Office with One-x Communicator softphones only 1

[rbordeaux]

Hi all, this is general/best practice/thoughts/recommendation question. The office managers are considering removing all the physical handsets (digital 64xx and IP Phones 46xx/96xx) and ask users to just use One-x Communicator softphones.

Employees currently use their softphones while away from the office, either working from home or another location without problems. As reference the CM version is 5.2 and we there are +300 users.

As administrator I like having the phones around but I cannot think of any technical/practical/best practice reason to try to keep them on their desks!. Any thoughts or experiences from the forum about handling a softphone only site are welcome!.

Thanks in advance
richard

 

[4merAvaya]

USB headsets for everyone could cost a boatload. Do you have enough One-X Communicator licenses? Does your LAN have enough bandwith for Road Warrior?

Kevin

 

[mattKnight]

>Any thoughts or experiences from the forum about handling a softphone only site are welcome!.

The biggest downside is the loss of VLAN segregation between voice and data traffic

Take Care

Matt
I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone.
My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.

 

[rbordeaux]

Thanks 4merAvaya, the costs of the USB headsets is planned as they give them to users anyway already and with CM5.2 every station license includes a One-X Communicator. Agents licenses with One-X agent on the other hand are not included and that will be the costly part.

Hi mattKnight, I forgot about the VLAN segregation! Now the IPPhones (46xx/96xx) are on their own VLAN and softphones could be affected by broadcasts and data traffic. This will bring me to the usual arguments with the networking team regarding COS/bandwith/etc.

Thanks both for your replies! I belong to the old "Definity" days when I could follow a cable and know where each device was and move extensions around as long I knew the port number, but probably it is time to let that go away and start chasing users.

Regards
Richard.

 

[texeric]

Not sure if any/many of your users are in remote WAN connected networks but you'll want to take a look at WAN QoS and LAN/Wifi QoS. May also want to see if the softphones/PCs can do their own traffic tagging to at least tag the voice parts.

 

[medicshelley]

I agree with texeric that you need to be very careful to ensure QOS is configured correctly. I just deployed 80 One-X communicators with headsets Jabra Pro 930 and had a terrible time due to WAN guy not knowing how to properly setup QOS. Other than that the biggest issue is users getting use to using headsets.

 

[rbordeaux]

Thanks, regarding WAN/Wifi I noticed that if a user is plugged to the WAN using one-x while also on the wifi, if he suddenly unplugs the wired network connection to go to a meeting for example the one-x stops working properly as the CM has the Wired IP address on the registered table while the one-x now tries to talk with the CM using the Wifi ip address.

I advise users to close One-x if they will do something like describe above but does anybody know if is there any way to make it simpler, so that when the users move from WAN IP to Wifi IP (or the other way around) CM can update their registered table automatically?

richard

 

[IPOthermia]

Do you want to boot/log onto a PC to call 911? If your building takes a power hit are all of your PC's on UPS? Usually I find the servers and network routers are backed up with UPS, but not the PC's. If the power hit is part of the building emergency, how do you get help? There is a certain comfort to being able to quickly grab a phone and make a call in an emergency. Not just 911, but even if you have to call someone NOW.

Based on my testing I am pretty skeptical about One-X Communicator working with SLS. I mention this in case you have sites without an LSP that would switch to SLS during a network outage.
I know there are purists who believe every site should have an LSP regardless of how few people staff some locations, but even where I have LSP's, I still program SLS. I like my LSP's, but they could fail.

I use and like One-X communicator, dialing numbers via cut and paste is my favorite feature since I have a lot of contacts and make a lot of calls. Epecially when testing programming changes on blocks of numbers.
Becuase I monitor Crisis alerts for phones at 40 locations, my physical phone is best becuase I can make a call immediatly especially if my PC is impaired. My PC doens't have a 99.999% uptime like my phone.

Personnally I like having layers of ways to communicate and deal with faults in my communication network. I would find it hard to make a case for recycling an entire fleet of deskphones for a little bit of extra desk space.

Thanks.

 

[phoneguy55]

The biggest downside is the loss of VLAN segregation between voice and data traffic

Agree, this is the biggest issue. Voice and data in the same vlan = problems.

 

[rbordeaux]

Thanks, IPOthermia/phoneguy55 for your comments.

Talking with a friend who manages an office that runs Cisco softphones he mentioned another drawback of not having desk phones. It seems 70% users don't bother to start the softphone application (or if they have it on the start they close it as it slows down the boot process or they don't want to use a computer headset) unless they need to make an outbound call. As result the office has a high percentage of calls lost or going to voicemail.

After thinking about this a little more, in the long term in the same way we moved from digital phones to ip phones, we will end up with just softphones - either on laptops/mobiles, etc - for employees and just a handful of desk phones for reception/common areas. This will be visible as soon as the new generations get into the workforce as some of them don't even remember their own home phone numbers.

Again thanks all for your answers, I am better prepared to try to keep the deskphones around (at leas for a little longer!).

richard