Welcome to My Adventures in Phone Land

This blog is about buying a phone system for non-phone people. 

I’m an IT guy who took responsibility for phones around 5 years ago. Previously our corporate parent had responsibility for phone sysem purchases and maintenance. Accounting handled basic administrative tasks. When we separated from our corporate parent all phone responsibility was given to IT.

Around the same time Avaya had dropped support for our phone system, an AT&T Definity System 75 version 3. It was purchased in 1993. While we found a vendor to support our system, the writing has been on the wall for some time. And my staff really, really wants caller ID.

Over the past 5 years I’ve learned how to simplify some of the administrative tasks, do some of my own phone wiring, and do various tasks. But the manuals are thick, dense obscure. Modern phone systems are much easier to administer than what was state of the art in 1993. 

And people want Caller ID more than most of the features touted by the pbx vendors. And it is important that features can be discovered without reading a thick manual or hours of training. 

In this blog I am not going to tell you what to buy. I cannot tell you if a Cisco or Avaya or Panasonic b or Asterisk based system is best for your office. I can’t even say if VoIP better for you than traditional phone wiring. Or hosted vs. premise based. Or if you should get a capital or operating lease or pay cash. I will discuss the pros and cons of these issues as I see them. 

Now that we have ordered a new phone system I am prepared to share what I have learned. I will blogging about the installation in addition to the many issues of selecting a system.