VoIP roll out to a large business or organisation

[TraceyD]

hi
Sorry if this thread is rather similar to that posted in the welcome section...

My new job is to rollout of a VoIP telephone system to gradually replace the existing analogue PBX. This will be a two phase process, starting with the office phones. We have a Foundry data network and Siemens PBX serving analogue extensions.

Do you have experience of rolling out an enterprise VoIP solution or are you in the middle of a project to do so?
Which product did you go for?
Which did you look at an reject and for what reasons?
Did you meet with resisitance from your users?
What additional features did you roll out with the VoIP system?
What network equipment are you using and what, if any, changes did you have to make to the network to get it to work?
What problems did you/are you experiencing with the VoIP solution?
How long did the rollout take?

Any info gratefully received!
thanks
Tracey

[mattpark]

Hi Tracy,

Welcome to the forum.

Rolling out a VoIP solution in a university isn't something I have done before... however, I'm sure I can help you get started.

You mention that you wish to deploy a VoIP solution in two phases. Phase one being your office phones, what is phase two?

How many users/extensions are you looking to role out in phase one, and phase two?

More importantly, do you have any existing statistics for the average number of concurrent calls @ peak times, and how with this vary for each group you are rolling out.

There are literally thousands of configurations you could end up with, but basic info like this should get us started.

I would imagine you will need an onsite VoIP PBX server(s), and some trunks to pump calls out over various telcos. If a hosted soultion was able to support you, my guess is you would out grow it rather sharpish.

While we start, what connectivity is currently available to your University (this probably isn't going to be an issue, but we need to check).

Matt

[TraceyD]

Originally Posted by mattpark

Hi Tracy,

Welcome to the forum.

Rolling out a VoIP solution in a university isn't something I have done before... however, I'm sure I can help you get started.

You mention that you wish to deploy a VoIP solution in two phases. Phase one being your office phones, what is phase two?

How many users/extensions are you looking to role out in phase one, and phase two?

More importantly, do you have any existing statistics for the average number of concurrent calls @ peak times, and how with this vary for each group you are rolling out.

There are literally thousands of configurations you could end up with, but basic info like this should get us started.

I would image you will need an onsite VoIP PBX server(s), and some trunks to pump calls out over various telcos. If a hosted soultion was able to support you, my guess is you would out grow it rather sharpish.

While we start, what connectivity is currently available to your University (I'd image this probably isn't going to be an issue, but we need to check).

Matt

Phase one is office phones, phase two is all the hard stuff like lift phones and security emergency phones etc. Probably around 5000 extensions in phase one. Phase two is unknown as yet (only been in this job two weeks)

We will use the existing trunks that feed the Siemens exchange to also feed the VoIP server. Not sure how yet but I'll get up to speed soon.

In phase 1 we dont want to take the VoIP calls over the internet. The VoIP server will jsut be a replacement for the PBX, plus providing some additional features for extension to extension calls.