Finding the Right Business Phone System? 70
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."
Phone system recommendations (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Phone system recommendations (Score:2)
Asterisk... (Score:2)
Re:Asterisk... (Score:2)
Re:Asterisk... (Score:1)
Re:Asterisk... (Score:2)
Re:Asterisk... (Score:1)
What I do know is Asterisk is very capable of doing anything you need it to do, but it is certainly not a polished plug-and-pray system like that proprietary crap you listed. Asterisk's real power comes in being open-source. If it doesn't do something you want it to do, you
Since when is that in your job description? (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:2)
Re:Since when is that in your job description? (Score:3, Insightful)
I remain concerned (Score:2)
Well that sounds reasonable, make sure you clarify maintenance is not covered. I repair computers for some people and buy some for others. They all run to me screaming if something breaks regardless of what the SLA says, so I have to lay down the maintenance responsibilities at the time of purchase. Turning down support on a dysfunctional phone system when the whole company is not functioning because of it is difficult because youre then part of the company.
Ive seen other sysadmins who really spend all t
NetworkWorld (Score:2)
here. [nwfusion.com]
Seems they cover a lot of what you are asking.
Windows 2000 is stable when... (Score:2)
Re:Windows 2000 is stable when... (Score:2)
Other VOIP solutions (Score:1)
I've worked with the Cisco system, and I know that it has call detail capability. It does run Windows 2000. However, it was pretty reliable. I've talked to others running the NBX, and they swear by it.
That all being said, don't rule out the standard telephony players. Although their systems aren't VOIP based, many of them have hooks for VOIP and network management. Many are still hurting after the telecom boom went bust, so you could probably
Re:Other VOIP solutions (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:VoIP (Score:2)
Re:VoIP (Score:2)
Voip phones are down to $75 [grandstream.com]. That's a lot less than any proprietary mini-PBX phones that I'm aware of.
If you're having echo or other voice quality problems in this day and age, then you haven't configured things properly.
By using Voip p
Re: (Score:2)
Re:VoIP (Score:2)
As you stated above.. $400 for a cisco VoIP phone. ComDial phones can be had for about $70. Lucent phones can be had for about $90. The phones my company was using with TeleVantage were about $120 each. I agree with you on those Siemens phones. Siemens seemed to be ridiculously overpriced... probably because they have such a strong European presence.
Wiring the cat.3 network when we were already running cat.6 cabling to the same
Re:VoIP (Score:1)
I have installed two Cisco CallManager solutions, and they are great. During the first one I was skeptical (the client really wanted VOIP and I wasn't too sure), but I have never heard any echo problems or delays that others have talked about.
The phone's are more expensive, but they act as a switch at the end user's desk, so only one drop is typically needed, since the user's PC plugs into the phone. So you avoid the extra cost of running a second drop to everyone's
Televantage has issues.. (Score:2)
Its basically functional and meets our needs though.
BTW, it sends email notifications with voicemails attached, encoded as ms-tnef format. Don't get this if you want to use that feature and don't use MS email clients.
-molo
Re:Televantage has issues.. (Score:2)
Regarding the voicemail notifications-- I believe this is a standard feature in TV. You can just turn it off in the administrator tool if you don't want to use it. And TV is designed with Outlook Integration in mind, so yeah... MS formats.
One of the nice things about those sound files is that it goes both ways. You
Re:Televantage has issues.. (Score:2)
-molo
Re:Televantage has issues.. (Score:2)
Set the default mailbox password to whatever you want and disable outbound calls from inbound trunks (disable the follow-me setting).
Re:Televantage has issues.. (Score:2)
-molo
Altigen (Score:1)
Unfortunately, it's on Windows... but the last one I installed has run for three years and didn't die once unless the power went out or (just last month) the mobo fried. Not its fault.
Just make sure you have some hefty UPS backup, and at each workstation if you go with some powered phones like VOIP...
Re:Altigen (Score:1)
i've used a few (Score:2)
i'm presently using and love my inter-tel [inter-tel.com] system. all the hardware is in a small blade-like rack, no atx power supplies, cpu fans, or hard drives to fail and take my whole system out. the voicemail system runs os/2 on a single blade with storage to an industrial laptop hard drive. all the database programming is done via a windows app, and while the gui can be
I've been here before... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [inin.com]
Best Bang for your buck: Artisoft Televantage [artisoft.com]
Runner Up: 3Com NBX100 [3com.com]
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.
--
Re:I've been here before... (Score:1)
Talk to someone with a clue (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Talk to someone with a clue (Score:4, Informative)
Your local telco will try to sell you something called "centrex"-- which is basically them managing your phone system for you by partitioning off a section on their local class 5 switch.
This sucks because:
- You have to get your local telco to fix the problem whenever you have one... during business hours... whenever they feel like getting around to it.
- If you EVER want to change ANY settings, they have to do it for you... even little things like moving an extension from one office to another.
I think the only advantage of Centrex is that everyone has a DID (direct-inward-dial) number... but really if you want that, you can get that with any phone system.
If you tell them that you don't want centrex but still want a suggestion, you'll probably just end up with whoever their partner is. Remember they want to make money here, not help you.
Regarding the other suggestion above, that you call other companies customer service and ask them what they use-- Let me tell you what I've found from this in my own experience.
On the off chance that you get to talk to someone with technical expertise by calling into a huge company's customer service number, you may get a good idea of the user experience with the phone, but certainly not the management experience.
Also, it is not a good idea to pick your system based on taking a poll of what other companies are using for their call centers. In MANY large organizations (as the commentor correctly stated), the phone system is a very lucrative contract that goes to some VP's nephew who is a rep for Avaya or something with hardly any research. In other cases, when a company (say, American Express) goes out and buys themselves a phone system even with a lot of research, you have to understand that 1) they have a lot more bargaining power than you do, and 2) their needs are far different from yours... even if it seems like the same application.
As for magazines... try "Call Center". Its one of the better industry journals, but I didn't really find it all too helpful when I had to find a phone system for my company.
Re:Talk to someone with a clue (Score:4, Informative)
The "you have to get them to fix problems" argument isn't a good one if you have nobody in-house who can fix problems. It's better if the phone company fixes a problem in an hour than if your sysadmin has to spend an hour reading the manual each time there's a problem. I've also seen very few problems with the centrex systems where I've worked, but that's obviously related to the quality of your local provider.
The "they have to do everything for you" is also an advantage if you don't want to do it yourself.
Re:Talk to someone with a clue (Score:2)
Caveat Emptor, but it's an option well worth inviting a telco rep over for a meeting about. If I were your boss, I wouldn't think you'd done your homework if you hadn't checked out Centrex as an option - it's really just outsourcing your phone system to the LEC. If you look at it an
Re:Talk to someone with a clue (Score:2)
I wanted to get a feel for what else was out there and see if there were any systems that I missed when I was searching (well, let's be honest, googling) for them.
And you're right about the boss thing. Right now my boss is gunning for the televantage because he liked the GUI. I seriousl
Re:Talk to someone with a clue (Score:2)
In my office, the TeleVantage UI gets used by normal office users pretty much for voicemail only. It gets used in the call center for EVERYTHING though... We have it setup so calls coming in on different 800#'s (ANIs) appear differently in the que. We have it setup so that if the boss calls into customer service on his cell phone, it shows his name in the que so that customer service agents always pick up his call first (like if he's demoin
Bosses brother in law's nephew (Score:2)
Using a rule based rewrite system (in Lisp) to simplify such relationships, wouldn't this reduce to simply "when your boss tells you that his nephew is a phone contractor..." ?
Make sure you check security track record of PBX (Score:2)
Unfortunately, I don't have a background in PBXs. But I am aware of how cheaper, flawed models of PBXs will have holes to be exploited by "phreakers". They will then proceed to route many long distance calls through the PBX, leaving the company with the bill.
Re:Make sure you check security track record of PB (Score:2)
Another simple precaution is making the number you dial for an outbound trunk something other than '9'. Or make '9' only available for local calls.
For instance in my company's system--
Dialing 9 goes to the 8 copper POTS lines we use for local calls and for when our T
Re:Make sure you check security track record of PB (Score:1)
Re:IVR / Gateway / VoIP (Score:1)
Portus Group is an official reseller of Artisoft's Televantage. However, Portus also has a telephony and IVR platfor called PortusConnect, first implemented on Linux, and then ported to the Win32 platform.
Portus's PortusConnect is analogous to Emacs. It's a completely programmable telephony application, written entirely in Common Lisp, and has a CL interface as well. It's client-server based, so you can run the hardware part of the system i
Narrow choices (Score:1)
Re:Narrow choices (Score:1)
Re:Narrow choices (Score:1)
Re:Narrow choices (Score:2)
Especially since, as he points out, the next version of the *app* fixed the problem.
More information needed (Score:1)
We're using an Altigen (Score:2)
The version we have will let you use any IP phone as an extension (which is to say, identical to a wired extension). The other thing that's nice is that it gives you analog phone jacks, so you can use any phone/fax/modem you want at each extension.
It's got other nice stuff, like a (windows) desktop app that will pop up to do phone stuff (transfers, conference calls, etc.) Or a java applet, if you don't have
Avoid Mitel (Score:2)
HOLD THE PHONE!!! (Score:2)
I strongly recommend that you contact a loca
Re:HOLD THE PHONE!!! (Score:2)
I have here in front of me budgetary bids from 5 vendors on 7 phone systems.
Alcatel OmniPCX
Artisoft TeleVantage
3Com NBX 100
3Com NBX 5000
Comdial FXII
Vodavi XTS
Convergent Communications PDX
The prices on the systems listed range from $28k to $48k.
Organization size is currently 40 users, up to 60 by the end of the year and around 100 during the course of 2004 (after that,
3Com NBX 100 (Score:2)
I *just* finished putting together a 3Com NBX100 system a month ago. Of all the choices we looked at for a similar-sized organization, the NBX100 seemed like the best fit. It had the best mix of current features, including all that you mentioned, as well as future expandability and nice touches like compatibility with H.323 gatekeepers.
We were also impressed with their softphone application... until we used it. We were given a reference at an AOL cal
weird. (Score:2)
Re:weird. (Score:2)
Hire a consultant (Score:2)
and do Asterisk. You will have wide open future
growth options for the company, and be expanding
your career prospects too. Not to mention that
your well-spent consulting and training $$ will
go a long way in advancing the Asterisk project.
Win, win, win.
Televantage Good. VOIP I dunno... (Score:2)
VOIP scares me. Seems pretty complex and expensive.
Good luck!
buy used (Score:2)
Cisco Call Manager (Score:1)
I'm sceptical about Windows 2k also, but the Call Manager runs on 2k and we have never had a crash. The voice quality is supprisingly good also. The codec used is the best GSM standard (I forget the exact one). There are also op
Nail Down Requirements and Features (Score:1)
The best piece of advice I can offer is understand as best you can how the business will be using the system. How large will it need to be, will it be growing? What kind of availability is required? What extra features are you looking for, voice mail, conference bridges, ivr, acd, etc?
We have 5 phone systems, 3 of which are replicated accross 3 local call centers for load balancing and redumdancy. We have 3 Avaya [avaya.com] systems, 3 Aspect [aspect.com] systems, 3 Periphonics [nortelnetworks.com] IVR's, a Concerto [concerto.com] Unison and Concerto [concerto.com] Contact P
Cisco Phone Systems (Score:1)
Two suggestions (Score:2)
1) This is not the place to do homework on this issue. a great place to get started is to find somewhere that has the last year or two's back issues of Communications Convergence or similar trade magazines. That one in particular might be good - I don't know how they are now that they're part of CMP, but the magazine used to be called Teleconnect and was edited by a crusty old guy named Harry Newton. I've never seen more honest reviews and buyer's guid
Research, More Research, User Input... (Score:1)
We just switched to Televantage (Score:2)
I didn't make the call, my boss did. But we looked at a number of systems - many that are mentioned in other posts here.
So far, so good. We had a problem with it not releasing trunks. That was *not* good. Artisoft said the problem was with the intel chipset, Intel said it was Artisoft's fault.
Either way after a week or so of waiting, we received a patch, installed it, and wala, it works.
We got it working with the building's