Information Week recently ran an article about VoIP Gotchas. If you're looking to make the switch from traditional PBXs and digital phones to a Voice over IP system, read this article. This year, we began implementing a VoIP phone system. Fortunately, my network team spent a good deal of time preparing for the installation and were ready for the issues.
In preaparation for moving to a new system, we researched several alternatives including hybrid switches. If you're not familiar with hybrid switches, their main attraction is their support for both digital and VoIP phones. The catch is, you need a fairly recent digital phone system in order to use existing phones. Because of the age of our current system, the hybrid switch wouldn't support our phones. So, we decided to bite the bullet and implement a complete VoIP solution. So far we've implemented the new phone system at only one campus. If all goes as planned, we'll convert our corporate campus next fiscal year.
How did our installation go? It went fairly well. The biggest issue we ran into was a bad network card that caused circuit failures. We've received a lot positive responses from the departments now using the new switch. Unified messaging, the ability to have voicemail messages sent to email, is a big hit. The biggest complaint; people can't forward voicemails between the old system and the new one.
How do I like the system? I like it a lot. It has a number of strategic and tactical advantages. On a purely personal level, I like the software client that allows me to use access the phone system from my laptop via an Internet connection.
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