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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.
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
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.
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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.
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