Telecoms Review

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I've been asked to look into the communications and telecoms strategy for the school I work in.

Currently we have a Nortel Meridian Option 11 that is over 10 years old. Whilst it does its job, it is very close to running out of licences and needs a software upgrade (last checked this was in the region of £15K).

We also have around 35 mobile phones with 12 of them being blackberries. Whilst the blackberries do the job just fine, there must be another method or email on the move that is as robust and cheaper then the blackberries.

We will also bu upgrading our mail server to Exchange 2010 when it comes out.

Does anyone have any advice on what I need to look for? Someone mentioned Hosted Telephony so that we can turn extensions on and off as required (ie during the holidays when there is no-one around).

VOIP, ISDN 30 (we already use this) switch manufacturers, joining outlying offices into the telephone system, voicemail to outlook etc.

Any help gratefully accepted.

 

Our place uses Mitel so another vote for them. We use mainly Mitel VOIP 3000, 6100 and FX 2000 I reckon.

 

Are you going to be supporting the VOIP install if you go for it? If not there will be a nice support contract to go with it.

 

Good point, VoIP skills are highly paid these days. My employer currently has 3 or 4 vacancies for Voice Specialist/Engineers it can't fill, pushing the wage up to entice people. Best factor in some CCNA Voice training maybe. Not just saying it but Joe's course looks spot on and you even get a free CCNA course . . . .I think.

 

Yup, also worth noting that the network infrastucture might need to be upgraded as well. POE switch \ VLANs etc.

All £££££ to be spent.

 

We had a mojor upgrade to the network last year, so the infrastructure is already there.

I would guess that there will be support for the first year, but I will be maintaining the system after that

As for a pay rise ROTFLMAO

 

We upgraded our telephone system from the Nortel BCM400 to the Avaya IP Office 500. It supports analogue, ditigal & IP phones, and depending on what options you go for you can have messages forwarded to your inbox (with Exchange), do mobile twinning, on the VoIP side have either a handset or use your laptop/PC at home and use your extension, etc...

As for mobile phones, when we went thru the process of getting mobile phones for us, the iPhone came out cheaper than the blackberry as it wasn't capped (or subject to the fair use policy) for data/internet and we didn't have to pay for the blackberry licence. When it comes around to renewing our contract, I'd probably get a Windows Mobile phone for myself (not sure about for everyone else), the only thing I would have to look into is the capped fair use policy though.

BTW, Exchange 2010 is out already, we started installing and setting it up and had to delete the server at the time (there were a couple of problems we had to sort out first, our certificate and there were errors in our Exchange environment from a previously fail upgrade a couple of years ago). We'll be install Exchange 2k10 again shortly

-Ken

 

Thanks for the info there guys.

From a management point of view, what utilities are available with the i-phone. Already have a BES so I know what that can do.

Also does anyone have any experience with SIP phones. My boss was on about putting an aeriel up so that the porters, matron etc can be mobile but still contactable. I think the cost of that is just too much compared to a standard mobile phone.

 

Loads of food for thought there guys, thanks a lot.

Got various reps comming to see us soon, when we have got our own thoughts in order.

Will keep this thread going as and when we have info to share. Enough to say that with a Citrix farm to learn how to use, Appsense and Appv to learn, my time is going to be taken up with learning this stuff