New Phone System
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We have somewhere around 200-300 users and the person in charge of the phone system is looking at alternatives to consider. We currently use cisco phones but I don't know many more details other than that. Is a hosted solution viable and if so what company do you all recommend so i can look at them?
Or should we just stay with onsite management because that is what we are used to?
I would ask what makes sense for a school with that many users....but we hardly ever do what makes sense lol if you feel like answering that then go for it, I guess it couldn't hurt.
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The only advice I can offer is to ditch the Cisco phones and get anything else. They're more difficult to flash... they basically want to connect to a cisco phone system.
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Good Luck.
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@rojoloco Yeah we have had our problems consistently. I just don't know when and if our amount of users warrants something different than something much smaller.
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@rojoloco said in New Phone System:
The only advice I can offer is to ditch the Cisco phones and get anything else. They're more difficult to flash... they basically want to connect to a cisco phone system.
That is what I did... I tried the SIP firmware for one of the phones, it was awful.
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@brianlittlejohn we had a cisco phone system when I started. Awful, but easy to add new phones. New system? It was like pulling your own teeth, and I have 10 bricked phones now.
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@rojoloco said in New Phone System:
@brianlittlejohn we had a cisco phone system when I started. Awful, but easy to add new phones. New system? It was like pulling your own teeth, and I have 10 bricked phones now.
Yea, I just ditched the cisco system we had... I wanted to try and avoid purchasing new phones, but too many features did not work for me to consider deploying it.
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A hosted phone system that doesn't require anything on site besides the phone will be a lot of money to replace, even if you were just buying phones.
It's something we've just finished evaluating for our own reasons and are moving away from our on-prem system. Mostly due to a lack of features and age of the system.
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@dustinb3403 Any particular hosting companies you would recommend?
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@jmoore I'll PM you.
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I suggest that you hire @JaredBusch to do some consulting for you to help you find the best solution
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@dustinb3403 said in New Phone System:
A hosted phone system that doesn't require anything on site besides the phone will be a lot of money to replace, even if you were just buying phones.
It's something we've just finished evaluating for our own reasons and are moving away from our on-prem system. Mostly due to a lack of features and age of the system.
At this size, if you have a dedicated phone person, it's probably worth managing this yourself (that doesn't mean it's hosted onsite though). If the company is willing to get rid of the phone person.. then you might be OK with a fully hosted solution.
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Hosted is certainly viable. On site is viable too. Depends on what you want from the system.