Scott Martin

Most of the articles that I have read on the topic appear to have more negative views than positive, but that again depends on the use and perception of the system. 

The main reason why I decided to implement a VOIP system was that the demographics of our employees would save us a substantial amount of money.  Also we were able to consolidate our data and voice networks into one for less maintenance.  In our structure we had 10-12 people working from their house, one of them being our lead developer who I talked with daily as well as a several other developers.  At times we were on the phone all day, sometimes 3 or 4 way calling to debug or solve an issue.  With a VOIP system we no longer had to pay long distance charges on these calls.  Our remote employees were required to have a high speed connection, but in this age just about everyone has that installed.  We saw savings of around $1000 a month on our system.  We used a hosted system so we paid a monthly service charge per phone, but we still came out better in the end.  Larger installations will likely see bigger savings depending on user size.Our network was defined enough so that we could support the extra packets without any issues.  Some other networks might have required an upgrade of equipment and cabling to be satisfactory.The positives and negatives of a VOIP system should be thought out carefully before moving down the implantation road.  We ran into some snags, but our vendor worked very closely with us and resolved issues before they became a crisis.  One the issues reported to me was the quality of speech from home users using a cable modem or DSL line.  This was usually due to the fact they were downloading large files.   Another was the fact that an external power source was needed for the phone (we used a Cisco 7940), but we implemented some PoE switches with UPS’s and alleviated this issue.Two of the intangibles that I found very useful and good tools to have were integration with Outlook and the ability to have voice messages forwarded to my smart phone.  With the Outlook integration I could look up my contact name and with the TAPI functionality I could right click and call the contact from any number stored.  Plus with any contact I had in my phone merged with Outlook I always had all my numbers to choose from.  With the voice mail forwarding I was notified of any missed calls that might be needed.  Very handy when your desk phone is not forwarded to you cell. Here is a good article on som of the 1,2,3’s of VOIP.  VOIP Overview

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under IT Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.