atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Shoretel Telephones & Systems Shoretel

Anyone have any experience with this system? I was involved with an install yesterday, seemed really nice, more feature rich than Cisco, much cheaper as well.

It must not be too popular. I asked for Shoretel info from this board months ago and got one response. I hear good things about it from industry rags but nothing from the interconnects.

One of our local computer vendors picked it up and entered the wonderful world of phone systems sales and service. They merged shortly afterward with a local phone system dealer and they now offer Shoretel but i don't run up against them much at all. The owner tells me it is a slick system.

we're going ShoreTel. have demo'd and played with it for a couple of months. 1st small store went in well a month ago in Washington, no complaints. installing a 50-phone system this week in central California. will do another eight or ten sites this year, I'm told. will try and remember to keep this BBS updated.

royb- complete your profile so that others may ask questions and send info. Email and web address. Glad to hear the install went well. Keep us updated.

I have been a ShoreTel reseller for over three years. System is by far the most stable, scalable, and redundant system on the market. Let me know if I can help you in any way.

45 IP phone install in Sacramento went very well. the only problems encountered so far have been network/traffic related. very busy site, 512k IP-frame circuit. prioritized all tcp and udp to and from the server, seems to have settled down nicely. (problem was delayed screen refresh when hitting feature keys). voice quality has been very good. zero out-of-box failures on the phones (which is soooo much better than my other brand of pbx).

I install our third site next week, another 20 users, more as it happens, if you're interested. (so far, so good). admin is fabulous.........

Ha! Spoke too soon. Disclaimer: Old voice guy who maybe doesn't know what he doesn't know. In the past month, many problems have come out of the woodwork. The ShoreTel system itself seems pretty stable, admin is a breeze, users are happy with that part of it. However, other WAN 'shortcomings' become very apparent when voice is added to the stream, and to the users it looks like phone system problems. Tools to monitor are costly; Troubleshooting can be tricky due to the 'spiky' nature of WAN traffic; QoS might work, but doesn't appear to work too well in a busy environment (hence the phrase "no substitution for bandwidth"). We've (temporarily) put a traffic shaper into the loop to overcome QoS' limitations while we evaluate/discuss/decide. (I anticipate having to buy lots more bandwidth to support VoIP.) Sorry, this isn't meant to be a blog -- just don't go into VoIP without being ready to spend $$$ up front, during, after -- it's not the panacea of cost savings that VoIP marketing departments suggest it is. (We thought we were ready). More later, if you're interested......

Good followup. I have been right where you have been, luckilly I have enough data background from the old days to understand all the crap that is flying around a network. Unless you got that baby locked down ala Novell or Unix you are going to see some real weird things if you have a packet sniffer.

Thanks for following up. Great info. Keep us posted in your upcoming adventures.

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