I’ll chime in a tad about the softphones… We seriously considered it with our new voip rollout. Opted against it. (Note, we are solely laptops).
These were the factors we decided against it: 1. Albeit very rare for our users, if their PC is acting weird, bye bye phone. As an IT guy who supports users too, I cringe at the thought of a user calling me with a PC issue, and I have to tell them to reboot – which ends the calls. 2. This one our ops team brought up: Many times, users are still on the phone while they are powering down their laptop to take home for the night. Won’t be able to do that anymore. However, we still have the softphone features, and our users can use them whenever out of the office. IOS/Android too. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Richard Stovall Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 5:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] RE: How much to implement a Cisco telephone implementation Softphones are, umm, interesting. Definitely do a trial with a number of different types of users before going whole hog. On Mar 26, 2014 2:16 PM, "Stefan Jafs" <[email protected]> wrote: Yes strictly Outlook and Exchange, and this is also about UM, not just a phone system. The client for smart devices is very important and you are correct we do not need phones for all desks, may use Softphones on quit a few. We do not really care much for video and web conferencing, however we are planning to use the Desktop sharing. __________________________________ Stefan Jafs From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Frank Ress Sent: March 26, 2014 12:20 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: How much to implement a Cisco telephone implementation Depends on a lot of considerations that you don’t mention. Are you an Outlook/Exchange shop? How much value is there in unified messaging and the features that go with it (e.g. voice-to-text and vice versa)? Do you even WANT desk sets? (We’re looking at the same migration, and intend to almost completely move to soft phones and headsets.) It’s not either-or, you can save a lot with soft phones, but use desk sets where you’d like. What about web and video conferencing? Again, that’s one of the attractive features to us in a Lync solution. We could do more self-hosting for these services. We looked at Cisco several years ago, when we first entertained our PBX replacement. They didn’t yet offer soft phones, and the Cisco desk sets were pretty expensive. I have no idea how well they’d interoperate with the rest of a Microsoft environment today – and I don’t know how much you care. We’re a fairly pure Windows/Exchange/SQL Server/Sharepoint/Office environment. Lync fits well. I just wish that I had a budget. Unfortunately, management usually perceives this as a pure voice play, and it’s anything but these days. Frank Ress From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stefan Jafs Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 10:35 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [NTSysADM] How much to implement a Cisco telephone implementation We are looking at replacing our old Nortel BCM 450 for about 275 users. The shortlist is Cisco and Microsoft Lync. We are leaning towards Cisco a bit more expensive but also only 1 vendor (the President likes the “hardware” platform, even though Cisco runs with VM’s). Anyhow implementation is about $66k (Lync is about $56k), to me that sounds like about twice too much, has anyone have done a similar implementation, and / or is it a fair price? And we would do the placement of the phones ourselves. __________________________________ Stefan Jafs _____ This communication is for the use of the intended recipient only. It may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication, the disclosure, copying, distribution or use hereof is prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please advise me by return e-mail or by telephone and then delete it immediately.
