sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Toshiba Telephones & Systems End of Life on the MAS

So we got a note from out vendor that Toshiba was ending support on all MAS products as of Sept 1, 2016. Never mind the fact that we just purchased one in April..

They are telling us that we need to upgrade them to the IP edge servers. So I asked what the new software looked like, and was taold everything is the same, but it is virtualized. So, my question was :If it is the same software, still running on Windows, why are they dropping support on it. Just don't support the machine." They did not have an answer. We have 8 of these in a Health Care environment, just bang, we are all done?

Is our vendor confused?

Was also told that if we upgraded, we still had to buy a physical server, we just cannot drop it into our VMWare environment that is already in place. So they are still going to support a physical machine? What is the point of virtualization then?
Yes I am venting a little. But really?

Just to be clear, you can extend your support on the MAS past September 1st, but you can not buy any new support after that date. After the maintenance ends on the MAS you can not renew. Toshiba has already discontinued the MAS and MicroMAS. Now they are going to end support for them after all the exiting support contracts end.

The new visualized IPEdge comes on a Dell server. Toshiba has the software pre-installed on the Dell machine. The hardware support is actually through Dell. Toshiba currently does not currently support using your own server, but maybe in the future.

There are a few minor enhancements to the ACD portion of the MAS, such as a web interface for managing the ACD. Toshiba promises more enhancements in the future.

The voicemail on the IPEdge is pretty different as compared to the Stratagy on the MAS. While the Stratay is pretty comfortable for techs that have been doing Toshiba for a while, I like many of the new features with the IPEdge voicemail.