Please give your opinion - phone systems

[tmckeown]

Hi,
Our company is moving in the next 6 months to a much larger facility. We are spead out over 23 acres, though the majority of phone/data is in connected buildings. I have had meetings with the following vendors.

Avaya - IP Office
Inter-Tel
Altigen Systems
Nortel

I'm mainly looking for a digital system with capability of adding IP to the system as needed. We will start with 100 phones but will need the capability to double that in the future if needed. We also need some type of wireless phones. Most of these companies have some tie with Spectalink (sp?). Have any of you had any experiences, good or bad, with any of these companies? I don't want to make a mistake, so I'm looking for outside input.

Thanks for the help.

Tom

 

[bwilch]

I'll be upfront and honest. I work with an Avaya business partner and have for the past year. Before that, I worked on Avaya and Nortel systems.

In working with the Avaya products, I've grown to like working on them more. This is just a personal preference. Now more specifically, I've been working a lot on the IP Office phone systems from Avaya. They've had their issues, and still have some which Avaya is working on, however to counter this, I'll point out (so far) Avaya hasn't charged for any of the upgrades to the IP Office.

As far as wireless systems, the IP Office also has the ability to integrate with the 9040 Transtalk wireless handsets as well as the 3910's. Both of which are digital handsets.

The IP Office 412 would handle the capacity you explain and has the ability to do both IP and digital sets. Just be aware, the system would need a VCM (Voice Compression Module) in order to do IP Phones. If you read a few posts in this thread, they explain fairly well what the VCM is and how it works.

I don't have a lot of insight on Inter-Tel nor Altigen Systems, and the experiences I had with Nortel were limited, but their phone system did the job we needed it to do.

 

[tmckeown]

Thanks for the reply. We had most seriously looked at the Avaya and Inter-Tel systems. Altigen does not have any digital phones. It's either analog with no indicator lights or IP phones. For us, they just don't make sense. Inter-tel came in much more expensive than Avaya, but cost is not everything to us. I just noticed there is another general phone systems forum. I'll post there to continue.

Thanks,
Tom

 

[Ragnorak]

I've only worked with a couple Inter-Tel systems and I didn't care for them at all.

I would go with Avaya or Nortel as a product. Keep in mind, the vendor really matters. You can do better with an inferior product with an implementation and service from a more competent provider.

Most importantly, ask a lot of questions. Most systems do most things. The important thing is how you and your fellow employees intereact with the features. You are making a big purchase so you have some leverage. If you have the time, make them demo the system and bring your receptionist so she sees the actual usage. If your executives have admin assistants that cover their calls make them demo that too. How the vendor handles the demo will tell you a lot about them too.

 

[tmckeown]

I have been to multiple demos on both Inter-Tel and Avaya products. I got the feeling that the Avaya might be easier to maintain. The Inter-Tel system did impress me in one respect. They brought one of their IP phones to our office, plugged it into one of Ethernet jacks and instantly they started recieving phone calls. We were behind the firewall, yet everything worked fine. I have not been able to get the Avaya guys to demonstrate that feature (if Avaya can do it).

What were the things you found bad about Inter-Tel? I would definately be curious to know.

Thanks,

 

[Spanning]

Engineers opinion.

Avaya IP office go for the 412 very easy to maintain , lots of resellers available , in house IT can pick it in no time.


INTER-TEL , TOP END not many around. Maintenace could be expensive

Nortel , if you just want to make a call and receive a call , go for this , its cheap and nasty some may disagree i speak from experience.

 

[Ragnorak]

The Avaya IP phones use a range of ports and they recommend a VPN to avoid port mapping issues. This can be annoying at times, but I usually find that customers like the network access from home that comes with a VPN. It would be nice to have clearly defined port info from Avaya though.

The two Inter-Tel systems I've worked on used odd pinouts on the jacks (three and six instead of 4 and 5 I think.) This made some MAC work really annoying. I remember having issues with the soft phones in particular I think it was overly involved to transfer the extension from one PC to another. I was only doing data work for the clients but got roped into some phone work as well. I am by no means an Inter-Tel expert though.

My main point for the demo is to see how each function works and see how well the vendor implements the demo. If they can program the demo to be simple button pressing with good, intuitive visual feedback from the phones than you know you've got a good company to work with. Things like pressing a single lit button to pickup a parked call instead of having to press some awful string of digits. These little things are what matter to the average user. After all, if your employees don't use the tool you aren't getting your money's worth.

 

[dcphoneguy]

You might look at the NEC Aspire system, it seems to have all that you are looking for.

 

[andy4uk]

I install Avaya and Mitel both very good and easy to maintain, i would agree with one of the last comments you are spending a lot of money and you need to ask a lot of questions, and test the phones Q.O.S on both softphones and hardphones.

Just remember you get what you pay for, NEC Aspire handsets don't have very good quality on the speach and this is something you will need to test, On any system.

If it's a homeworker/IP Phones softphones solution MITEL 3300 have a teleworker solution which i have installed plenty of and have had no problems,
One of my customers has a place in England, Spain and America before he went i programmed the handsets, all he had to do was plug the phones into his network and they linked up to his main site. This is something you will need to check!! is this posible?
Avaya do homeworkers/IP Phones abit more difficult to set up but works very well.

Remember BULLS..T baffals brains, be carefull what vendors sell you there's one thing them saying it can do this and do that BUT CAN IT? and when you do purchase a new system, make sure it's in writing what you get.

 

[tmckeown]

Thanks Andy,
I'm still trying to get all the facts from both Avaya and Inter-Tel. I liked the Inter-Tel system due to it's very easy IP phone solution. The Avaya appears to need a VPN to work. That's a problem. It's another piece of hardware needed on the road by our MAC users. PC users can VPN on their laptop and do a softphone. MAC users can't do that. But, Inter-Tel does not have a very good ease of use reputation on these forums. And most of all, their price is 50% higher than a comperable Avaya system.