Chris Hellyar wrote:
I signed off on the spec, so I was/am part of the problem in the
business sense, but at some point the vendor should be tell us we're
stuffing popcorn up a dead goats nose instead of fiddling around with
the thing trying to make it work for 2 years.
What is wrong with the Nortel solution? Must be serious to consider an
upgrade after 2 years!
There's not really anything wrong with it, but it's not an ideal
solution for where the business is going.. As per my other post the
business is consolidating to one building from two. The current
solution splits the telephony into two chunks, and is no ideal from a
management or operational point of view.
Also in the last two years SIP has become mainstream, IP handsets have
become main stream and to some extent vendor agnostic.
Although it is likely that we will just move to a larger/better nortel
solution, it would be ignorant not to at least asses other options, and
that's what I'm doing here, and in conversations with conventional
vendors.
I've got a tiny Asterisk system at home (1 analog line, few VoIP
extensions and a couple of remote VoIP extensions (one that I take to
work with me and one in my sister's flat in Dunedin)) and a play one at
work (we've got two sites so it's mostly used for the IT people etc at
each site to ring inter site over the WAN, but also as a backup system
for when the E1 PSTN connection goes down). I have no problems with
Asterisk as a home or small business PBX but the other solutions
available for larger business really can be quite impressive compared to
a basic Asterisk install.
For where I work I really like the look of a couple of Zultys systems
(one at each site), http://www.zultys.com/. It's a closed source
(although IIRC the PBX and their phones run Linux) VoIP based PBX using
SIP. Other than Asterisk and other OSS PBXs it has to be one of the
most open PBXs that I have seen. It talks SIP (with SIMPLE support) for
it's extensions so you have heaps of choice for what phones you want (it
can configure their own ZIP phones plus some others) and their web site
is full of information including installation and administration
manuals! How many other PBX makers have more than just sales brochures
freely available on their website? Their latest software update even
includes a gateway to Jabber/XMPP based IM services (including using
gateways on said jabber server to other IM platforms) for the IM
component of the system.
