> Out of interest, why are you getting rid of the Nortel system? > > What features/benefits are you looking for.
The major issue with the nortel kit is one born of business process. We currently have two 'main' offices. One with 24 extensions and one with 110. There is a nortel switch in each site. When we move to the new office we're consolidating those two sites (and some other people), and will wind up with one site with 140 or so phones initially, with 170 desks available. While the two separate PBX's can be networked they don't look like one switch from a user point of view, and we would not have a seamless telephony solution. The easy fix is to go to the next size up switch, which will put a $80k dent in the budget before we plug in the first phone. Hence my interest in Asterisk. I've been reading a bit about it, and saw this come up so thought I'd plug in some questions. > The obvious benefit of Asterisk is that you'll get feature updates that > you can apply when you want and it's not going to cost you a service > call out. > From my experience most providers aren't all that interested in > providing software updates for systems once they're installed. They > prefer to leave you for 5 years and then come back and sell you the next > solution. Our current vendor is Telecom for the Nortel gear, and they've been pretty good with support in that sense, although they seem to be a little thin on the ground when the going gets tough and it looks like a software issue. Nortel themselves as a 3rd tier support organisation seem to be pretty good. Cheers, Me.
