I apologize straight off for being mid-level management. That said, I'm trying to push information and good decisions up the food chain, so bear/bare with me. And thanks for any information in advance.
Both my boss and I are relatively new to our positions and we've inherited a "migration to Skype for Business." We've been told up and down how old and unusable the Nortel is, blah blah blah.
The previous middle management decided to take the Nortel off of maintenance, and the batteries failed, which has resulted in unpleasant outages. No fun. However, I was able to corner the repair technician and ask a few questions while I got the CallPilot web server rebooted. They said "These Nortel's are great and can be upgraded, anyone who said that its old and dead had an agenda." "Just pull the old parts out, slap the new ones in and boom, off to the races and no more grey market parts." Considering we only have 5% moved to Skype for business, miles to go before E911 is correct, let alone VLANs for phones, etc. I want to consider all options, without a preconceived notion of what's "good or bad" I mostly want to give the users what they want, which is basic phone service.
So my question is this, you walk into a job with an existing Nortel Meridian, running 3.0 (or so I'm told) and dying batteries. We're going to have to make the investment in new batteries, so we're already going to invest. Important people are even considering putting it back on maintenance.
Do you rip, or do you sit down with a vendor and run through upgrades to get to 7.x?
Both my boss and I are relatively new to our positions and we've inherited a "migration to Skype for Business." We've been told up and down how old and unusable the Nortel is, blah blah blah.
The previous middle management decided to take the Nortel off of maintenance, and the batteries failed, which has resulted in unpleasant outages. No fun. However, I was able to corner the repair technician and ask a few questions while I got the CallPilot web server rebooted. They said "These Nortel's are great and can be upgraded, anyone who said that its old and dead had an agenda." "Just pull the old parts out, slap the new ones in and boom, off to the races and no more grey market parts." Considering we only have 5% moved to Skype for business, miles to go before E911 is correct, let alone VLANs for phones, etc. I want to consider all options, without a preconceived notion of what's "good or bad" I mostly want to give the users what they want, which is basic phone service.
So my question is this, you walk into a job with an existing Nortel Meridian, running 3.0 (or so I'm told) and dying batteries. We're going to have to make the investment in new batteries, so we're already going to invest. Important people are even considering putting it back on maintenance.
Do you rip, or do you sit down with a vendor and run through upgrades to get to 7.x?