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Solutions for Small Business VoIP?
MajorBlunder asks: "I'm part of the IT department of a small but prospering software company. We have recently filled the capacity of the POTS PBX phone system we currently have installed. We are currently looking into switching over to a VoIP phone system. We have a sizable IT staff in proportion to the rest of the company, so we'd like to be able to maintain the hardware/software in house as much as possible. I wanted to ask the Slashdot readership what experiences they have had with switching over to from POTS to VoIP. Any recomendations for full end to end solutions would be appreciated, and recomendations of things to avoid would be great."
Having seen smart people struggle to get Asterisk working (cool a system as it is!), I imagine there would be quite a brisk market for a pre-configured, low-power box running asterisk ready for the user to plug in some custom messages, and / or rely on existing generic ones. That is, something truly plug-and-play, providing your have at least one POTS line to which it can be connected.
Such a system needn't be *cheap* exactly in order to be quite a bit less expensive than typical PBXes, which are usually overkill for small businesses, as well as for any but the most elaborate homes. (Should be doable for a few hundred dollars, I'd guess.)
Or am I just missing that someone is selling such a beast already?
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VoIP can be tricky - stay away from going exclusively VoIP, for example using Vonage, Broadvoice etc... for business in my experience it's just not there yet. The trickiest part will most likely be choosing the right phones and integrating with whichever PBX / Gateway you'll be implementing. Asterisk is a very solid option - but make sure the server that it's running on is reliable and that the IRQ issues aren't a concern with the hardware.
Getting outbound VOIP Lines might not be mature enough for your company yet. There are always call quality issues unless you manage to get physically near your termination provider and you have a fat pipe from your offices.
The fact that you're a part of a development house is going to help out a lot when customizing your solution. Asterisk really isn't that complicated - modifying it so that it fits your companies needs and provides true business benefit is probably the biggest thing. (Like integrating it with your existing CRM solution or back ending VoIP to your database).
There is a PDF which helps on the overall analysis and how Asterisk can be pretty usefull for smaller businesses =
A Voip Small to Medium Business Analysis
Your network is a factor here as well. Do you know how much traffic you have on the network currently? Can your routers do prioritization on different traffic types, either IP Type of Service or tcp/udp port? You want to have that understood to make sure the quality is good, so VoIP doesn't affect your usual traffic and vice versa.
You can also get switches/modules nowadays that have Power over Ethernet (PoE). So of the two RJ-45 connections (you have the physical cabling for this, right?) in a cube, one connects their PC and the other connects the VoIP appliance/phone back to the PoE port. The phone gets it's power from the ethernet cable. If those switches and the rest of your key servers and network are on UPS, the phones still work when the power goes out.
Good luck.
I won't argue since I have an obvious bias, but Asterisk and CCM aren't really comparable. Using CCM for 400 users wouldn't be cost effective, which is why CME exists. And yes, Callmanager is about a thousand times more complex than Asterisk, and it does a hell of a lot more as well. A lot of those features probably don't matter to a lot of folks, but Callmanager runs installs with tens (and hundreds) of thousands of phones. A bit different running, say, all the phones for a major bank or credit card processing house than running 400 phones in a small or medium sized business.
Different strokes for different folks, but you'd be stupid to dismiss either option out of hand.
I predict 37 clueless "Vonage" replies before this thread reaches 100 comments. 34 of those users will continue to defend their clueless "Vonage" answers even after it's pointed out that they don't want to ditch the landlines so much as they want to have more extensions than their phone hardware allows. Of those 34, 29 of them will have no clue what an extension is in this context, even though they have certainly dialed an extension at least once in their useless gibbering idiot lives.
BTW, for those of you clever enough to know the guy is asking about asterisk... that part is probably obvious to him. He's more concerned with how to manage a network, bandwidth and hardware wise, to use this. With maybe a little "what's the best VOIP phone for your money" thrown in.