sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems NEC Telephones & Systems 2 IPK Phone Systems

I'm the IT manager for my company and we currently have an IPK, completely maxed out. It's a great system for our needs so I'm not looking into voip yet. We are considering buying another IPK to support employee growth. Can the 2 systems be linked together to share resources and act more as 1 phone system? We would like to be able to dial extensions between both and share trunk groups.

As a secondary question, is the IPK II a good product? I have heard the software is very buggy and our vendor has told us they dont recommend it.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Can the 2 systems be linked together to share resources and act more as 1 phone system?

Yes, KCCIS.

IPK II a good product?

I've sold and have had installed over 50 of them. At the beginning, our techs had a hard time adjusting to the new software (and some buggyness), but now they are rocking along and also like it better than the IPK.

There are a couple of issues to be aware of using two systems as one. This are based on my experiences with an IPK1 system. KCCIS has not changed on the IPK2 based on my testing last week..

1. Centralized voicemail. The remote site will not have softkey integration when logged into the voicemial on the main site.
2. Call pick will not work easily so don't mix user groups.
3. Outgoing CLID is not repeated across the CCIS link. If you need this feature have a seperate set of trunks on the second system.
4. Centrlized billing is not supported so you would need a seperate CDR package on each site.

Apart from that it should work ..

With the IPK II you more than double your size and you can migrate most of your circuit cards and all phones. If your company is all in one building the IPK II is the way to go. The systems software is stable after the shacky start.

Foot note if you upgrade to the IPK II the end user will have to get used to different features and functions as if the system was replaced with a different brand. This will be hard for some people because the phones are the same and it makes it more difficult to break old habits.
I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.

many ways to integrate 2 systems but not all features would be available to them both.. you could use Tie Line[TLI(2) ETU's], ISDN[thru PRT], IP[thru IAD card], even through loop backs.. just depends on what would suit you best..

Upgrading to the IPK II is the most economical as you can re-use most of your hardware,however,if you upgrade from IPK I to IPK II DO NOT use the PCPro database conversion tool! Key in the data fresh or you will have alot of "buggy" problems.