atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Shoretel Telephones & Systems Shoretel

Hey, royb, how have things been lately? I'm interested to see how things are working lately with your system.



[This message has been edited by TechGuy (edited August 25, 2005).]

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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Royb,
Just wondering...Do you think that this system will save you money or cost you more?

What real advantages have you gotten from going with an all IP system verses a traditional system?

I have installed/maintained phone systems since 1988 and I'm really having a hard time seeing the advantage of going with an all I.P. system.

If you have to upgrade your entire I.P. network just to accommodate your new phone system, how long will it take for an actual ROI?

Also, why are you considering switching to Cisco after you've started the rollout?

Honestly, I've never seen a ShoreTel product and do not know it's strengths and weaknesses. 2000 systems with an average of 125 phones seems like a growing company.

Please don't think I'm being critical. I would truly like to know the advantages/disadvantages from someone who has actually installed/maintained a pure I.P. system. I'm getting older and need to know if I'm missing something or if I'm just stuck in the old school.

Thank you,
Larry


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North Florida Communications

advantages that I see of VoIP -- besides the centralized/unified voicemail (others are doing this, too), we can actually share answering duties between sites transparent to the caller. lets managers allocate people power in new ways.

why we're even looking at VoIP -- our Nortel systems are aging....upgrading is not inexpensive....Nortel distributors are lacking and expensive....intangible, but Nortel has been in a bit too much hot water, laid off too many people to be real cozy with (perception being everything, as they say).

why Cicso now? -- street stories had always had it that Cisco is too complex and too expensive to install and maintain. one day a new Cisco factory rep paid us a cold-call, we figured we'd be polite for twenty minutes (we already are a Cisco house for routers and most LAN switches)....two hours later we were setting up a meet so he could bring back a voice engineer. that meeting also ran several hours. it came down to the mindset that we needed to look again at Cisco, if for nothing else than having truly done our due diligence before we spend a zillion bucks. we're a fifty site company, and growing, so we're not so far into ShoreTel that we couldn't do a turnabout, if needs be. Cisco is not a shoo-in, we're just about to have our first budgetary/planning meet. if there's sticker shock, this thing could go 'round yet again.

VoIP save money? -- the marketers will tell you "yes". long distance is cheap, though, so you'd be hard-pressed indeed to recoup the costs necessary to beef-up the network to support voice. VoIP is strong for the new ways people can communicate; the ways the system is managed/administered gets simpler; the new ways to spread-around labor -- not to replace people, but to allow more efficient call handling and customer service. no, I don't think VoIP is cheaper at all, but I do think it's inevitable (I've got a lot of Norstars and Option systems that I can run pretty cheap, and very trouble-free). Nortel End-Of-Life is forcing our hand on the Option systems, though, which forces new considerations for old ways of doing business.

by the way, I'm a voice guy, too, since the early eighties. Certainly no VoIP expert or network expert, but getting better. I started studying Cisco a couple of years ago when it looked like it could become a matter of survival; I'm a relocated Silicon Valley guy who lived through a bunch of ups and downs (read: layoffs and plant closures in the high tech world), learned that a person had better be marketable, with current skills that are needed, if s/he's going to feed the family on a regular basis. End here, we'll be needing the BBQ and some good red wine if we're going to wax philosophical. Hope this helps, let me know, if not.

Regards
royb


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Thank you for your response, Royb.

I use and manage this system every day. I love it!

Abu- How big is your Shoretel install? I am very interested in the product but I am having difficulty finding sites of 100-150 phones or greater. This equipment gets great writeups in industry mags...but I'd rather get info from endusers/managers. Thanks.

Can anyone provide any updates? I am currently involved in due diligence on replacing our current outdated phone systems. Company has muliple locations from GA to AZ. Am really impressed with the Shoretel solution for ease of management and functionality, as opposed to Cisco Avaya, or Inter-Tel. Have seen the demo and read the rags. Any imput regarding Shoretel and why you decided to go with it would be appreciated.
Lots of info in this forum. Thanks!

I'm up to 4 sites, 106 users in 3 states. I'm off next week to install 3 more sites, about 75 more users. Early December our HQ site, another 125 users. I finally got to ShoreTel's install class last month, will get to their advanced troubleshooting school mid-December: Easy installs, easy admin -- only trouble we've had has been network-related, not ShoreTel. Even their upgrades are smooth. I find their tech support folks great to work with, the whole crew at their HQ very customer friendly. (I'm an end-user, not a Distributor or ShoreTel employee).

We're replacing Nortel, and did look at Cisco. We know about, but elected not to look at NEC and Avaya.

You other users, please respond, too. ShoreTel tells me they're trying to put together a User Group, and I've not found another active one elsewhere.

PS: ShoreTel6 is released, but only recently. We're giving it some time to settle before we upgrade to this -- no problems heard, just letting the dust settle, as it were. This is the release that pushes display services (and some other functions) down to the local switch level, which makes WAN problems much easier to deal with.

Thanks Royb. Are the Shoreware apps intuitive and easy for the users to grasp? Are you using any ACD functionality over the WAN? Any call center environments in your locations, and if so, are your users using handsets or the softphones?
From your earlier posts, you indicated that you were exploring Cisco again. Was it sticker shock that drove you back to Shoretel?
Would you have time for an email or two? I have other questions that would take up more time than is available here.
Thanks!