We're going through this exact thing at work right now. All the vendors keep banging on about a "five year solution" whereas we're realistically looking 10-20, based on the life of the current phone system.
With ~100 extensions and 8 lines, its approxiately the same size too. The big saving for us is that we are reusing all the analogue extensions - about 80 of them. Digital phones with displays etc are around $300, and the big phones with lots of buttos for office operators are around $550. Voip functionality is built-in with most of the expensive switches. Panasonics one is "voip capable" rather than voip enabled, but is $10k cheaper than the fully VOIP enabled samsung. We're still waiting for the price on the avaya IP everything system... Their calculator hasn't got enough digits to add up the total :( Suprisingly, a school has a totally different call flow to any business. The main reasons we're changing pabx is so that we have more total extensions, and an answer phone system that works right. Soft phones look cool, but I can imagine a lot of arguments if we replaced phones with laptops. One last comment - don't start looking for a problem for your tool. Phones have to work, all the time. If us geek types suggest a solution that is any less in terms of reliability, then it reflects badly on OSS, and on us. I have already had bad experience due to connecting photocopiers to the network for billing via pcounter... If the server is down photocopiers won't work. -----Original Message----- From: Hadley Rich [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] You are up for a wad going with an OSS solution too really. The handsets are the killer. At around $250-$300 a handset that's near $40k - assuming you need handsets. You'd also want either a highly redundant server or multiple redundant boxes to handle that many handsets, depending of course on how critical the phone system is to the business. So there's another $5-$10k
