Interesting. Looking for a new phone system for our office. Our current one is over ten years old.
Are all the new ones voip? Tried that with a 3mb T1 "back in the day". Hated it. Now we have 30mb with options north of 100mb (all fiber).
What are the phone systems folks are having success with?
We were looking to roll our own Asterisk with some brand name behind it so there would be support if we left, but Avaya made us a screaming deal through a VAR for an IP Office system that we couldn't turn down.
We looked at about four different systems including two well known Asterisk based brands, and even quotes from Mitel (not even close in price, I wouldn't bother again, ever, and only quoted them because I wanted another quote).
We had some in-place PRI circuits so we decided to keep that setup to feed it, but two of them are technically delivered over VoIP already and were converted in a carrier provided and maintained Adtran. So really a full VoIP conversion would be pretty simple, but we didn't want to deal with the headache of certifying that the carrier wasn't doing stupid incompatible stuff with their VoIP delivery or buy a border gateway for it... so we let them do their Adrian thing. The third PRI is delivered via Fiber via a separate path into the building (and down the street) and is likely ATM based on that, but it's again a "don't care" for us, they convert to a PRI in a Cisco router they provided and maintain.
Both carriers are rock solid with only one outage of any length of time in the last few years, and that was a large scale widespread power outage. If we had generator backup, we'd have had reason to be ticked at the larger carrier, but we went dark for as long as they did, so it didn't matter.
The IP Office has been rock solid. One problem and it's fixed now -- the phones we used are VOIP and we had a specific need for them to work off-site. Firewalls are Checkpoint, and we easily got the phones to do their own IPSEC tunnel back to the correct VLAN and all that stuff from anywhere on the planet, even behind NAT, and it all worked flawlessly. The problem was, Checkpoint followed the spec for renegotiation/rekeying of the tunnel and Avaya didn't. Checkpoint would send the request to rekey, Avaya would ACK and do it, and then continue to jabber away on the previously negotiated network port number, even though the spec says to switch to the newly negotiated one.
We turned in evidence and a ticket that went to tier-4 at Avaya and communication ended.
So, the workaround was to re-key/renegotiate the tunnel only every 24 hours and have the remote folks make sure their phone was rebooted once off-hours by hand so it'd do it off-hours. Worked fine for a year, but was mildly annoying.
New firmware for the phones for general release fixed the problem earlier this year. No communication to us about the fix from Avaya, but it got fixed.
That really has been the only problem.
We also are using third party call center management software and not Avaya's. Theirs is gold plated and we don't need the full feature set. Chronicall is the name of the third party stuff. Works well. Handles all the usual queue reports and call recordings and what not, but does it by simply snagging data from the IP Office hunt groups. Basically turns hunt groups into a mini ACD system. Along with Voice Mail Pro, literally anything can be scripted or even custom database hooks to our databases done.
And we did that for one thing -- but not through VM Pro -- we track the caller from starting agent/queue through any transfers with our own code -- basically we just have the agent push an on screen button in our code to "save" the call ID of the inbound call after they've filled in a case in our system, and then anyone later who talks to that person can hit a "retrieve" button to pull up the case, because we can query their phone and ask it for the call ID they're currently talking to.
We just snag the Call ID out of the PBX after analyzing the API docs a bit, and shove it into our application's DB if the agent hits that save/attach call button.
The attach could have been automated, but management of that business group said they get calls they don't want attached to a case. Basically they have some business rules that start a 72 hour timer if someone contacts us, that they don't want started for various reasons that relate to whether the person appears competent to understand a phone call when they call in. (Long story short: They're often dealing with drug addicts.)
Anyway. System works well. Not a second of downtime on it that hasn't been triggered by external problems unrelated to the phone system.
Thank God I never had to deal with Rolm stuff, other than to interface to it at a government site that should have used a forklift to put it in a dumpster ten years before I hooked gear up to it.![brian]](/community/data/avatars/m/21/21096.jpg?1456258959){kind=avatar}
