sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Guidance sought, VOIP setup for small business

Oh Grider sorry for being confusing. The panasonic voip system is one I assisted in setting up at a different client of mine. And by assisting I mean I did little more than configure administrative features on a dedicated xp computer, and set up phone extensions and features. The vendor and the dsl provider installed the heavy hardware.

The current client seeking my help with voip just has a loosely strung together setup-- one landline routed through a costco-variety multi-extension cordless phone system, one comcast voip line and a couple of cellphones. It's a workable setup that frustrates them.

What they envision is 4 incoming phone numbers for various aspects of their organization. Later they may want as many as 8 incoming phone numbers as their plans unfold and expand. They need to recognize these incoming calls by their number, in other words know that the call is coming in for the family foundation, for the consulting firm, etc.

They currently need about 8 phones/extensions in the office. Eventually they want to have 16 or more, as they add more personnel. They want all this incoming phone traffic to be handled by the office assistant, instead of the phone being answered automatically by an auto-attendant feature. But I'm sure that would be nice to have during after hours.

They are projecting a lean, high-tech image internally and externally. And they travel all over the world, so they seek the savings that Voip can provide in long distance and international traffic, and they like conference calling, and the boss dreams of having that call-hunting feature where it rings all of his numbers so he can receive certain calls from almost anywhere. The sum total of these needs indicates they want a feature-rich system. At the same time they look to me to pick the system that works best and is cost efficient.

The current client seeking my help with voip just has a loosely strung together setup-- one landline routed through a costco-variety multi-extension cordless phone system, one comcast voip line and a couple of cellphones. It's a workable setup that frustrates them.

I have no doubt whatsoever about this client being frustrated. What you have taken the time to describe is a very common scenario that I and many of my fellow board members here see on numerous occasions annually. These business setups evolve into existence within the office because of poor planning in the beginning by the top level management of the business. This is not an insult to you or the management of the particular business, it is what it is. These setups come together when telephones are considered to be low level technology that can be solved by something strung together with a few phones purchased from Costco.

In the early stages of this thread I was under the impression that we had some elbow room as far as time was concerned. My opinion has dramatically changed.

If you and I were fellow doctors consulting on the health condition of our patient I would be recommending a standard surgery on an emergency basis, otherwise this patient is gonna die.

You have mentioned a land line and a Comcast VoIP line. I assume these are from different providers. I also assume what you refer to as a Comcast Voip line is basically a land line delivered by cable modem and does not interact with the other land line delivered in the traditional manner by the local service provider. By interact I mean as far as a hunt group or rollover, not to be confused with call forwarding.

How does this business deal with incoming and outgoing faxes?

I have some very cost effective ideas for your client. Notice I did not say cheap. Cheap is what is already present. What was cheap soon will be referred to as waste.

Welcome to my world! Shall we continue?

From what you have said so far I would lean you in this direction.

Consider a circuit VS POTS line. POTS lines are like you have at home, and are a technology that is older than you are with very few contributing features for their cost. You should have some service providors in your area for telephone services that provide dynamic T1's which are provisioned as Data for use as your ISP, and a PRI telephone circuit. Dynamic T1 in this case means that the T1 will use channels for voice calls when needed, and the channels will revert back to use for data for ISP access when not in use for voice on the PRI. Many say they do this, but find a TELCO locally that has local references you can check.

This will allow you with the proper business telephone system to use a circuit to deliver calls to the phone users. The PRI can have multiple channels which provide a talk path for a call each. Each of these incoming calls can be to a different telephone number as a PRI can signal to the phone system which number was dialed by the caller on the incoming call, and the phone system can route it as needed no matter which one of the circuits channels the call comes in on. Another advantage is that everyone can have their own (DID)direct telephone number, and their own fax number, as many phone systems with PRI can route incoming faxes to individual numbers, and the phone system can send that call to a fax server. The fax server can then forward the fax via email to the inbox of the user assigned to that telephone number. Voicemail can forward the VM as an attachement to an email so they can get their VM, and FAXES anywhere they get their EM.

I work with the IPO, and can reccomend a very reputable company in your area that I have experience, and confidence with their ability to deliver excellent solutions in your area. The Avaya IP Office(IPO) is a great system, and made by the company with the most implemented phone systems in the world. Avaya

There are other systems that can do what you need, and I am not going to make statements about those as just like guys who do not do the IPO do not know it, I do not know their systems either. One feature that is often helpful with large amounts of travel in a tech world is the IPO's ability to do 64 channel conference bridges, which means you can have huge conference calls from all over the world.

PM me of you would like to talk more.

Please forgive the lengthy delay in responding to your excellent posts. I was incommunicado for a few days.

John, I should have remembered the fax when I was describing everything. This is on another POTS line dedicated just for faxing. I got them a Brother multifunction center and they love it.

Everything you deduced from my desription is correct. Yes please, let's continue.

Thank you also, aarenot. I was going to talk to Avaya after numerous recommendations as one the options for consideration, so your timing is fortuitous. I will PM you.

Sure seems like you're going against your tagline.... recommending an Avaya and all!?!

"and can reccomend a very reputable company in your area that I have experience, and confidence with their ability to deliver excellent solutions in your area."

I am just going to re-iterate the recommendation, and hopefully on your second reading you will see it is for the "very reputable company ", and their abilities with the system in which my confidence lies, as well as my recommendation. If he does not go with someone I can recomend for a tech, then I can not recomend that he go with any specific system, period. The "very reputable company" I am referring to is a local interconnect in case I was not clear. If you construed that another way, it was not my intent, after all, any system is crap in the wrong hands!

I want to consider every option I can so if anyone here wants to pm me with a San Francisco vendor, please do so. I hope it's not against the rules to ask for that favor.

Here is a good start, but stay with us through the process:

Addison Ashley Corporation

San Francisco, CA 94111

(415) 391-2900 Ext 2905

Thanks John, also sent you an email this morning, hope you have time to reply soon. And thanks everyone!