Did you every think that your company would be physically unavailable, the building not accessible and the phone system unmanned? The issue of business continuity and disaster recovery is on your 'to do' list and hopefully you can get to it before it gets to you. Recently, we had the experience of having to resuscitate […]
We continue to be a major fan of ShoreTel solutions, but that does not mean that they we accept everything without question. One of the most touted advantages of the ShoreTel architecture is the concept of a "single image" solution with no single point of failure. We find that in large enterprise deployments that may […]
All of the architecture "geek speak" aside, CISCO and ShoreTel have fundamental "cultural" differences that defines their approach to the entities of a "phone" and a "user". Simply stated in the ShoreTel world a phone can not exist without a user, but the CISCO world a phone can exist without a user. Now this is […]
All telephone systems have to deal with the same key architectural issues regardless of who manufactured the equipment. All phone systems have to provide for the definition of a system "dial plan"; trunk groups, call flow options, phone devices, gateways and user profiles. The dial plan, for example, not only has to identify the patterns […]
Having deployed literally thousands of phone systems of all sizes and levels of complexity, we have distilled a set of rules and check lists that work. (see our "network readiness check list" and our "VoIP planning guide") When phone systems were analog or traditional TDM based solutions, deployments were challenging enough! You always had the […]
We are often asked for an opinion on the subject of what is better solution: a hosted "virtual" PBX or owning your own phone system? Lets take a look a quick look at both solutions and see if anything stands out as making one solution more obvious than another. First, let me lay out some […]
Lately, we have been playing with a Windows based solution offered by 3CX. We remember the "UnPBX" products of the late 90's early 2000! There were a few companies that tried to build PBX systems on Microsoft Platforms like Windows NT. Popular gateway cards were produced by companies like Dialogic and inserted on the back […]
Since we published the blog on the ShoreTel SIP implementation using Ingate, we have been deluged with requests for more detail. Specifically, people want to know if there is a more economical solution for bringing SIP dial tone into the ShoreTel architecture when you are trying to add just a few local lines to a […]
My brother came from New York to visit with me in San Diego over the Thanksgiving Holiday. During his visit, he was frustrated by the fact that his brand new iPhone 4s battery could not last through the day! I did not pay to much attention to his ranting on this subject, but during his […]
I don’t think your average business professional wakes up in the morning and says “Gee, I need some SIP”! They do however ask questions like how do we get an Area Code from New York to appear on our System in San Diego? Do I really have to buy 23 channels of voice on a […]
Unified communications is a revolutionary technology that integrates many worlds of communication at one place. The way unified communications has converged many services is something unprecedented. You can get all the great features of unified communication like instant messaging, video conferencing, data sharing, electronic whiteboards, and call controls etc through one service. Recent developments in […]
ShoreTel currently runs on Microsoft Servers. There are a number of Windows components that need to be installed to support the deployment. If you have been installing ShoreTel for any period of time you already know that FTP and SMTP services along with Microsoft Windows ASP.NET, IIS and certain of its components are also required […]