Which is the Best Phone System to Use With Sugar?

[echealth]

I have 15 employees and all of them use Sugar in one fashion or another, and I need to upgrade my system to something that integrates with Sugar and so forth.
I have done some research and would love to hear some feedback from others that have built out a system.
If I missed any good ones please let me know. I need to fix our Nortel situation as it is very old and not very easy to work with.

Asterik-- this seems like the best option and the most flexible at the lowest cost.
VOIP System --8x8 seems to have a great option, but I keep getting warned that people have issues with a standalone VOIP system.
Standard PBX Solution Integrated with Skype (or something similar along these lines)
Skype by itself

thanks

[salesagility]

A bit of a no brainer ... asterisk!!

[echealth]

Thats what I thought. I have no experience in building out a phone system, do you have any suggestions on where to begin? Also do you know if this works on analog, digital, or voip lines? And if all of them (as I believe) work which would work the best with Sugar? I currently have a t1 but can change if if it is a good idea.
Also would you know any companies/freelancers that would be able to help me get this done quickly and painlessly (and affordably)?
Thanks

[Adam_Smith]

Thats what I thought. I have no experience in building out a phone system, do you have any suggestions on where to begin? Also do you know if this works on analog, digital, or voip lines? And if all of them (as I believe) work which would work the best with Sugar? I currently have a t1 but can change if if it is a good idea.
Also would you know any companies/freelancers that would be able to help me get this done quickly and painlessly (and affordably)?
Thanks

If you are looking for something hosted which integrates for inbound and outbound out of the box and would like to add voice automation, please take a look at invox.com as well.

The signup is free.

[datasponge]

We are using Asterisk and are mostly happy with it. But there are some caveats you should definitely be aware of that make good knowledgeable system administration an absolute necessity:

1. We have had our system hacked into through the firewall twice in two years. We found out because people started calling us asking why we called them and left strange messages. After several calls it was obvious someone was calling from our number. We had to dig into the Asterisk system quickly and identify the security hole and kick out the intruders. I believe in both cases we tracked the IP addresses to the Far East, so an IP phone system definitely becomes an international adventure.

2. Heavy data traffic can degrade the call quality. You really need separate data and voice networks.

3. We have had issues with performance due to call logging that causes the system to get farther and farther behind and start to fail to ring-in. Existing calls seem to continue fine, so it becomes a logistical problem to coordinate how and when to restart the system when there are important calls in progress. We have gradually solved these problems over time by tweaking configuration parameters, but it has been a learning process. For the first 6 months we were rebooting the Asterisk server every week or so.

4. We continue to retain our old PBX system for a few lines as a backup and we left our 800 number there so it rings in on a different phone. We can transfer the call into the new system, so it works alright. But you should plan that out based on your own cost points.

We're just small enough and just knowledgeable enough to get away with minimal pain, but some in the company would say there has been too much disruption to make it worthwhile. It sounds like you are slightly larger than us, so you're approaching the threshold where similar issues could be really painful. Our Asterisk administrator is brilliant, but he's not a Linux sys admin and he learned Asterisk for this project.

So if you are not sufficiently expert in these areas, get someone who is to set it up and have some sort of support system to be able to handle unexpected situations quickly.

The Sugar end of it is fairly simple once you know Asterisk. The Asterisk Connector integrates well for inbound and outbound calls and the support via SugarForge for me was quite good and very helpful.

Phil

[Lincoln01]

I think the best alternative you might have is to search about your query online as that could help you to get a variety of options which may prove to be quite useful in the future. So, do lookout for the options available with you online and choose the best alternative available.

________________________
phone systems cairns

[bevanwillson]

I am testing a new phone system at my office. I have seen systems in the past that integrate with voip and even have client phones that are voip. I am looking for feedback from anyone that has used any of these systems in the past and than I will give you the description.

VoIP phone system

[orcusomega]

I have used Elastix (Elastix :: Open Source Unified Communications Server) with success in the past. it is nice from an automated perspective, mostly hands-off.

Hope this helps,

Bob