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Ask Slashdot: Open Communications Set-Up For Small Office?
New submitter earthwormgaz writes "I've started at a small company and our phone system is crusty, old, and awful. We've got email hosted elsewhere on POP/IMAP, and we've got no groupware. The server here is Windows small business whatever-it-is and Exchange isn't set up, but I've put CentOS on it in a VM, and I'd like to do everything using open standards and open source where possible. I've been looking at SOGO, and these phones. What are my chances of getting all this stuff working together? What other suggestions have people got a for a small office and communications?"
Not open source but open enough to take the hassle out of it. It works with practically anything you throw at it.
if you're starting a business, just about the last thing you should be doing is worrying about is being sysadmin for your phone system - let alone doing so according to the "right" political principles and hoping you can get it to work together. Call your local phone company, get setup with them or some other turnkey provider and turn your attention towards your business.
If you don't mind paying for a product (and don't want to use Google Apps), take a look at Zimbra:
http://www.zimbra.com/products/index.html
It has an Outlook plugin so your Windows users will be happy, and it speaks Activesync, so any smartphone should be able to sync email contacts and calendar with it.
I haven't used Zimbra for a few years, but last time I used it it worked quite well -- much easier to set up and administer than Exchange, and cheaper too.
I've had good luck with PBX in a flash. You can run it on a small atom server for small numbers of people: http://pbxinaflash.net/
It works well with the Cisco SPA series phones: http://www.cedarpc.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=24600
You can use things like SugarCRM and OpenFire with it. Share documents with MSOffice and a Subversion repository (you can probably even install SVN on the phone server). That's really all you should need to start a small company -- you don't have to think big yet, and when you do you should pay someone else to worry about it so that you can do the important stuff that goes with running a company.
http://www.asterisk.org
Please look around there if you haven't already before buying a multi-thousand dollar PBX or contract.
I'd outsource my email and groupware - google provides cheap (sometimes free) calendaring, email, outlook connectors, etc. Email is so critical these days, and it's getting complicated (think backups, network outages at your office, spam, security, etc.) Better just use thunderbird and google (or some other outsourced solution.)
As far as phone goes, I'm a big fan of SIP and TrixBox - it's easy to administer, much cheaper than your CLEC, and will provide you with most of what you need to get started. If you're not technical enough for something like trixbox/FreePBX/Asterisk (for FreeSwitch), go with a packet8, vonage, or other type of solution where they provide the SIP Termination and a nifty little box to use.
I have a small business, and use flowroute - it scales well, is cheaper (for us) than asterisk, and with trixbox/FreePBX/Asterisk (for FreeSwitch) you can have all the fancy features that you get for thousands with other companies, but for much less (and the performance is great so long as you have a robust network.)
Asterisk may not solve all your problems, but if you are using VoIP phones and know Linux this might be an option. Plus it is open and fully customizable. Might be worth a look. http://www.asterisk.org/
If someone tries to kill you, you try and kill them right back
freepbx
Your chances aren't great if you're describing software products that do exist with terms like "whatever-it-is" and your concentration is to go with open source whenever possible.
Open source is great, but software that works and has support is a lot better for a small business. Sometimes it's easier to get a paid software package that comes with basic phone support than be neck deep in outdated man pages when the entire company is breathing down your neck to get something working because everyone's trying to meet a deadline.
There are lots of Open Source packages that are great for small business, but from the sounds of what you're asking to do, a paid, proprietary solution might be a better shot.
If you do it at no cost, the boss doesn't view that as a win for the company. He views it as suspicious, because where he comes from, spending is the key to getting somewhere, and everything costs something. In fact, he judges employees on how much they make (especially if he is new to the company), not how much they get done. It makes perfect sense to him, no matter what you think. To the boss, money is the bottom line to everything.
Let's put it this way. If your startup finds themselves hard on cash and needing someone to "temporarily answer phones", they will choose the person who makes the LEAST. (I speak from personal experience on this.) Why? Because his budget is tiny, and therefore "whatever it is he does" must not be as important as the person with the larger budget, or the person with the larger salary.
If a new IT guy comes along and spends twice as much as you, then the new IT guy is MORE valuable than you, not less. You will be considered the amateur, and he will be considered the professional, no matter how much actual "work" you get done.
So in conclusion, spend as much as you can, keep on spending as much as you can, and to hell with what actually happens to the company.
Not terribly hard to set up and maintain. For phones not so sure, asterix and openSER are very heavy pieces of software don't know of any minimalist SIP server
The server here is Windows small business whatever-it-is
Where do you see yourself going with this kind of attitude? Have you even talked to anyone about the kind of decisions you're making on their dime?
"I've started at a small company...."
The last thing you want to be doing is babysitting dial-tone. The Cisco SMB Voip stuff works great.
if you are on a super tight budget take a look at 8x8
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11388/index.html
the Cisco Small Business Unified Communications 300 Series (UC300)
1. Keep POP3/SMTP access; if necessary enable LDAP.
2. Use something like Google Apps for Business - includes e-mail (POP3/SMTP/LDAP) and Calendaring; $50/user/year.
3. Stay away from Outlook if you can help it; if you can't then at least stay as far away from Exchange as you possibly can. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches in the process. And if you can, enable your users to use Thunderbird (with Lightening if you want Calendaring); it can access LDAP and Directory Services for a unified address book too if you like.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Cell phones
Setup an Office 365 Account. Ditch your POP/IMAP because it probably costs you as much as 365. Unless you have a line of business application that requires an on premise server you may find you can do everything you need in Office365.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/all-plans.aspx
Look for a Hosted VOIP solution. Do not spend money on an on premise phone system until you are ready to. Many ISP's will also offer phone systems as well.
So many people here are assuming they understand your requirements better than you do, and those are the ones who could successfully parse TFS.
I run an opensource stack in-house because I need to customize what it does for my needs. None of the hosted products would work for me, and software freedom isn't something I throw under the bus for short-term gain. Currently it's a postfix/MailScanner/SpamAssassin/sqlgrey/dovecot/sasl/davical/asterisk/freepbx stack, but I've also never seen Sogo before, so thanks for linking that. I've been meaning to integrate Fumambol/SyncML and that does it built-in, so cool.
The other product I've considered is formerly-BBS-software Citadel, but I'm sufficiently suspicious of monolithic software to have not tried it out in production (the Unix way seems better). Sogo does more, though, so that raises the activation energy a bit.
On the phones side, I'm looking to replace the FreePBX system because it's increasingly buggy as new versions come out. There was a good interview with the 2600Hz folks on FLOSS Weekly recently about Kazoo. Their docs are very targeted towards a cloud-hosted version, which is fine, but I also haven't put in the energy yet to do a local install without docs. But it's on my very short-term list.
They seem to be headed in the right direction at least. Intergrating Sogo with Kazoo might be a nice direction and it doesn't seem like either community would be adverse.
Grandstream phones have the best bang for the buck, but aren't always quirk-free. That said, with a few tweaks they're very reliable and very cheap compared to Avaya. Their better models also embed linux, so I like to support them with my cash for doing so.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The last time i worked in an office, there was no phone on my desk. If my boss wanted me, he IMed me.
You need to really be concerned about the following:
1.) Provisioning the equipment. I don't know how "small" a small office is, but this is going to spiral out of control quickly if you don't have an elegant way to setup handsets and make changes.
2.) Your change from circuit switched to packets. There are a lot of discussion points here, but the biggest you need to be aware of is latency is king. You might have a really slick p2p setup with OpenSWAN on 2 high bandwidth, cheap DSL or cable connections, but the jitter will kill you.
3.) How does your voice come in? If you are under contract and you have a PRI or some TDM circuit, you have to consider how you will interface that, and the cards you will need, or the SIP gateway you'll buy are not cheap.
4.) Who is going to manage the call routes, system secuity. I'm well versed with Asterisk, and you'll not find an all inclusive interface unless you go the Digium SwitchVOX route. If you don't pay close attention to security up front, you will experience toll fraud pronto.
5.) Handset support. What are you going to do for replacement parts, who is going to setup all the buttons, etc.
6.) Codecs. Some of the best are not free, i.e. G729. Just about any handset you get will support G711, but 12 bits of fidelity at 64k/sec each way (plur overheard for UDP/RTP) is not that great.
7.) Voice prompts, auto attendants, voicemail, etc.
8.) Status/BLF lights on phones. There isn't really a standardized way to do this, but SIP's Subscribe/Notify is used by some, I think Aastra.
9.) Key system habits. You won't be able to "pick up Line 2".
If I haven't scared you out of it yet, Aastra and Snom make excellent, RFC 3261 compliant handsets, Asterisk is a lot better than it used to be, and there are some alterntives you might find interesting like FreeSwitch or YXA.
Good luck.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
If it's a small office, and everybody has computers, I'd be tempted to use something like SoGo for interoperability. But for communications other than email, I'd say screw phones, PBXes, etc. For intra-office comm use a good IM program. If you're on Apples, you have about 3 different ways to do voice or video chat, if typing isn't your style. For outside the office, just put everybody on Skype or one of the open source alternatives. Between Skype and cell phones you probably are covered.
For $50 / year, each person can have a regular telephone number, complete with caller ID and call forwarding, on their Skype account. Skype-Skype calls are always free; calling outside Skype is dirt cheap in most of the world, and unlimited US-Canada calling is only $2.99 / mo.
No administrative hassles... no server setup.
Just pay for hosted Exchange. Unless you're running an email company, you should not be worrying about what software your email/groupware is using. Save your high principles for when you're making a profit.
I don't respond to AC's.
CudaTel (of Barracuda spam firewall fame) appliances are built on top of Freeswitch, an open-source PBX that I've found scales much better than Asterisk. The hardware is sized by number of concurrent calls. If you don't know how many concurrent calls you handle, the accepted convention is to take the number of phones you have and divide by 6 (or 4 if you want to be very conservative).
Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
The Avaya system is a good one for small companies. Fairly easy to maintain and program without the need of outsourcing the tech part of it. Just make sure you get a support contract with Avaya to help when needed.
Its easy to learn and simple to program if you are technically inclined.
Shoretel uses open source and open standards tools. They do hosted or turnkey installs. I've been trying to get our office to upgrade from our existing Nortel Meridian Option 11 system for the last four years and my research into it has found mostly good things about them.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
A couple OBI202/302s, one ObiPLUS, and some IP phones if needed.
My background is telecom and I have a lot of experience in that. My recommendation is to go with a hosted solution.
DO NOT INSTALL ASTERISK YOURSELF AND THINK YOU'RE GETTING A PHONE SYSTEM FOR FREE. You'll just waste time having to configure hardware, software, and dumb things like tuning analog POTS lines or wonking around with dial plans or something that you probably have no idea how to do.
Ok, back to the hosted idea. Let's compare the big costs with a traditional PBX and a hosted PBX:
1. Phones - you're really not going to avoid this cost. Budget $200 per phone set and be happy if you come in less. Remember, cheap phones are cheap for a reason. Spend the money and get a handset with a nice weight to it and a speakerphone that works well. If you get a traditional PBX like the Avaya system you looked at, there's a good chance you're looking at purchasing proprietary phones. If it's hosted, I recommend Polycom. Whether you have hosted or a traditional PBX, this will be one of your biggest costs.
2. The PBX itself will be a big cost. Avoid this by not buying one and going with a hosted solution.
3. The maintenance/service contract is the third huge cost, regardless of whether you go with hosted or traditional PBX. You're really not avoiding it with a hosted solution, in fact it might even be slightly more expensive, but you're paying for it month to month.
Since you can probably start small and grow into most hosted solutions, switch your conference phone over first and make everyone use it. You'll find out quickly if the call quality will work or if people have complaints.
Quality of service will be an issue with a hosted solution, so make sure you have bandwidth and if you need to set up real QoS on your router, know how to do that.
----- obSig
Get everybody a cheap mobile phone with a business plan or agree to pay $50/month if they use their own phone (most people will). Move your email, calendar and documents to Google Apps or similar. And then focus on your real business.
You may like sipecs. They even have a pre-configured distro cd if you want to get up and running quickly--just install it, plug in your voip phones, and it will discover and configure them.
or
(2) Hire an actual Sys Admin to do the work.
I have worked with Avaya and a few other PBX IPs. I always seem to have trouble with Avaya and no trouble with any others. Seems like their implementation of SIP is not quite standard - something iffy about it. I would definately suggest another brand (Cisco never fails).
If you've already purchased and using (albeit only barely) Microsoft SBS, take advantage of Exchange before you spend any more money on a new system, otherwise you're just wasting money. Exchange works quite well, obvious straight-forward connectivity with the Outlook client. Administering Exchange isn't the end of the world, and is actually quite easy in an SBS environment. I would suggest setting up an alternate internal smart-host (smart-relay) so that you don't have to expose the Exchange server directly to the internet. Courier MTA works VERY well (and is the exact setup we have internet->courier->exchange).
Setting up a Jabber IM server internally is easy as well, otherwise use Google Apps and have your email domain hosted there and just use Google Talk with the various AV plugins.
Setting up Switchvox (Asterisk) is a purchase, but I 2nd the comment by others to find you a local phone service retailer and let them deal with phone integration. If you do decide on a hosted solution for email and voice (voip) then make sure you don't skimp on the internet connectivity. I worked at a place previously convinced VOIP was the way to go, but management would cringe every time you talked about capacity of the external connection and the need to upgrade.
Just my 2cents...
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
It is implied exchange is installed (As it is as part of SBS Standard) but just not setup best would be to just configure it. (There is loads of best practice wizard type stuff for SBS to make sure it is setup properly.)
If it isn't (i.e You are using SBS 2011 Essentials) then go with hosted exchange or office365. If it is not your full time job to deal with IT then go for something like intune as well.
If you want to go Linux / UNIX make it old school (Everyone logs in to a terminal and communicate using wall/talk/write etc or irc or news)
Don't use web garbage.
This doesn't entirely answer your question, but here's my two cents. I have a small insurance agency. We use Linksys VOIP phones and this company's service (http://www.vocalocity.com/). It works well the vast majority of the time. As you can imagine, our phones are horribly important to our operations. On the rare occasion there's an issue, it's a huge, gigantic headache - but I wouldn't want to switch back to a traditional phone/pbx system. I like that there's people to handle that part of the system. I can't imagine doing any of that myself. I have too many other things to mess with. I have a website hosted by a host I've used for years, and the email for the domain handled by google. Again, it works well. Sure, I could set up a server to host the website and email and blah blah blah - but I've got too many other things to mess with and I'd rather pay someone else for it so I can focus on other things. You don't say what the business is - or maybe you did and my attention span sucks - but my recommendation would be to not take on too much yourself. I'm sure you have the ability to do it. How much are you really saving, especially when there's an issue and you have people dealing with The Problem rather than being productive?
Please make sure the system is well documented, easily maintained, professionally supported, and doesn't require a sysadmin's level of knowledge just to figure out how it works. Maintaining the phone system should only take up a trivial amount of my time.
Signed,
The guy they hired after you moved on
#DeleteChrome
If you have less than a dozen or so, consider a cheap, closed source, COTS system, like TalkSwitch. It will take you 2 hours to set it up, and you'll spend 2-4 hours a year (yes, a year) managing it. Yes, it's limited, but for $200 a user you can have a real pbx system with no fuss, no muss, and no monthly fees (except the actual phone lines). As a bonus, it can also forward calls to your remote workers.
If you have enough business to have employees, you have enough work that spending nights and weekends chasing an open source system for phone service is NOT WORTH YOUR TIME. Really. When you grow out of your mini-pbx, you'll have the money to buy something real, or hire a full timer who knows how to set this stuff up properly, and to fix it when it breaks.
I think my talkswitch was $800 used and was one of the most efficient purchases I made.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I went through the exact same situation a few years ago. I absolutely LOVE a hosted VOIP PBX combined with an integrated Uniform Communications Center (IM, Group, phone stuff, faxing, etc). Just like your mail, the server is in a data center someplace. The phones hook up via the internet (from anywhere) and the UCC is a web page. There are several companies out there doing this. I am with Panterra Networks Worldsmart system and I love it. I was with a different company for a year or so but REALLY did not like them. Anyone who wants/needs to telework (permanently or temporarily) can simply take their phone home with them (or an ATA can be set up at home like I have). Each seat can have three locations. The UCC includes a softphone for the road warriors. No server for you to deal with. All the sys admin stuff is done on a website. Very cost effective as well. I could go on and on.
google apps, 37signals, and onsip.
Bottom line is that you'll probably need more horsepower to drive a VOIP system for anything more than 2-3 people than you can likely squeeze out of a Linux VM hosted on an old Windows server. Your switching equipment also needs to be voice-rated... many admins can't wrap their heads around how demanding and unforgiving VOIP equipment is in the hardware department. The last thing you want is to put a lot of time and effort into an "open" system that ends up dropping calls, generating echoes, and causing all kinds of jitter when the system is under any kind of load. There's a lot more to consider here than what software package you want to handle the PBX back-end.
That kind of thinking is what leads to the very finest of vendor lock-in you could imagine down the road - and it's total bullshit. Investing a few hours of research and setup effort in a standards-based, transparent and reusable technical foundation for what is going to be the backbone of your company's communication both on the in- and outside for many years is definitely something to worry about - unless you have no problem whatsoever with buying your whole frickin' phone system all over again once you pick up the 11th employee, because the (cheap but proprietary) license and hardware you acquired when you started out "does not support more clients", or some such crap.
We just paid a few grand to extend our phone system from supporting <=50 clients to supporting 54 (and possibly more; even up to 70!!1!) clients. That's what you get from choosing the wrong solution in the first place, and if you let it become a vital component of your infrastructure - you'll have to stick with it and it will cost you dearly, because outright replacing it with a saner choice is always the more expensive one _in the short term_. Typically until the next forced upgrade cycle comes around.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
You could also look at using SME server (see contribs.org). Open source SBS type system with a large active user community. There is also a selection of user contributions and HowTos including incorporating Asterisk. It will also run much more efficiently on the your existing hardware that Microsoft SBS.
First off Exchange is the most complicated and evil thing ms has ever made next to sharepoint. You dont need it! Here is why?
You dont just install it. The product actually alters AD itself at the schema level! So lets say you forget to raise the forest level in your domain as you just installed Server 2003. I bet you nooobs didnt know Server 2003 runs as Server 2000 forest and domain by default?! Somethin non win admins commonly make.
Oops just reinstall right? Nope AD has now been corrupted at the schema level and all users cant receive email anymore. Not even a tape backup can save you. Now imagine you have it working? How can people send you email? You get a ton of error messages when installing your cas outlook on the web about it not having a certificate?! Oh now you to create a Sans certificate. Now you need to register your web server so people can email you. What? You have to create a freaking IIS server too??
http://saveie6.com/
I switched our company (~20 users) over to www.onsip.com for phones... I'm using all Polycom hardware... works great if you have good bandwidth. All setup and config is web-based and they auto configure the Polycom phones (335's and 550's). Onsip works with ekiga and there's sip clients for iOS and Android that work OK.
Google Apps for everything else!
My company recently migrated to a computer-based phone system.
1. Handsets are much preferable to headsets, if you use the phone only occasionally.
I went from *pick up the handset* to
a. don the headset, trying not to snag the cable on the stuff on my desk, notably including a mug of tea.
b. hunt down the pop-up with the Answer button
c. plug in the headset leads because I forgot to do that when I came in
d. hope the other party hasn't given up yet.
2. Don't buy the Counterpath Bria product. It chops up your conversations into little bits, and throws away packets randomly. It's bloody awful. The UI is crap, too.
3. it is possible to do IP telephony right. My home phone connects to a 42Networks DRG device which connects to the fiber interface. Sound quality is as good as POTS, and no problems with lag.
Use XMPP for chat, and voice+video.
A big plus is that it's federated, so you can talk to Google Apps users, and other XMPP users out there.
XMPP also has voice+video, so you can actually get rid of those old phones and just voice-chat through it (this is a matter of taste, but I think soft-phones have their pros).
In my experience, several clients will use the LAN to stream (intead of proxy on the internet) if both partys are in the same LAN, so you'll have very low latency and won't use up internet bandwidth.
Cobbling together things rarely makes sense unless your time is free or you need something the various providers don't support.
IMO, unless you're going 100% open source for some philosophical reason, you can't beat the combination of Office365 and Windows InTune.
~$35 a month (O365 E3+InTune) per user gives you centralized desktop policy management, hosted e-mail, document sharing via Sharepoint, enterprise SA for Windows (so you can use/mandate Bitlocker, DirectAccess, and get free upgrades to Windows 8, etc), desktop software management (pushing out updates, new software, etc), Office Professional Plus, and Lync with telephony support. Another $20-$30 a month per user and you'll have direct dial in and out supported, with automated attendant, voicemail, and everything else, all in the cloud, all managed by one person via a web browser. Pay another $40 for your sales guys and you can flip on CRM. Hell, its worth it just to avoid dealing with all the "I forgot my password to our file sharing service" questions.
IMO, you could run IT comfortably for a knowledge-worker-centric small business with 30-40 people with one guy if you use the right infrastructure. And you won't have your infrastructure fall apart when the guy who cobbled together your stuff quits. A real small business and one person a couple hours a month could probably maintain it if they can follow directions.
Seriously, focus on your business, not this kind of crap.
Call up Verizon for a five finger discount.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...doesn't mean you should.
I work for a company that provides VoIP and data services (the kind of company the OP should be calling). We have some damn good sysadmins, who can run everything from Asterisk to Postfix. But we don't. Internally, we use an off-the-shelf Asterisk implementation with a nice interface, and for email, hosted Exchange on one domain and Google stuff on the other. We could write our own ticketing system, but we use a hosted solution. It costs us far less to pay for some of these hosted services than to develop our own.
So, while we could hand-roll everything, we don't. Our whole business is based on Asterisk somehow, but we don't use it raw. Time spent maintaining our own software is time we're denying our customers.
As far as boxed, premise solutions go, I really like the Adtran 7100. Handles all voice and data up to 100 seats, and their phones are very good too.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
For such a key business tool as a phone system, I would not rely on open source. I would purchase a system that has a good support tack record and that was easy to manage.
One of the last projects that I worked on for my previous company was to deploy a new VOIP phone system to a 100 person office. The vendor equipment that we used was ShoreTel. They have fairly inexpensive systems and an app that integrates into Outlook that shows you any incoming calls, voice mail, etc. They have also developed a mobile tool for smart phones, etc. More importantly, once configured it is easy to manage and maintain.
My recommendation would be to look at ShoreTel or a similar small/medium size solution that can grow with the company.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
ok, so you've just turned on virtualization on your SBS server. you just broke it. Microsoft supports SBS installed as a GUEST but not as a HOST for virtualization. this is all over the microsoft knowledge base and the SBS Blog (blogs.technet.com/b/sbs) you'd best read up on SBS Best Practices before you make your server any worse. www.sbsbuilddoc.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd use FreeSWITCH instead of Asterisk. For groupware I'd consider Bedework. For email I'd use Postfix or exim + SpamAssasin and ClamAV. For LDAP I'd consider OpenDJ (fork of OpenDS).
Whilst it's a noble thing to want to go open source and take it all on yourself, you can save yourself a major headache by going SaaS instead. I originally setup a XenServer running VMs for Endian Firewall for routing, Zimbra for groupware and Asterisk / Trixbox for the phones. It was, to say the least, a pain in the ass to support, and there's no place to hide when you're the sole admin for a system you setup yourself.
About 8 months ago I got sick of the distraction it was causing from my main role, and now we're running Google Apps for Organisations, a hardware router and a Sipgate Business account for fully hosted VoIP. We use Cisco SPA-921 SIP phones, which are about £55 (roughly $90), and the whole setup causes zero headaches. Our old setup appealed to us on principle (we're all software engineers!) but that was all it was - in the end, it cost us time and thus money.
It helps that we've got a great, rock-solid broadband net connection (check out Fluidata if you're in the UK and looking for good business connections!), but the combination of virtually zero critical equipment on-site and hosted services is such a good economical decision.
Yes, I know I'm preaching to an OSS-biased community here - OSS stacks can be great, and we probably will end up going with some combination of in-house and SaaS in the future, but only when we have dedicated people to run it. In the meantime, get the technology out of the way so you can concentrate on whatever it is your business does!
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
FWIW: I have a single server (small business too) with the follow services running:
Linux as the host OS using Xen
On Dom0-Linux-x64: MySQL, OpenLDAP (Directory services for IMAP\Asterisk\Samba), IMAP (email with Outlook Clients), Asterisk (VOIP Phones), Samba(Windows File Sharing), D2D backups, Squid (Proxy Server), Firewall, dhcp, CUPS (printing), NFS (Unix file sharing), Sendmail (smtp-internet), ntp, ssh, bind (name server)
DomU1-Linux-x64: Apache: External Web site
DomU2-Linux-x86 Apache: Internal Web sites (32 bit), ftp
DomU3-WindowsServer: Windows specific Server apps
Everything was consolidated to a single box since electricity rates have gone up. It does leave an issue if the server does go down since everything is running on one Box. I do stock spare parts (Disks, Memory, Power Supply, and motherboard) to address hardware issues. We have Disk to Disk backups of the server and VM's. I switched over almost three years ago without any major issues.
If you have an older phone system, there is a 99.9% probability that it just works. Every day.
If there are problems you can call the company who installed it to get stuff repaired
If you get an open source phone system you will never have a dependable phone system that just works. It will work most of the time, but when it doesn't work it's more stuff to ruin your day.
If you have a specific need for VoIP, like branch offices or home workers, you may have to put up with the quirks of all VoIP phone systems/SIP trunks/local networks to get the features you need.
Some older real phone systems also have add-on VoIP modules, so you get a hybrid system. The old stuff will keep working, and the new stuff will give you headaches from time to time.
If your network stinks, VoIP phone systems won't work well. If you have to go with VoIP, you might consider a separate T1 for just the SIP trunks - not sharing it with anything else. If you try to share the bandwidth with voice, voice usually loses against netflix, porn and cad drawings.
Having a separate Ethernet network for just VoIP is also a good idea.
The VoIP phone system won't work like your old system. You should make sure all the features you are now using are in the new system, including intercom, external paging and ringing.
Unless you really need a new system, you're really going to regret messing with something that's not broke. Believe it, or not.
Then install Horde/IMP, and whatever other modules you want for your groupware - on top of Dovecot IMAP (with LDAP Auth) - and your favorite SMTP. I prefer Qmail, so I use Matt Simerson's email toaster as a basis (www.tnpi.biz)
I had the choice of converting email or sticking with Exchange - I wish I would have converted. Exchange is OK, but you also have to consider backups and disaster recovery. Backing up unnecessarily huge-ass Exchange databases is not fun. Instead, use Maildir (one file per email) and ZFS and you have simple site to site replication for your email data.
Enjoy
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
If you want a decent hosted SIP PBX, I just switched our 10 person office to onsip.com & have been pretty happy. Two caveats - they don't yet support the "Busy Lamp Field" so you have to use their web portal to see who's on the phone, and groups can only ring 10 devices at once. If you can deal with that, and have decent bandwidth (we have reserved 1.5mbps), they're good. We have bought Polycom phones, and they sound great; I'm sure the Avaya ones are good too.
I've screwed with Asterisk & PBX in a flash, but our phones are important & we want to concentrate on other things so we outsourced. We're paying $99/month plus 2.9c/minute, which is fair & should be less than our Verizon POTS lines were running us.
I'm going to assume that you have made up your mind (and have the business owner/manager's agreement) that you want to avoid Windows/Exchange if you can, and you want to keep everything in-house for a reason (as opposed to cloud/hosted arrangements).
Firstly, stop using your Windows SBS installation as a virtualization host. Set up a new box running a dedicated hypervisor (vmware, windows, linux, whatever you're more comfortable with) and either use that or use it as a staging box to virtualize the existing SBS server.
Second, if you want to use a non-exchange groupware platform, test. This is a business, so the first groupware solution you find isn't always going to be the best. Install SOGo, Zimbra, Citadel, Kerio, etc on different VMs and determine if they'll meet the business's needs. Once you've narrowed the field down to a couple, get buy-in from other people in the business - get them to have a play and see how they deal with it.
Once you've decided on the groupware platform, blow it away and rebuild it. Do NOT use your experimenting environment in production. In fact, rebuild it through several iterations of testing. It will ensure you're very familiar with it. Document while you go, too. One day you won't be there, and someone might need that documentation.
Finally, pilot the system running in parallel to your existing arrangements (on a second domain for example) for a while before going live, to get out any remaining issues.
Always ensure the most important and "loudest" people who'll need to use the system have buy-in before going live, too.
As for products, SOGo is nice but you need to know what you're doing to run it properly. Other solutions are less-intensive, but can be correspondingly less flexible. Kerio's nice and straightforward for instance but has a number of known gotchas to be careful of. All depends on your skills and available time, and what the business actually needs.
Next.
Phones are probably the most important thing in a business. Not only are they the usual first port of call for customers and suppliers, but there's usually legal requirements here too. Don't put a system in place that you and management are not 100% happy with. Run comparison trials the Test. Test again. Test again. Run LONG pilot programs (months). Get rigorous specifications on how it needs to work (call groups/queues, menus, extension numbering schemes etc) from relevant people, then get them to confirm those specs. If that phone system plays up blame will come down on you hard.
Basically the same rules apply here as with groupware - experiment phase, shortlisting, expanded experiments, testing, pilot, implementation, with rebuilds and documentation at every step, and full buy-in from those who'd complain if it broke.
Anything *can* work for you here - raw homespun Asterisk, AsteriskNow!, Asterisk in a flash, trixbox, or other packaged non-asterisk solutions. Depends again on you and on the business.
I hope that doesn't scare you off though. It's a rewarding pursuit and once done, if done properly, can last the business years (for groupware) or decades (for phones), and can save them a lot of money after your time investment.
We had to move offices about 2 years ago.
Quick and dirty solution for about 15 staff was google docs and skype on 2 adsl+ lines.
We kept tweaking routers, VOIP solutions, backups etc etc once we were in.
Everything worked in a weekend.
SME Server has come along way since the E-smith days when it was purchased by Mitel. The setup and admin is user friendly. It is a one stop standup that can give you an email server, Firewall, Samba Shares, in a couple of hours.
And the contribs community also maintains several addon applications such as FreePBX http://wiki.contribs.org/FreePBX
check out the built in features.
SME Server provides the following standard functionality
Ease of Administration ...
File and print sharing
Sharing of a single Internet connection between multiple computers
A robust email server, which includes virus and spam filtering and webmail
A network firewall to protect against Internet intruders
Secure remote access
Directory services
Web application server, including support for Apache, MySQL, PHP and Python (LAMPP)
RAID and Backup
Automatic updates
Extendibility
Support for multiple languages
and much more
Just my opinion - I work in VoIP and call center design and implementation, so I've worked with the major manufacturers and have seen their costs (emphasis on Cisco). For your particular situation, avoid the big boys like Cisco and Avaya for phones, but frankly I would not consider Asterisk either since the learning curve is probably higher than you want. For Telephony, Shoretel is probably your best bet.
For a small company, until you get bigger, consider parking your infrustructure on Amazon Web Services (cloud). There's a bit of getting used to, but it's pretty amazing. You can install Windows, Linux (I believe CentOS is an option, I use Ubuntu on AWS), and it doesn't cost very much - I think you'll find that it will cost less than running your own MDF. You can try it for free (up to a year) by signing up and creating a "micro-instance", so you've nothing to lose. Call AWS customer support and they'll answer any questions about their "free usage tier". I would definitely look into it if I were in your position.
But what you want to avoid is vendor lock in. There are several good open source and open source-based UC platforms out there. Digium, the company that sponsors the Asterisk project, offer a turnkey UC solution called Switchvox that gets good marks. It includes the PBX, a chat server and a desktop user panel with all kinds of bells an whistles. It's not free, but it's less than the Avaya and Cisco solutions, includes support, matched phones, etc. http://www.digium.com
If you want both free and open, take a look at Elastix. http://www.elastix.org It's an open on-prem UC system that includes chat, email, calendaring and of course the full PBX system. Good docs. Decent support is availble from the communtiy. Paid support from PaloSanto Solutions, the sponsor. (It kind of picked up where Trixbox left off, if you've ever looked into that platform.)
I am guilty of posting after a few beers so mod me down as I deserve ...
Slashdot is definitely the wrong place to pose this question as you may have already realised - if an open source god didn't exist then slashdot would have invented one
My two cents? Take the path of least resistance. Choose the best thing you think you can successfully deliver on time to make the business work. When you have more time you can make things work better - if they don't work in the first place then no one will care about your well intentioned ideas
At the same time - don't give up on your aspirations, just remember, deliver something you can control in the time given - you probably already know what that is.
And write out the monthly check .. . . .
Can you give us a general cost analysis of ownership?
SaaS Monthly Cost = $ XXX
Servers + Software / 5-7 year Lifespan / per month = $ YYY
To show how economical it really is ?
SBS has Exchange. You've paid for it, use it. It works. Alternatively, hire someone to come in and manager your CentOS. Honestly, if you're asking, it means that you don't know how to administer it, which is going to lead to more pitfalls.
Cost savings for OS is only made once you understand it. If you don't configure these things properly, you leave yourself open to a lot of problems.
Disclaimer: I run Postfix and Cyrus for my clients, and Exchange on SBS. All my email comes through Postfix, ClamAV, SpamAssassin and SQLGrey before it gets to Exchange.
Grandstreams are inexpensive, work fine and are generally simple to configure, but for some of the low-end ones I've seen phone system upgrades that simply dropped the older low-end devices (e.g. BLF strobing stopped working and nobody was bothering to determine why). I know of one site that's using Yealink phones that they're pretty happy with so far (only a few months in). I've heard a variety of complaints about another (Aastra?) being a real headache to configure.
For email, there are many options one of which is Kolab (http://www.kolab.org) which is apparently better known in Europe. They're working up to their 3.0 release which includes some fairly major structural changes, including a switch from Horde to RoundCube for webmail, etc. Open source with commercial support also available, and unlike Scalix et al it's a live project.
fencepost
just a little off
Modding someone down because you disagree is abuse, modding someone down because their post will derail the conversation is correct
Hard to distinguish the two.
On any given topic someone will add that with[out] this common mistake | with[out] [ a strong central government | a belief in the man in the sky | /. editors not doing their job | Microsoft] we'd all be happier and that anyone not seeing this is just a moron [and doesn't see that correlation doesn't cause Occam to shave].
Here's a vote for SOGo - I haven't tried the Outlook integration, but I'd stick to Thunderbird (ESR) and it works well, gives you corporate address book, calendaring with invites etc, swish web calendar/mail and mobile integration across all the usual suspects (athough they recommend some pay-for sync apps, I've managed without quite happily - n900 syncing was more involved but I've got it working). inverse.ca are good to work with if you need commercial support (just a happy customer). We use dovecot & exim for IMAP & MTA, but I'm sure other OSS options are fine. All this does require that you have sysadmin skills to setup, but once installed they're rock solid and there's plenty of documentation - all this works fine with AD integration (for auth, groups, aliases etc).
Having said that, unless you've a committment to OSS, an aversion to client licencing or a requirement for multiple OS support, Exchange will fit the bill, though I've steered clear due to reputation and some (possibly historical by now) limitations or architectural disagreements (do they still use PST files?). For me, and my old-school email-file-storage preference (I wouldn't know where to start on Exchange if somebody asked me to move all emails from a certain address which had an attachment > SIZE to secondary storage every tuesday night) then it's a no-brainer. YMMV.
stay the hell away from the 1120e and 1140e ip phones from avaya. they are old nortel garbage that have to be replaced at a rate of at least three each week. in a deployment of 600 you can see that a lot of time is wasted with this junk. of course im posting anonymous.
Yes, posting as AC here, but.... you're a dick.
I've started at a small company and our phone system is crusty, old, and awful.
read: IT may or may not work - but I dont like it.
We've got email hosted elsewhere on POP/IMAP, and we've got no groupware. The server here is Windows small business whatever-it-is and Exchange isn't set up
read: Whoever set this shit up in the past was clueless or couldnt get managemetn agreement/buyin to set things up so its a mismatched hodgepodge of half baked barely strung together "solutions"
, but I've put CentOS on it in a VM, and I'd like to do everything using open standards and open source where possible.
read: I an opensource wanna be zealot. Look at me ma - I can tinstall a 'distro' ! woot! Never mind the fast that I have solutions available to me right now. I'm jsut to blind/biased/stupid to consider using them to leverage the investment alreay made by my new emplorer.....
I've been looking at SOGO, and these phones.
read: I can use the interwebs and the googles. Can I use this free software and buy these expensive (but admitedly very good) phones? Can I haz dis cheezburger?
What are my chances of getting all this stuff working together? What other suggestions have people got a for a small office and communications?"
read: I've got no idea.. I wanna make a big impact at my new job but I have no experiences, skills or clue. Before I fuck things royally I've tried to make myself look intelligent and thoughtful - but - can you tell me how to do it all... step by step... with pictures - to make me look good?
Like I said on the first line - IMHO you're a dick.
Or of course ignore this AC and built yourself a suport nightmare beyong your knowledge/skills/ability - or think for a moment and use professional skilled people to do it RIGHT. Document a business case and present it to your new boss - "These are areas of risk/confern because of X. Here are proposed methods to fix and their cost. This is the return on investment/payback you will get. This is the productivity increase you will get. etc etc"
I'm surprised no-one's mentioned Zarafa: www.zarafa.com
A great Exchange replacement using true MAPI protocols. Outlook and AD integration, push email, device sync - devices don't know they're not talking to exchange. Plus, a kickass web interface.
"but I've put CentOS on it in a VM"
*Facepalm*
Place Windows in a VM on Centos. Otherwise your Linux uptime is a derivative of your windows Uptime. Which is typically crap.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
One easy (free) way around this problem is to use Google Voice. Add and remove employee cell phone numbers as needed. Give your customers one phone number (gVoice number), and you control the routing at all times (including ring order), plus the added benefits of voice-to-text translated voicemail (when it works right).
"That'll never compile."
I'd more or less second this... they can be your fallback position if you come up against time constraints or problems rolling out FOSS stuff, and in this case you can just take your time until you're ready.
I'd recommend running an XMPP server to provide instant messaging and more on the local network. I recommend Openfire for the server, it's fairly easy to get up and running and is Apache licensed; the server runs on Linux or Windows. It supports LDAP for authentication against an Active Directory network for user accounts so it will integrate well with your existing Windows domain. Functionality depends a lot on the client you select, but I'd recommend Jitsi (formerly SIP Communicator) which is very similar in many respects with Microsoft Lync; it is LGPL and supports enterprise features like voice/video calling, SIP integration, automatic provisioning via URL, encrypted connections, and a lot of other interesting features. It runs on pretty much anything, If you add Asterisk to the mix, you can tie Jitsi into that as well and get phone system integration and dialing from your desktop.
This does not solve the problem of Sharepoint, however.
My tips for doing VoIP:
- if you're going hosted use a separate and quality internet connection for your VoIP.
- Be wary of NAT. Many problems are caused by NAT routers/firewalls.
Don't say I did not warn you.
I presume you are in the US. Have a look at Intorrent.com for VoIP solutions. I use it. It's asterisk-based, but the GUI is better then anything I've ever seen.
For a straightforward do-everything mail server (runs in an OpenBSD VM), take a look at mailserv. I'd really recommend weaning everyone off POP3 - it's just horrible. IMAP is great, and there's very little that doesn't support it now.
I've never found a contacts & calendaring solution with multi-user 2-way sync that really works - it always seems to run into trouble in one way or another. Any recommendations?
I've had real reliability problems with Google Apps, and their backup options are really quite bad: you can't seem to back up in a native format, only via conversions which are lossy, and as an admin, you can't back up user accounts - you need to log in to each one and back them up separately.
I did see this recently (asterisk/FreePBX running on a Raspberry Pi), it's got to be worth trying at the cost!
202 comments on VOIP and nobody mentioning teamspeak, mumble or Ventrillo?
If your looking for something that's going to set your apart from your lynq/exhange/avaya using competitors that a direction you might want to look at.
The whole groupware thing is in a lot of way corporations trying to achieve what the various geek subcultures have done for decades and allow teams to function independently of geography, without loosing the mid 90ies serious business office vibe.
Poking further outside of the "made exclusively for business" box you find IRC servers, conventional web forums etc,
I know this is not what the OP mentions but it's worth noting that there is different approaches to doing in team communication then the tools that is directly derived from the stuff that got adopted by the old school office in the mid 90ies.
How many handsets and how far away to you make calls. For less than 5 handsets or mostly local calls, a simple, simple hardware pbx is still king. It's just not worth the trouble of setting up several thousand dollars worth of gear just to have options you're probably not going to use. Samsung and Tadaran make simple boxes that don't randomly crash or require hours and hours of setup and maintenance.
Voip starts to make sense when you need to have access to phones outside of the office. Asterisk does a good job of patching into any other PBX as a voicemail service and routing calls in/out to voip. Normal calls don't get dropped and VOIP is still a less reliable but still functioning option.
Voip only makes sense when there are many phone in many places with many changes. It's a up front cost of testing all network gear for working QOS. Routers, switches and you're ISP has to have working QOS. When you need everything to talk with everything else, there when you have many many handsets in many places, then worry about having open communications.
For small business though, simple hardware pbx with a few extra ports give options to open it up later.
I think I just cashed out all my cool points.
and you can connect it in with your email system to email voicemails, faxes, etc.
Just a warning based on experience and the documentation of several PBX solutions I investigated while working with such software:
PBX software will not run properly in a VM. PBXs need uninterrupted access to the CPU, or the calls get "choppy".
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Being a new business, I'm sure money is tight, and like all things - any solution comes at a cost. Fortunately there are very good solutions out there that cost very little or are free, but the cost comes in learning and being able to setup those method up. If I assumed you had a resident genius that was capable of setting up anything, I think your best solution would be to centralize your costs, meaning for starters you get a single pipe to the internet that you can use for both data and your phone system. Buy a decent workstation, load Linux on it, and then install Asterisk, which will handle all of your internal phones. The beauty of using Asterisk is you can still come out looking a feeling like a big company with plenty of resources, with video calling, conference calling, automated phone menu answering and routing, and even click-to-call for your support page.
You can also use that workstation to be your PDC running Samba and install something like Zimba to be your MTA. Depending on how heavy your load is, you may even be able to use that same box as your firewall, DHCP server, and DNS name server (or DNS relay). So now you've got your marketing guys that will run only Windows happy, as well as your tech people which are running Linux or Mac, and nobody complaining that they can't use that specific program (which is the only way they know how to do it). It all sounds easy and great, but I won't lie to you and say that it's easy and quick to setup all that, although it can be if your familiar with all of that. You do also have the option of bringing a person in to set all that up, although I tend not to trust systems that I don't understand or can't fix myself. This setup would however be a very low cost solution to everything you mentioned, but the cost is knowledge or the time spent learning it all, which there is a lot there.
Give the client facing employees cell phones. When tech needs to be on a conference call, use Webex or another conferencing software that can be used with a PC instead of a real phone for audio. For the rest, I'd use either or a combo of- GoogleApps (it's cheap, solves the mobile and a lot of app/remote access problems) and FOSS. Whoever needed a laptop could have a Thinkpad or Macbook, loaded with their OS of choice but I'd only support officially Ubuntu on Thinkpads to keep support/upgrade costs down. Sensitive irreplaceable data would be required to be stored on the network or a automatic trickle backup of sorts. Most things would rely on Google Docs for sharing though. I'd try to keep the small office small, as things have to change a bit as the company expands and I'm not sure I'd be up for that. I guess if the moneys rolling it, anything would be welcome.
http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-slashdot-account Stop visiting Slashdot.