excerpts from what I mailed techguy yesterday. brethren, I would spare you some unsettling, painful moments, sorry if it's long and tedious...
...By coincidence, we just came from a meeting with our local ShoreTel distributor, and with ShoreTel's CEO. Good meet, ShoreTel seems committed to having a great product with great support. Their CEO said during the meet that they have some 2,000 systems with 250,000 telephones installed.
ShoreTel has a good product, has been stable, users like it, easy to install and maintain. Great features: Users really like the Personal Call Manager and the Operator Call Manager. We like the prospect of being able to share telephone answering between sites, and 4-digit dialing between sites has the users spoiled. I've worked with ShoreTel's tech support on a couple of issues, they've been very professional, quick to react, very good knowledge base.
We've recently done a slow-down on the deployment, however, as we re-evaluate our position: Going in to this whole VoIP thing, we didn't know what we didn't know about our data network, and our vendor was a little timid about up-front network evaulation (and discussing associated costs, is my guess), which would have been a very smart investment on our part. So it's been a painful process, this tweaking of the data network, learning what it can do to voice communications -- not because of ShoreTel, but because our network wouldn't have been ready for any VoIP system to be trouble-free (hence the meeting). I heartily recommend spending $$$ early to fully and intimately evaluate your data network -- routers, switches, the type and bandwidth of WAN links to your interfaces (ppp, frame-relay, ip-frame relay, mpls), etc. QOS is critical, and not all types of WANs and clouds support QOS. It's really looking to us like point-to-point T1's and the MPLS product is the way to go for VoIP. Also, we've installed IP phones for every user to make it a little easier on the network (no analog-digital conversion as with analog phones; IP traffic routes directly from phone to phone). Have your vendor do a close inspection of any office/s with more than about forty voicemail users, too, as voicemail traffic affects the network just like real-time calls do. (Temporarily, we hope, we have installed a Distributed Voicemail Server at one of our larger sites while we bulk-up bandwidth/move from IP-Frame to MPLS, and continue to learn and tweak.) A long paragraph, sorry. Bottom line -- the vast majority of our problems have been network related: us learning the weaknesses of our data network, learning how to find and troubleshoot and repair those weaknesses. With VoIP, network weakness results in poor call quality.
As you go forward, have your vendor show you what happens when the WAN goes down. ..... Which reminds me, upgrades have been a breeze.... Oh, and get tough with your vendor -- tell him/her that s/he should get tough with you, too, and not be afraid to call it right if they find any weakness in your network. You just don't need the headaches......
We have four sites installed (Washington and California, with a Headquarters server in Oregon), I'd guess close to 100 telephones. Remote troubleshooting is great, and ShoreTel tech support folks can do even more remote troubleshooting in pretty amazing ways.
As part of our newly-realized call for due-diligence, we're now also looking at Cisco, and hope to have our first budgetary numbers in the next few days. This will go a long way towards leading us to a long-term VoIP supplier --- we already have seven more sites (200+ users) just waiting-in-the-wings for us to decide who we'll go with. Cisco has done their song-and-dance, too, and the local vendor seems very knowledgeable, very strong. Doing the money thing first, then we'll evaluate how it installs, maintains, repairs.
Not experts, yet, but getting better at this thing.
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