I think it's going to be hard to find a high-quality outsourced voice solution for a small account, especially if you have an sophisticated needs. In my previous $job, where I was working for a small financial firm, I often described our needs as "small enterprise" because we had many of the complex needs of an enterprise (segmented/segregated networks, complex backups, complex phone needs, etc) without the scale that helps amortize the cost of that complexity. It's really hard to find good solutions in that space.
Voice is hard, in part because you've got a long legacy of pre-VoIP tech that's heavily regulated, and then the VoIP world that's very capable and flexible, but largely unregulated. People have come to expect the reliability of the former, but want the flexibility and price advantage of the latter. At a small scale, the only way you're going to get that is to have a local system with someone who really understands the local need and can tune the system for it and cares enough to get it right. For an outsourced provider to care enough, they'd have to charge more than it was worth to people. -- Christopher Manly Coordinator, Library Systems Cornell University Library Information Technologies [email protected] 607-255-3344 From: Jon Young <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Thursday, February 13, 2014 at 9:56 AM Cc: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [lopsa-discuss] Virtual PBX's? Not fonality, worst implementation experience I've been through. For my small $work with 20ish people spread across 5 offices and lots of travel, we've been looking for something more appropriate but with a strong eye towards integration with office365 and hosted lync. Lots of problems and I'm not really finding anyone that does that for small organizations. A significant portion of my consulting work is helping large organizations (mostly universities with project costs in the millions) through this same problems and there are excellent options in the enterprise space but I'm finding few reasonably priced options in the small business space. On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 6:34 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> > [mailto:discuss-<mailto:discuss-> > [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of Derek > Balling > > If someone suggests 8x8, smack them hard across the face. ehhehehhe, I work at a company right now that uses 8x8. I have considered moving off them before, and I'm sure there are better alternatives out there, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the effort. Not that much to gain. When I saw Matthew's OP here a few minutes ago, I momentarily considered responding, but couldn't make up my mind if I would have positive versus negative feedback, and decided not to post, until I saw this. Overall, I think I would have a *slightly* negative review, but the above position is too extreme to be fair, so I have to come to the defense of 8x8 and say, they're not that bad. They have a moderate feature set, at moderate pricing, and moderately good support and sales. Nothing special, nothing horrible. Yes usable. No complaints from either my users or finance dept. If I make a change it's because I'm trying to make an improvement, in terms of feature set or price, and there just simply isn't enough at stake to motivate me over the risk . Anything I could gain will not be amazingly impressive, but if I screw up and choose a new provider that *does* elicit complaints from users, the fault will be entirely mine. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
