I have a customer with 5 offices. Each office has 3 C.O. lines that they must keep. They want site-to-site connectivity between the offices with a common voicemail. In other words, voicemail handled on the corporate controller with one box per location. They also said they need advanced, advanced call reporting. I first looked at the Vertical systems that I usually sell, and soon gave up. After looking at many systems it seems that the Mitel 3300 CXi II, one at each branch would do this job with Business Dashboard. Where it got confusing for me was the licensing. Do you have to buy Business Dashboard for each controller that you want data from? What other licenses would be required, and what comes standard with the controller? Is a license really required to use the 'Computer' jack on a Mitel IP phone? One license read 'Centralized Voicemail and Centralized Attendant'...but can't call handling programming just route the calls to one voicemail anyway? When all is said and done I'm sure a Mitel dealer should figure all this out, but essentially I'm just trying to figure out if I'm making a sound recommendation and expand my understanding of Mitel. I feel I'm soon about to give up on Vertical and take the Mitel training anyway. Thanks for any input.

How many phones are at each location?No need for a liscence to use the jack on the phone.

Thanks for the quick reply! Thus far they've used POTS wireless phones. Only managers would need IP phones, so probably two or three per location. The sales floor would probably use a POTS wireless base connected to an analog port so they have floating handsets on the sales floor. Also I should mention I already have a site-to-site VPN set up so you can ping a local IP address in the correct subnet and get the remote device's response. As I understand it Mitel counts that as an 'IP trunk license' for each call traversing that IP address at a time. I plan to not use the WAN port on the controllers.

Most of the references you've made to licensing (i.e. 2nd port activation, individual IP Trunk licenses), apply to the SX200 ICP's not the 3300's. The 3300 does have the same licensing requirements for IP/analog sets (depending on hardware choices).

You may want to look at pricing out some teleworkers for the remote locations and host them off the main site and just use sip for the analog stuff.