXWorks is /designed/ to be 5 nines, you can't say that about Windows). The Alcatel is Linux at the core, but is that really meaningful when there's other systems out there designed from the ground up to be telephone systems? Any suggestions? Any warnings? I'd appreciate any information or advice you can give me on any phone systems, not just the Alcatel and Artisoft. I want to make sure I'm making the right recommendation when there's a $30k plus investment involved."
I went through a similar search process about a year ago. We got bids from several vendors and we eventually ended up choosing this one. It's turned out pretty well for us, but it doesn't have the visual management you are looking for. In that case, you may want to try this. I hope it's worth more than doubling your price, though.
...is not that complicated. I don't know where in the world KodaK is, but there are a number of companies offering Asterisk-based solutions. Perhaps asking on #asterisk on FreeNode (irc.freenode.net) would be worth a shot.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The economy is making more sysadmins these days to provide cabling and phone support as well. Only playing with a phone exchange is very different from making scripts for cron in Solaris or AIX. Did you agree with them installation and maintenance of the phone system is part of your work or are they pushing you to do it? There are phone support companies who specialize in these things and work in parallel with the System/Network Administrator.
If you are supporting the phone system, make sure youre called System Administrator/Phone Technician, so that such services arent defined to be part of the Sysadmin. And make sure you get paid for it too.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Check out this article at nwfusion.com:
here.
Seems they cover a lot of what you are asking.
Windows 2000 is stable when only one program is running. I really liked the TeleVantage system, but have no experience with it.
Also go check out the Cisco CallManager, and the 3Com NBX.
I've worked with the Cisco system, and I know that it has call detail capability. It does run Windows 2000. However, it was pretty reliable. I've talked to others running the NBX, and they swear by it.
That all being said, don't rule out the standard telephony players. Although their systems aren't VOIP based, many of them have hooks for VOIP and network management. Many are still hurting after the telecom boom went bust, so you could probably get a decent deal.
Just make sure you go voice over IP. It sounds like you'll be the one supporting it, and being a sysadmin, you'll be much more at home supporting a VoIP system. This seems to be where the industry is moving anyway.
Asterisk is not that complicated, and it's nice because you can pretty much use any VoIP phone with it you want. There used to be another one out there, opensource. The project was started by a Cisco voip engineer, but I couldn't find it about a month or so ago when I was looking for something for home to play with my 802.11b voip phone. The story about it was posted on slashdot sometime last year or the year before, does anyone remember what it was?
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Televantage needs some work. It has serious out-of-the-box security issues that require reconfiguration (and in our case an upgrade too).
Its basically functional and meets our needs though.
BTW, it sends email notifications with voicemails attached, encoded as ms-tnef format. Don't get this if you want to use that feature and don't use MS email clients.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
- VOIP
- handy voicemail
- integration with contact managers
- total control of user privileges
- uses STANDARD handsets (not proprietary)
- totally easy to administer
Unfortunately, it's on Windows... but the last one I installed has run for three years and didn't die once unless the power went out or (just last month) the mobo fried. Not its fault.Just make sure you have some hefty UPS backup, and at each workstation if you go with some powered phones like VOIP...
UserAdvocate: The voice of the user
from interactive intelligence, artisoft, etc, but i don't like entrusting my dial tone to pcs with tons of moving parts and a general-purpose os.
i'm presently using and love my inter-tel system. all the hardware is in a small blade-like rack, no atx power supplies, cpu fans, or hard drives to fail and take my whole system out. the voicemail system runs os/2 on a single blade with storage to an industrial laptop hard drive. all the database programming is done via a windows app, and while the gui can be limiting, the phone system can really do just about anything.
i'm using 10 channels of a t1 with digital ids for phone numbers, and multiple complexities (hunt groups, independent companies, analog breakouts, ip phones at 3 remote locations, etc). i've been using it for about 2 years and i can easily say it's the best stuff i've encountered.
About a year and a half ago, I did 3 months of research on a new phone system for both customer service and regular office users in my company. We wanted something that had every feature known to man (like voice prompts, announced hold times, visual call management, tracking software, database integration), but we were also on a tight budget-- in this case, around $70k for an intial roll-out of 50 stations.
I evaluated pretty much every system out there, from the "real" PBXs made by ComDial, NEC, Toshiba, and Lucent / Avaya, to the "soft" PBXs made by 3Com, Artisoft, Alcatel, and Interactive Intelligence... Bouncing features and quotes off of at least two dozen different sales agents.
My conclusion:
Best Features available ANYWHERE without completely breaking the bank: Interative Intelliengce I3 Phone System
Best Bang for your buck: Artisoft Televantage
Runner Up: 3Com NBX100
The "real" PBXs that ran their own OS and didn't have Linux or Win2k at the core just couldn't compete with the features of their younger cousins from smaller companies. Of course the tradeoff was reliability. You could expect even a 10-year-old NEC PBX to keep running exactly the same, never crashing, pretty much until the end of time. However if you just had to have those features (like database integration, custom voice prompts, etc...) with 99.99999% uptime, I would have to be prepared to spend well over $150k... which I wasn't going to do.
I finally decided on TeleVantage for my company, and a year and a half later, we are still happy with this system. It does have it's problems though-- it's never exactly crashed, but it has had some mysterious slow-down issues that calls for a reboot about once every 3 weeks. We also had a database corruption that caused us to restore from a backup about a year after installation-- but all in all, its a fantastic system with every feature you could want.
As for the others in my final 3:
Interactive Intelligence was by far the system that impressed me the most out of all the ones that I looked at. It had even more features than TV (the ability to record EVERY call and store them in a seperate database for instance), but for the most part those two were very similar. Both had great Outlook integration. Both had visual call management. Both could do everything we wanted. Two things really set I3 apart from TV. First, they had the best design tool anywhere. Database integration, even with our PostgreSQL DB, required virtually no programming. You created call flows in the design tool like it was a flow chart in MS Project. The other thing that set I3 apart from TV was the price. I3 was about 50% more expensive than TV, and that was the only reason why I didn't go for it.
3Com NBX100 looked like a great system. One of it's best features was that it could support 200+ users on an IP network, making it unneccesary to wire our new building for both Cat.3 and Cat.6. Unfortunately, at the time, the $10k difference in wiring costs was still less than the difference in prices for 3Com IP phones vs. regular phones that use Cat.3. The NBX100 also had most of the features we were looking for... like visual call management, custom prompts, etc... But it couldn't do announced hold times (which was a requirement for me) without an expensive extra piece of hardware from a third party that would have doubled the price. Even doubled though, the price of the NBX100 system (which would have been around $35k for us) was still fairly competitive with what we were expecting to pay. However, I was unwilling to rely on an all-IP system. The NBX was still a new system at the time and it had been rumored to have echo and other voice quality issues. Of course the 3Com reps denied it, but I couldn't really take the chance.
--
I know this is going to sound rude, but with the amount of money that you're going to spend, you really need to spend time talking to someone who knows what they're doing.
;-)
Given your lack of experience, consider talking to your local telco: a lot of them offer package deals of hardware and support for organizations that want a PBX but don't want to run it.
Failing that, find someone who's willing to talk. Again, your local phone company may be willing to offer consultants on a contract basis. Another good source of advice: colleges. Talk to a few schools in your area. Ask to talk to someone in their telecom group. Find out what they're using for staff and faculty (where per-user billing is less important), and also find out what magazines they read and how they stay current on new hardware and trends. Get up to speed on trends and terminology before you start talking specifics. Find out what info you need before you talk to vendors. Find out which vendors they use and which they'd like to use.
Then, throw all of that work into the trash can when your boss tells you that his brother-in-law's nephew is a phone contractor, so you'll be using whatever he installs.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Unfortunately, I don't have a background in PBXs. But I am aware of how cheaper, flawed models of PBXs will have holes to be exploited by "phreakers". They will then proceed to route many long distance calls through the PBX, leaving the company with the bill.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
That security track record has less to do with the package than the configuration of it.
http://portusgroup.com/portusconnect/index.html
I've been usign a Cisco IP Phone for quite some time and I quite like its features. Individual phones are programmable over the web for speed dials, calls redirects, etc., and phones are fully programmable in XML. Adminstration of a CallManager for the finest granular functions is an entirely different story though, although if you have used windows 2000 and a web browser you should already feel comfortable.
Well that sounds reasonable, make sure you clarify maintenance is not covered. I repair computers for some people and buy some for others. They all run to me screaming if something breaks regardless of what the SLA says, so I have to lay down the maintenance responsibilities at the time of purchase. Turning down support on a dysfunctional phone system when the whole company is not functioning because of it is difficult because youre then part of the company.
Ive seen other sysadmins who really spend all their time sysadmining, but are HELD responsible if a phone system breaks. Just some of my concerns and opinions out of experience.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Security is defenitely an issue. Make sure to firewall your PBX and to disallow outbound calls from inbound trunks. This usually means disabling the "follow-me" setting that rings your cell phone when your office extension doesn't pick up.
Another simple precaution is making the number you dial for an outbound trunk something other than '9'. Or make '9' only available for local calls.
For instance in my company's system--
Dialing 9 goes to the 8 copper POTS lines we use for local calls and for when our T's go down. These lines don't have long distance service.
Dialing 4 goes to our 4 T1s that come in from our switch in LA.
I'm sorry, but Windows 2000 is rock solid as long as you know what you're doing. Just like any other OS. Now if the software has bugs and leaks memory or whatever that's another story - your application avail rate will suck. But blaming it on the OS is rather stupid. Besides, 99% of the time Windows will will clean after borked apps so you don't have to reboot. Schedule service packs on weekends during low-usage hours or whatever.
Not only the cheaper PABXs have "holes", even the big established vendors have had releases in the past with mayor holes and other faults. Security flaws are not always the fault of the vendor but mostly of inexperience of the admin. For example trunk to trunk calling (ie. connecting an inbound call to an outbound call) is possible when a user puts his phone in a call forward to an external location (for instance an overseas friend.) User goes home, calls his own phone number and presto! "free" call to his friend on the other side of the world. call accounting can help you detect this kind of action when you know how to read the records, but it takes a good admin to know what is going on exactly in his PABX.
First things first. Why are you looking for Voice over IP systems? Is it required? Why? Do you think maintenance would be any easier? It won't be. How many users must the system support? 10 or 10,000? Do you need future networking functionality? Other locations? sharing the same numbering scheme? The systems described are small systems, aimed at a max. 256 users. Also take note, a lot op VOIP or IP-enabled PABXs don't offer the same functionalities as their conventional counterparts. And if they do, prepare to pay a lot more for less functionality. (Cisco Unity voicemail for instance is based on the Active Voice Repartee voicemail systems. Guess which one is cheaper and offer more functionality?) Also, not unimportant, where is the PABX needed? In which country? European PABXs have a different way of handling things than North American systems. (Euro: call handling is done by department on default, call pickup, call forwarding functionality, inbound group/ACD functionalities. NA: enduser is supposed to handle all incoming calls him/herself.) I agree with a previous poster, get someone who knows their stuff. The system you are getting will be lasting for 8-10 years...
The version we have will let you use any IP phone as an extension (which is to say, identical to a wired extension). The other thing that's nice is that it gives you analog phone jacks, so you can use any phone/fax/modem you want at each extension.
It's got other nice stuff, like a (windows) desktop app that will pop up to do phone stuff (transfers, conference calls, etc.) Or a java applet, if you don't have windows.
I'm not sure how common the other features are, but it has good call routing/group calling stuff. They sell an add-on package for doing reports on the calls that each person made, and you have very fine grained control over outcalling (e.g. Joe can call out from his voicemail, even off site, but Bob can't).
I'm pretty satisfied with its capabilites, overall.
I am sorry I can't be really helpful by recommending something. However, we recently bought a Mitel 3100 IP phone system and I can tell you it's a lemon. Non-intuitive and inflexible voicemail, random misbehaving, Web administration frontend that *require* IE, etc. Avoid it at all cost.
:wq
You don't give any specifics, not even about the size of the organization, much less planned growth and call volume so, no one here can give you a legitimate answer. But, what you do tell us is that you are way out of your league on this decision and if the company is larger than 10 people, you could be putting yourself and the company in a grave situation. There are many legal requirements for phone systems (think 911) that some smaller offerings do NOT address.
I strongly recommend that you contact a local provider (or three) of PBX/Key Systems and services and get them to come and do an analysis of your company's needs. They will then be able to recommend the right system for you. They will look at things like number of sets, growth plans, call busy minutes per day/month/year, fax needs, call center integration, voice mail, and much much more.
Finally, I would recommend that whom ever you do call be a dealer for Nortel. Notrel offers the best telephone equipment in the world (spare me the Definity crap) and has systems that support everything from 2 sets to 500,000 sets.
You were hired to be a Systems Admin, but now are buying phones? I hope it doesn't get much worse for ya.
Hire a consultant for installation and training,
and do Asterisk. You will have wide open future
growth options for the company, and be expanding
your career prospects too. Not to mention that
your well-spent consulting and training $$ will
go a long way in advancing the Asterisk project.
Win, win, win.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I've had great luck with Televantage. Stable, good features, users find it easy-to-use.
VOIP scares me. Seems pretty complex and expensive.
Good luck!
buy used, or slightly used, at 1-800-phoneguys. i don't work for them or know them personally, but the guy who runs it is talked about alot on this site, and is pretty successful. buy from them and help fund their ferrari addiction!
moox. for a new generation.
I *just* finished putting together a 3Com NBX100 system a month ago. Of all the choices we looked at for a similar-sized organization, the NBX100 seemed like the best fit. It had the best mix of current features, including all that you mentioned, as well as future expandability and nice touches like compatibility with H.323 gatekeepers.
We were also impressed with their softphone application... until we used it. We were given a reference at an AOL call center that used the softphones exclusively, so we figured they couldn't be that bad. We were wrong.
The reps told us not to buy cheap USB headsets, so we bought cheap line-level headsets and used the onboard sound cards: big mistake. This caused horrible echoes due to the lack of echo-cancellation in the hardware. We have since replaced all the headsets with Plantronics USB headsets, only to substitute one problem for another. Now they don't echo, but they crash randomly on some of the computers. Here is a list of the outstanding problems we have:
The softphone has a noticeable delay, that gets worse the longer one is on a call. After five minutes of talking, it's like talking on a HAM radio halfway around the world.
There is an 'external page' feature on the NBX that plugs into an amplified speaker paging system. It works from the hardphones, but not from the softphones.
A few people's computers crash and reboot sometimes when they try to answer the phone. This is especially annoying and neither we nor 3Com has *any* idea what the problem could be.
So far, all 3Com has done is blame the OS (Windows 2000) and the network (multicasting?) for all the problems. They finally, a month later, have put someone on our case and are supposedly working on solutions. But I can't believe the problems we have had from a system that was touted as "six years old".
Don't get me wrong: if we had NO softphones, the NBX system would be damn near perfect. The hardphones are slick as hell, but you have to get the $300 business phones to have functionality like call groups and speakerphone.
If you really want softphones, though, Swyx was one solution that was similarly priced and seemed rather impressive. They seemed more focused on the software side of things than 3Com. Their server runs on both Windows 2000 and Linux, which is also a plus.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I know I'm posting late and anonymously and might not even get read, but I did go through this with a $10,000 budget for a 30-person company just recently.
:)
My suggestions:
First, are you absolutely wedded to the idea of graphical call management at each workstation? Because you can save some serious coin (like tens of thousands of dollars worth) if you just get a really high-end, wired, non-VOIP PBX system. That was what we did.
We were (I left the company a couple of months ago for a cooler job) a real-estate firm with decidedly non-technical secretaries who already knew how to transfer calls on the PBX with all the buttons and the blinking lights, so when it was time for a major upgrade of our phone system we just bought more of the same. A newer, bigger, better, higher-capacity system with call-forwarding features from the same vendor. (It was a Toshiba cabinet, if I recall correctly.)
And the other point I can't stress enough: GET A GOOD VENDOR. When you purchase this kind of equipment from somebody, they'll probably support it for you... and even if you want to or are required to support it yourself, your vendor will still be the first line of contact when you need a new part, a replacement an expansion or an upgrade. So really, do check out their references and thoroughly vet them before you buy.
If you're in the Massachusetts area, I can highly recommend Datel (www.datel-com.com, I think) who services our installations for a very low per-incident rate of something like $12 (maybe $25) per hour. Since I was always fixing the databases and web servers and e-mail servers, it was more than worth it for me to call them any time the voicemail or PBX system had to be tinkered with.
Really... shop around for the best vendor selling any system that meets your needs, because if they have an affordable and good support team, it will lift mountains of burdens from your shoulders
Their BP 250 was the best choice I found in the market, in this price range.
"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds !"
If you are willing to spend a little extra money, I highly recommend Cisco Call Manager. It is a VoIP system that provides access to the pstn through voice gateways. It is a little more expensive than a classic PBX, but is VERY easy to configure and scales extraordinarily well.
I'm sceptical about Windows 2k also, but the Call Manager runs on 2k and we have never had a crash. The voice quality is supprisingly good also. The codec used is the best GSM standard (I forget the exact one). There are also options to use different(lower bandwidth protocols) depending on the source and destination of the call. Any feature you can think of is available, including unified messaging through Unity, which runs on top of Exchange.
A little costly, but well worth it if they are "growing" as you say.
The best piece of advice I can offer is understand as best you can how the business will be using the system. How large will it need to be, will it be growing? What kind of availability is required? What extra features are you looking for, voice mail, conference bridges, ivr, acd, etc?
We have 5 phone systems, 3 of which are replicated accross 3 local call centers for load balancing and redumdancy. We have 3 Avaya systems, 3 Aspect systems, 3 Periphonics IVR's, a Concerto Unison and Concerto Contact Pro product. Reliability and redudancy are huge for us, a big piece of our business is a 24x7 call center that handles 3 million inbound calls plus another million or two outbound calls a month.
Unix systems were a must!!! They simply don't have problems. They are the most reliable systems I have ever seen. Period.
However, this may be overkill for you. If you understand what you are looking for and do your homework you will be ok.
BTW -- Telecom is one of the easiest ways to cut costs and impress your boss.
good luck"Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty..."
My company went to The Sisco System about 6 months ago. It took about a month, and a new switcher to get the bugs out of the system. During that month, we had audio quality issues. We are running the system on a win2k server. My phone has crashed a couple of times, but overall, it seems to work as advertised. One of the features that I liked was the fact that when I had to move my office, my phone number went with me without having to call in the service company.
when your boss tells you that his brother-in-law's nephew is a phone contractor, so you'll be using whatever he installs.
Using a rule based rewrite system (in Lisp) to simplify such relationships, wouldn't this reduce to simply "when your boss tells you that his nephew is a phone contractor..." ?
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Here are my two suggestions, for what they're worth:
1) This is not the place to do homework on this issue. a great place to get started is to find somewhere that has the last year or two's back issues of Communications Convergence or similar trade magazines. That one in particular might be good - I don't know how they are now that they're part of CMP, but the magazine used to be called Teleconnect and was edited by a crusty old guy named Harry Newton. I've never seen more honest reviews and buyer's guide info anywhere than I did in Teleconnect. I haven't done this is years, let's hope that part stuck.
2) It's *really* important to learn enough to understand what's going on here: Telecom isn't hard, but it's *very* different from what you're used to from a networking point of view, and the business is filled with sharks - if there's the first hint you don't know what you're doing, they'll take you to the cleaners. (For instance, if you somehow let it slip that you don't know whether you want a loop-start or ground-start circuit, or worse, even what that means...)
Finally, IP phones and VoIP can be a good way to go, but realize the technology is young, and you may spend more for future flexibility. Some day, nearly all wired phones will be IP-based, but that's a long time, and there may be no compelling reason to jump now. If you are interested in looking that way, you might want to consider Mitel's stuff, which I've heard (only) integrates nicely with networks, including thier SME server, which is the old e-smith Linux distro.
Good luck, and please post you decision here along with what you learned for future reference...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Since this is not your field of expertise, you should make that clear up front to your superiors. Put a positive spin on it by saying you're happy for the opportunity to add telephony to your skill set. Next, involve the end users heavily in the selection process. This will make the process much more cumbersome, but their feedback is essential and their buy-in just might save your butt when the system isn't everything it was hoped to be. Did I mention end user input? You don't say how many users you'll need to support, and whether or not you need the features of a PBX (versus a key system). Since that discussion is well beyond the scope of this forum, suffice to say that a key system like Avaya Partner may be more than adequate. Be sure to look into the "IP Centrex" offerings. These can be extremely cost effective solution. Management is dirt-simple. Extremely reliable, even when put up against traditionally rock-solid conventional PBX gear.
A few weeks ago we switched from an old AT&T system to Artisoft Televantage.
I didn't make the call, my boss did. But we looked at a number of systems - many that are mentioned in other posts here.
So far, so good. We had a problem with it not releasing trunks. That was *not* good. Artisoft said the problem was with the intel chipset, Intel said it was Artisoft's fault.
Either way after a week or so of waiting, we received a patch, installed it, and wala, it works.
We got it working with the building's paging system, and now will soon have it doing faxing in/out.
For what we needed (and bang for the buck) it was our best choice. Note, however, we're not phone guys, just IT guys who got stuck with having to do this.
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