Ask Slashdot: Open Communications Set-Up For Small Office? 224
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?"
Re:If you're starting a business... (Score:4, Informative)
if you're starting a business,
Nevermind RTFA, just RTFSummary. He started at a small company, NOT starting a small company.
Zimbra? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [zimbra.com]
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.
PBX In a Flash (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [pbxinaflash.net]
It works well with the Cisco SPA series phones: http://www.cedarpc.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=24600 [cedarpc.com]
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.
Re:Asterisk (Score:4, Informative)
Came here to say this. Use those phones with Asterisk, easy peasy. There's also Trixbox for the textophobic Windows admin.
good advice, wrong address (Score:4, Informative)
"I've started at a small company...."
Several Suggestions... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Zimbra? (Score:5, Informative)
The built in chat is no longer supported, and it is very clunky to administer. Overall, Zimbra just barely meets the "MS Exchange" threshold for expected behavior. There are enough quirks, and oddities, that you'll often sit back and wish you just went with exchange. After using it for 2 years, the time, effort, frustrations, and cost all pointed towards a different solution.
Our office ended up getting a cheaper solution by using Microsoft's hosted exchange product. Integrated chat options weren't great for us (we have some Apple workstations), but we ended up with a much better solution by firing up OpenFire ourselves.
Things Zimbra doesn't do well: .. we had a ticket open for 9 months, and repeated attempts to get ANYTHING back from it were ignored, even with the "upsold" support option
-Work well with other Outlook based plugins
-allow for centrally managed contact lists (easily maintained, auto pushed, etc)
-Resource scheduling was often buggy or unpredictable
-support it's own product
-Documentation is mostly right, but where it's wrong its frustratingly wrong, (finding information is a bear, it's often that you'll stumble on to very old information when trying to find out details on a current version)
On top of all that, it's a resource pig - it takes almost a full minute to restart mail service (which unfortunately, we had to do quite often due to one issue or another).
Personally, I would not recommend it if you are just trying to save money over using Exchange. If you don't really NEED Exchange, but some of the features might be nice, then maybe Zimbra will be good for you. If your office needs full Exchange features, and you don't want to constantly tinker, or work around various niggles that aren't quite right.
Re:If you're starting a business... (Score:2, Informative)
For fuck sake get someone else to do phones, contract it out. YOU DO NOT WANT THE SHITSTORM THAT WILL HAPPEN AS YOU ARE TUNING SOME ASTERIX DISTRO. Been there, done that because we "inherited" a crap tone of VOIP phones. Real phones sound better, work just as well, and cost less. It works OK now, but a crappy FXO and some VOIP phones are the very last thing you need.
Sent from my Angry Sysadmin v2.0 running 8hours of overtime for a blown up breaker panel
Re:Google Apps (Score:5, Informative)
...aaaand when Google changes its terms, or discontinues the product, you are well and truly hammered. Which Google definitely does do from time to time, and you can't predict when they'll decide they've had enough of supporting some chunk-o-freeware they cobbled up. Look at the wreckage they made out of Google base -- terrible, terrible support, and now they're converting to a "paid" model, which means that the product data you upload to them that they get to place ads all over... you now get to pay for. And there's plenty more like that. [google.com]
Do NOT put your data "in the cloud." That's the very worst thing you can do. If you have a business, YOU should be in 100% control of your data and your backups.
The tech you use for documents should be chosen (1) so that you own the applications and (2) so that you can interchange any documents with others that you need to (color separations? Probably Photoshop. Writers and editors? Probably Word. Spreadsheets? Probably Excel. etc.)
You need a database? PostgreSQL or MySql (and I'd definitely go with the former... the latter has been, shall we say, "compromised.")
Just keep it to real applications that run under a real OS that you expect to be supported for some time. It will not be the least bit amusing to get that "end of life" notice from Microsoft or Apple or Ubuntu or whomever.
Let me be the first to trust you (Score:5, Informative)
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 [freecode.com], 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 [github.com]. 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.
The PBX istelf is the easy part (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:If you're starting a business... (Score:4, Informative)
Absolutely correct. Alas, outsourcing any kind of IT is anathema to the typical geek.
Once worked at small ISP (started in a guy's garage, and still pretty much his personal operation) where everything was internally developed: phone system, CRM, server status software... Needless to say, using these do-it-yourself tools was a nightmare.
Re:If you're starting a business... (Score:2, Informative)
I'm commeting because I just moded you Overrated and it went up to 5... I was trying to demote your post...
You need to reread the summary. He is starting work at a small company, not starting his own business. Who knows he may have been hired to do this as part of his job. Plenty of small business's need to have people with many hats on, so they might not be experts in everything they were hired to do.
In addition, depending on the business optimizing the phone system might be essential to grow the business and in other cases completely irrelevant. Am I the only one who thinks these always need to be more specific? How many people in the organization? How much does your business depend on phones? Email? Mail? IM? Social networking? Fax machines?
Use the tools you already purchased first (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re:If you're starting a business... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not about VOIP or IP phones vs analog/digital phones, it's about focusing limited time and attention on what needs to be.
Find a phone service provider, and let them propose what they know and can nail into place. You will be happy.
And do not let the boss rope you into working with the call director or voice response/menu tree. Gaaa!
Re A former exchange consultant here (Score:4, Informative)
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??
Re:Google Apps (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If you're starting a business... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm commeting because I just moded you Overrated and it went up to 5... I was trying to demote your post...
That's a borderline abusive moderation - there is no "-1 Wrong" for a reason: The correct response to a post that is flat wrong is to reply to it (as you've now done) explaining exactly why the parent poster is wrong, not to try to suppress the incorrect comment. Among other things, this reduces the chance that another moderator comes along and thinks your -1 Overrated was simply unfair and votes up the wrong comment.
Re:If you're starting a business... (Score:4, Informative)
It seems strange that everyone so far in this thread is put off by PBX's. Systems like FreePBX's images are really, really easy and very flexible. As long as you have a decent internet connection the sip service has been great. Tie the voicemail back in to the email, route extensions to cell phones, handle faxes all in one system.
Re:Google Apps (Score:5, Informative)
> Has no one forked MySql yet?
Yes. The original author. Michael "Monty" Widenius. He named his first database after his oldest daughter My, the new one after the second daughter Maria.
http://mariadb.org/ [mariadb.org]
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)