IT Staff
A single administrative interface gives your IT staff total control of the system, complemented by a Microsoft®-centric network approach that lets you connect your branch offices over a LAN or WAN. Your IT staff can make a number of adds, moves, and changes without requiring remote on-site work or expensive vendor service contracts. Your system administrator can even use the auto attendant to configure call routing processes to a new Support workgroup, including caller prompts and account code support to track a customer’s call and tie it to their service record. The IP-ready system also puts you in a position to migrate to SIP-enabled voice over IP (VoIP) and reduce costs over your telecom carrier’s service fees.
IP Telephony reduces administration overhead and IT costs by eliminating the thousands of dollars spent annually just for system moves, adds, and changes—and from the ability to:
- Administer a single network-based server rather than multiple communications systems at a given location or several different offices.
- Open new offices, plug in a server at each one, connect to a WAN and be up and running in hours.
- Simply add licenses to add business applications and communications functionality—not more hardware and administration interfaces from proprietary vendor ‘lock-ins’.
- Select standards-based analog phone devices and SIP soft phones, which are significantly less expensive than the devices from proprietary vendors.
- Integrate existing business applications, including Microsoft Business Solutions and other third-party applications.
- Centralize IT infrastructure and communications management.
- Reduce time spent on training, certification, network maintenance, and even travel to dispersed branch offices or locations.
- Rapidly install the pre-configured Server using the menu-driven Set-up Wizard, configuring stations, lines and users via the built-in system administration interface, and putting the IP PBX phone and communications system to work.
Simplified Moves, Adds, and Changes
One of the most costly support issues any organization faces is telephone device moves, adds, and changes, or MACs. Because IP telephony takes MACs to a ‘plug and play’ level, end-users can often perform the tasks of an IT technician with little or no system reprogramming required. In effect, IP telephony replaces a traditional voice database with IP phone sets that register with a data network's Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) database. From there, a unique MAC address in IP phones allows a DHCP server to recognize the new IP address whenever a phone is moved, added or changed, and re-associates the existing configuration profile with each MAC.