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Posted on 5 Aug 2008 at 11:08

Jon Honeyball believes Analogue telecom is a thing of the past. so get more value from your computing infrastructure and switch to Voip. Here's how.

All the paid-for editions have essentially the same functionality, the differentiator being the number of simultaneous calls they support. There's a lot to be said for the paid-for version, as you get a number of useful call-handling functions such as call parking and pickup, call queuing, conference room support and so forth, plus a central phonebook. Then there's the integration with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange 2007 unified messaging, which could well be a very important feature for many firms. The software itself is 2008-safe, happy in a VM and supports grown-up technologies such as clustering, too.

Overall, I'm very impressed with this solution. VoIP and SIP proves to be a complete minefield, and 3CX has done an impressive job in making it as pain-free as possible to set up and configure. However, even more could be done, especially on the third-party side. Frankly, I'm not sure what some of these third-party hardware vendors are smoking, but they could do with some lessons in UI design, built-in help files, and hiding away all the irrelevant trivia. I tingle at the thought of what Apple could do in this space.

I'm giving 3CX a couple of weeks to bed down on my server, and if everything is still good then I'll buy the Small Business Edition and support contracts, then move it into a VM on the big HyperV server. Despite some of the rough edges, it's totally clear to me. Analog telecom is so last century, and VoIP is here with a vengeance, so it's time to look at the alternatives to that ageing, expensive analogue phone switch.

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