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."

Comments

Simple

[KiranWolf]

Asterisk.

try asterisk

[amx109]

asterisk . try asterisk@home for a quick install/demo of asterisk's power

Re:Asterisk has saved us over $1 million in the ..

[unixbugs]

We have put 16 T1s in 4u boxes that handle hundreds of thousands of incoming calls daily, each. Asterisk is beautiful and yes, ubiquitous enough to staff IT for it, but we are talking about the Sendmail + BIND of IP-PBX, not to mention the newly released database back end capabilities. The systems are not cheap, nor are the support contracts, but this is a relatively new technology and outsourcing is really the best way to go when you get a bunch of figureheads involved. If you want to pay a couple of internal lackeys to do the job then you will get that kind of liablity and reliability. Better for the market and the open technology to have VoIP specialized in the short term than to try to push the evolving needs of a given phone system on to a newcomer with a very steep learning curve.

Steadily we contribute to a massive knowledge base revising RFC's, protocols, interoperability standards, and marketability premise while walking the big line under fire from bigger iron and governmental agencies, threats of greasy palmed regulation, and the balance of overall OSS zen. With over fourty config files and an entire platform depenedent scalability, having someone come to your place and show you how its done is worth the money especially in this uncertain interim. I hate to sound like that but I'm in the fire day in and day out and I can tell you from experience that we put together some of the most heavily customized communication systems in Texas and are fast growing enough to realize that we do have a product to sell that is worth the cost of replacing million dollar PBX's, and then some. I was all for asterisk falling onto my desk where I used to work because I was going to be given the task of managing the CLI, but now that I have real time under my belt I don't know how the system administration could have made daylight for it without re-allocating allready precious and specialized resources, even in a multi-million dollar Open Source based operation. Seriously, my comment might wreak of FUD but geez man I'm allready preaching to the choir about it. To make a long story short, unless you got some guys that can really handle it just call us. Yesterday I had to tell some guy that didn't speak English that his Windows 2000 DHCP server went down and it wasn't because of Asterisk, the phones were fine, his XP desktops were just knocked offline, and I'm talking about a guy with a distribution warehouse full of Cisco refurbs.