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."

Comments

Since when is that in your job description?

[mnmn]

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.

Re:Since when is that in your job description?

[jaredcat]

You should be forewarned that any advanced phone system requires constant supervision... More so than almost any other server. If it has features like Outlook integration, visual call management, etc... Expect to be adding/deleting users, helping people undelete messages from their voicemail box, resetting station IDs (especially in the win2k based systems) and changing the hold music as often as your upper management decides is neccesary.

Talk to someone with a clue

[PapaZit]

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. ;-)