So your organization is finally planning on upgrading the old PBX, you’ve got a big project on your hands, and you are looking for the first things that you need to do to plan this beast out. Well have no fear because I have been on the planning, fabricate, deployment and support side of the voice over IP business for 10 years and will give you a big represent overview of what the next 3 to 12 months are going to be like for you. The first thing that you have to know is what the reasons are for the deployment. It is important to maintain the reasons for the upgrade in mind when planning and selecting the new system, so as not to get sidetracked into less important reasons during the process. Here are the most popular good reasons ones that we run into:
-The old PBX is failing or breaking down all the time.
-People are complaining about how old the phone system.
-There are potential monthly cost savings by converting to SIP trunking.
-You are hearing about improved productivity from other companies using sigh over IP systems.
-There are a lot of unusual features available that you need.
There are, however, other benefits to upgrading the existing phone system that you may not have thought of and will arrive out during the process:
-Your old data network gets an upgrade as fragment of the cost of the new phone system.
-There will be an ability to improve business processes.
-There are many ways customer service and vendor interactions can be improved.
-Faster handset moves, adds, and changes.
This guide assumes that you are looking at getting an on premise voice over IP-based phone system. The other options of getting in on premise passe PBX system or a hosted voice over IP system are not discussed because they are a minor fragment of the overall market at this point.
Planning the VoIP Upgrade
So, where do you start? Well, the first step is assessing your current phone system and data network. You have to find out what the current capabilities are that you have, what people like about the system and what they don’t like about the system, and especially how the people that are big users of the PBX on the customer and help desk interaction side make use of the current system and want to improve it. From a calculation standpoint, what it means you have to figure out a bunch of things for every site:
-How many analog and digital phones you have. Which analog handsets can be replaced by low end IP phones (usually all of them will be).
-How many outside lines you have in the form of negate T-1′s and analog ports
-Number and type of data T1′s at every site. (A T1 can be used for tell, Internet, WAN, or a combination).
-Current wide area network per region bandwidth and utilization.
-Current local dwelling network switches quantity and location; quantity of used ports per closet.
-Any special requirements for ACD, IVR, call recording, handset paging, and application integration.
If you want to gain funding support for this you have to get a handle on what your new monthly costs are. Unique monthly costs include charges at every site:
-Internet and wide area network circuit costs.
-PBX lease costs.
-PBX monthly service costs. Average cost of additional PBX service on a monthly basis.
-Cellphone costs, since some of these can be offset using single number approach.
-Monthly conferencing costs.
-Monthly maintenance and support on all network hardware and software that may be replaced.
Once you related what your current monthly costs are you’re ready to figure out what the budget for your new project is. The best outcome to the new project would be that your new monthly costs are lower than your current monthly costs, after accounting for new equipment installation services and everything else to put the new phone system in place, when financed over a 3 to 5 year period with a one dollar buyout at the end so you own the new system. You may fetch out during the course of this planning that it will be significant to get a new Internet phone and wide area network connections in order to realize the desired return on investment so make sure you preserve your monthly circuit costs and your financing of equipment, maintenance, and installation separate..
Choosing VoIP vendors and resellers
There are two choices to make next. One of the choices is to determine the manufacturer of the new phone system that you want to purchase, the other choice is to pick a local vendor who’s going to do the design installation and support of the new system. To find the best note and the best service on the new system you should go about this in a very specific way. Customers have found in many cases that it’s best to secure a phone system from a manufacturer who has good local resellers that will do a good installation of the system, a smooth cutover, enabling all the features that they want, and then support them well in an ongoing fashion afterwards.
The size of the reseller that you probably want to work with depends on the size and needs of your organization. I recommend that you work with the reseller who is gargantuan enough to handle your business but won’t be overwhelmed by it and is miniature enough that your business is important to them and they’ll bend over backwards to catch care of you. So how do you find a reseller that’s the right size for you? This is where you go back to the phone system manufacturers to procure some options.
The major phone system vendors are the best source to find out the local resellers. The major vendors of declare over IP systems at this point in time are Cisco Systems, Avaya, Mitel, Shoretel, and Digium Switchvox. If you contact these vendors either online or through their local salespeople you can ask them for a recommendation of their top three resellers who would do a good job for you. After you get those reseller names from the vendor try to get their recommendation of whom that you should really work with, then call that reseller, as well as the other two.
At this point you should have three equipment vendors three resellers for these vendors will have nine good options of a local business that will do a great job for your voice over IP upgrade. Be aware though as soon as you start this process of contacting vendors you are going to start getting phone calls because people know that you’re enthusiastic. Now, that may be a way that you can pick up out who’s the most fervent to obtain your business, but it also might unprejudiced give you objective indication of who has the most aggressive
So be very clear to everyone your expected timeframe is going to be, that you can take your time and select the best vendor review, and if they bug you excessively that will put them on the bottom of your list. By the way, you should start this process at least six months before you want to have a recent phone system up and running. It is going to you 2 to 3 months to select a vendor, another month to figure out pricing and financing, and from when you say go it will take about two months to get the equipment then another month to fully set up and cut over to the new phone system.
Vendor expectations
What you should seek information from from these vendors is that they are going to want to meet with you determine what your needs are, do a walk-through of your existing systems and glean out any special requirements that you have. They will then try to sell you on some specific feature that their system has that nobody else has and try to get you to examine a demo of their system. I recommend that you glance the demo of their system, don’t buy into any of their must have exclusive special features, then ask them for a list of reference customers about your size and requirements that you can call and talk to to see how things went. Definitely call these reference customers and see how the reseller did during the design phase, how competitive their pricing was, how they did during the installation, and what their wait on was like after the sale.
During this part of the engagement is when you have the most leverage and you can come by the most things for free. By all means take the time to pick up some good lunches and get to know the people that are going to potentially doing work for you for. Furthermore find out who is actually going to be doing the installation for you, if they’re going to be coming from out of region, or if they are local and are going to be available for succor after the installation. Don’t be jumpy to ask this question as it is perfectly valid and definitely will have a bearing on the outcome of the project and should be a decision factor for you.
At this point you should have proposals from everyone of your vendors and you can start comparing them. Some phone system vendors will try to give you just a monthly cost with a summary description of the parts, then say hey that’s the way it’s done. Since most of the voice over IP vendors are coming from the data side of business they expect that you’re going to be wanting a line item pricing and a bottom-line cost. You can then employ this to settle what you want finance or not. If you’re not getting this ask for line item pricing and the specific part and model numbers of equipment and a complete breakout of what the annual maintenance costs are going to be.
Annual maintenance is broken down into three areas. Annual product maintenance which provides for support and replacement of hardware and software, upgrade maintenance costs which allows you to upgrade the applications, and a local vendor support contract. All three areas of maintenance are valid. The first two are very important and should be bought in just about all cases, and a local support contract should be purchased if you are not going to have someone qualified to operate the equipment after it’s installed.
Since this is a voice over IP system you should expect that you’re going to be able to run the system over a new data network and not on a separate network that you put in parallel to the existing one. This means that the company is putting in your voice over IP phone system should have excellent networking capability and be able to demonstrate that they understand Quality of Service, which is tuning the network equipment to differentiate between different types of data and prioritize voice. This is easy to do on a local area network, somewhat challenging to do on a wide-area network, and difficult to do over a firewall connection to the Internet. If you are looking at doing SIP trunking make sure the vendor shows where they are going to apply quality of service on all the SIP voice paths.
Making a VoiP phone system decision
So at this point you should have your line item proposals with all the pricing, with all the installation and maintenance included, have seen the demos, and have gotten a chance to meet with the local vendors and contact their reference customers asked some basic questions. Step back and asked her real basic questions at this point. Ask the vendor if there’s anything that you’re missing. Ask the vendor if any parts or over engineered. Ask the vendor if this is the best price, then go one step further and ask the reseller if there’s any way to get better pricing out of the vendor. Sometimes there is an end of fiscal quarter or year coming up and it’s possible to get a few extra points discount or some other concessions thrown in.
During the process you’ve probably eliminated some vendors from consideration, because you’ve been trying to narrow your list of nine vendors down to about three. For those six vendors that you eliminate call and give them a good reason so that they deathly know why they’re out of the running and what they can do about it in the future with other customers.
For the other three, let them know that they made the shortlist and given the timeframe for when you’re going to perform the evaluation and the decision. Go through whatever decision-making process your organization uses and settle on one vendor. As you go through the final contract negotiation with this vendor, the other two on the shortlist who haven’t made it are going to be calling you nonstop unless you let them know that you have placed the order with somebody else and that they’re out of the running. This is a small industry and there are not a lot of companies that do a good job in this space; I recommend next you let them know that they did not make the cut in a nice professional way and that you appreciate all the hard work that they did on your behalf. At some point in the future you may be calling them for assistance, and you want to make sure that you parted on good terms.
Finally, as you start the installation with your vendor of choice, make sure you work closely with her project management team and get them all the information that you’re looking for as quickly as possible. This is going to make your installation go much smoother, faster, and successful. Hopefully this guide has been helpful to you in describing the process of how to go through and choose a voice over IP solution vendor, as well as give you some idea of what to expect.
Please let me know if you have any questions or comments on any parts of this. If you have specific questions about your situation, please ask them at Geeknick.
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Filed under Small Business Pbx Systems by on Aug 3rd, 2010. Comment. 
Hurricane Katrina taught us a lesson. Disaster recovery is important! Hopefully we will never again have to experience the devastation that this natural event wreaked upon us. However, that event got many businesses thinking – “How safe is my data? ” This article provides some basic steps that will back you recover your business’s data in case of a disaster.
How distinguished data are you willing to lose? It may sound like a dumb interrogate but it will help you determine your disaster recovery strategy. For example, many financial institutions use a technique called data mirroring or data shadowing. Every time a transaction is written, that same transaction is written to another disk at another location. For example, if your business is in Modern York City, a copy of your data is written or mirrored to a site in Philadelphia or wherever your backup site is located. If your business suffers physical damage, you have up-to-date data at another location. In theory, only the transaction being processed at the time of the disaster is lost.
This process is costly; you need to either retract or rent extra computer equipment. You also need to enter into a contract with a company that provides data storage. Obviously this may not be cost-effective for your company. So, how noteworthy data are you willing to lose?
How often does your business backup its data? Every hour? Twice a day? Once a day? Once a week? Your backup schedule answers the previously asked question. If you backup twice a day you are willing to lose half a day’s worth of data. If you only backup weekly, you are willing to lose a week’s worth of data.
Backing up is extremely notable. However, if your office is damaged, what about your backup media?
Store your data at an off-site facility. There are many companies that provide archiving and storage services.
Be colorful. Choose a facility at least 50 miles or so from your office. If there is a flood in your community, you don’t want your� storage facility in the same town or city.
A main pains is resolved; you have your data. However, depending on the disaster, your office may be gone. Data is no good unless you have the technology available to put that data to work.
How long can you afford to be out of business? One day? One week? One month? Not at all? The respond to this question determines the type of off-site facility, if any, that you have.
There are three types of off-site facilities. They are: hot, warm, and cold. Many financial institutions, health care companies, and other critical companies spend a hot site.
A hot site is a complete off-site replica of your data center. It includes all of the computer equipment, networking equipment, and any other technologies that are part of your data center. You are quite close to being up and running. This plot is also the home of your off-site data storage. The data is ready to go. In some scenarios, there are desks, phones, and other office equipment ready to use.
A hot site is expensive. In addition to the cost of renting or purchasing the technology, you are also incurring a monthly rent. This type of set is like insurance; you pay monthly and hope that you never have to use it.
A warm site has the technology but is not as up-to-date or ready to use. You may have to supply some additional equipment to make this a replica of your office. You may also have to install programs and data because your off-site storage may not be fragment of this position. This type of site is less expensive, but it requires more time and work to have it run your business.
A cold site is a bare bones facility. You will need to bring in equipment, restore your data, and so on. It is the least expensive of the three solutions, but it incurs the more down time.
Certainly there are other solutions. If you are a small business, you may be able to quickly purchase some computers, restore your data and temporarily rent space until you can rebuild or relocate. The key is to have a plan. Don’t wait until the disaster strikes!
A good plan is documented. This fact is often overlooked. Don’t let your employees convince you that the information is in their head; they will know what to do. They may not be working for you anymore, or God forbid, depending on the type of disaster, they, the company, and you may not be alive.
Your plan includes all the instructions necessary to rebuild your business. It includes: how to hook up your equipment, instructions for installing software and restoring data, how to rebuild your email system, how to rebuild your phone PBX system, and so on. It includes contact information, who declares a disaster, and it may even include phone scripts that employees use to reassure your clients that your business is still feasible.
Include walk-throughs to ensure that your instructions are correct. Ensure that people read the document, or at least the sections that pertain to their responsibilities.
A disaster recovery plan is the best written-document that you pray will never have to be used. Be prepared. You never know when a disaster may occur but you can know what to do if one does.
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Filed under Small Business Pbx Systems by on Jul 31st, 2010. Comment.