Hi.

I never heard of the ESI phone system before today. I have spent a few minutes looking over their website.

It seems that they are pretty user friendly and can integrate into a workstation’s computer a lot easier than other phone systems.

What do you guys thinks of them? How do they compare to other phone systems you work with?

Thanks.

OK,

I'll start.

ESI is a Great System! I've been installing phone systems for 25plus years.

ESI runs circles around a Lot of the other systems.

ESI=Easy.

I'm done, Happy Easter!

No it's not a good system, it's great. As a technician, it's a good day when I'm sent to work on an ESI, I work on three other manufacturers and I by far prefer ESI. We get great responses from customers on them, their IP capabilities are great, built in modems and NSP and so on and so on...

What are the three other manufactures that ESI is so much better than.

1- Panasonic

2- nec (ds/dsx)

3- avaya (partner/legend)

That's a preety good mix. I'm not sure you are comparing apples to apples. All four systems have both strenghts and weakness. Very often no one individual tech can be an expert in 4 systems. We also handle 4 different systems. We try to train our techs on 2 system so they can feel comfortable working on these systems. Of course there are times when they have to work on 1 they are not as comfortable with. It usualy works out OK.

I can easily tell you that ESI produces a quality product that many dealers use to satisfy the telcom needs of their potential customers. The reason you haven't heard of them before now is due to marketing. ESI does very little marketing outside of dealers and potential dealers. In other words ESI does not commit their marketing budget to put an ESI Phone on the TV set of "24" like cisco. ESI expects potential future owners to do research before committing company funds to a major purchase which will bring the future end user and a dealer together. Apparently they are correct because here you are communicating with several ESI dealers. If you keep it up an ESI dealer will be in your business with a hands on demonstration kit for you to experiment with.

Now as far as ESI being able to integrate with the computer network I'll direct you back to the ESI website an recommend you spend considerable time focused on VIP.

You asked how they compare to other systems?

If you view the main page here at Tech-Talk you will see a comprehensive list representing ALL of the major manufacturers and each one of them produce a quality product. The side by side comparison just can't be done without knowing the details of its future application. There are some businesses that the Acme 6x16 will be a perfect fit and be cost effective. Possibly ESI does not have a product to compare with the Acme 6x16. I doubt it, but in theory it is possible. In that case get yourself a good dealer and go with the Acme 6x16.

There is one hurdle ESI faces regularly that other systems have had no problem with.

Price!!!

I have experienced this myself as well as many other ESI dealers that when a prospective purchaser gets numerous quotes the ESI system will end up being 70% of the others and 50% of the highest quote. Don't let that fool you, it doesn't indicate a lack of quality it simply means we don't owe Hollywood anything for the next season of "24".

to Tech-Talk MK3. This is your thread, ask as many follow up questions as you like.

1 thing to keep in mind when deciding which system is the best for you is that any piece of equipment will operate poorly if the installer isn't properly trained on the product.

Besides studying telephone systems, research potential vendors that would supply and install the system as well as and provide onsite training and support.

Grider is right, low price is usually a red flag.

I can speak from a non-installer but highly technical and knowledgeable user and the ESI systems are the easiest systems I have ever worked with. When we removed our old Nortel system and installed the ESI, my staff picked up on most of the features very quickly. The system has been VERY reliable and for me, changes are easily made with the Esi-Admin software (I am not yet fortunate enough to have a CS, but hopefully that will be the next change). The phones are also easily programmed from a desktop phone as well, with the voice prompts and the 3 line display on the 48 key phones, if it were any easier, it would have voice recognition for programming (that is one of my worst nightmares), but the ESI system is such a great system I have recommended it to every business that I can think of and have given them a fairly extensive rundown of the features and capabilities of these systems. My installer was very capable with this system and programming was a snap for him. We fully configured the cabinet with our AA and extension lists before we actually made the cutover to the new system. By doing this, the install time after hours was very short since all we had to do install the phones at the desk and pull the cross-connects from the old system to the new blocks. We installed around 60 phones in less than an hour and the cutover was complete. NSP makes life so much easier since everything on the system can be programmed remotely by your installer either via an RS-232 cable connected direct, through the Internet with the NSP, or he can even dial into the built-in modem to make any and all programming changes that may be needed. If you have any more questions on the system, please PM me and I will gladly discuss further with you any questions you may have about the system.

ESI is a good system for the price. Very user friendly and one of the easiest systems to program both on the user and technician side. Customers think it's great. That being said it is also one of the quirkiest systems around and their VOIP and computer intergration fall around par level. The Cisco, Shoretel, Avaya, and Nortel do a better job and are much more stable, however there is a price difference. As a technian I just spent a full day reprogramming a 85 phone site because the hard drive crashed after two years. We had a backup of the whole system, however the hard drive that ESI sent was a higher revision and cannot be dropped down to a lower revision. This was found out after ESI tech support tried two hours with ESI because they thought it could be. Meanwhile the customer is down this whole time. Also they now do not send older release hard drives so now your backups are useless if the hard drive crashes. This is just many of the annoyances of this system. If you look at all the legacy products that ESI has you'll understand why they can't keep up. Why do you have to initialize a system with simple upgrades. That means losing all your data. Can you keep any of it? No. This system is just simply poorly engineered on the backend, however it does offer a lot of great features. Bottom line you get what you pay for.

We've been bitten by the old/new software version thing too phestus..... All the better reason to keep all of your systems on the latest software revisions when they come out. We include that in our service plans, and for others, we call every quarter or so and recommend a software upgrade if it's available. Sometimes we'll offer a discount rate just to get on site and update. Usually other issues or sales come of the call.

That is definitely a shortcoming, but I wouldn't go as far as calling them poorly engineered, honestly there are few other systems on the market that allow you to migrate up through all of the system sizes (accept for the legacy S-Class) and still keep phones, port cards, etc.

ESI is a good system for the price. Very user friendly and one of the easiest systems to program both on the user and technician side. Customers think it's great.

This system is just simply poorly engineered on the backend, however it does offer a lot of great features. Bottom line you get what you pay for.

I see those two statements as being a bit contradictory.

As far as the 85 user site is concerned which system was that. By that I mean was it the IP200 you have discussed previously or one of ESI's other system types?

Pardon my ignorance, but couldn't you have loaded the older system software on the new hardrive and then uploaded the backup? We used to be able to ymodem the system software onto the harddrive then upload the backup. If memory serves there is like 3-5 locations where is one doesn't load after 3-5 attempts it loads the next location?

Besides my solution to this has been to get the same hardrive and dupe it. So far it's worked for IVX128's and the Voiceworks 16 systems.

That is also why ESI has begun offering the MMM or Mirrored Memory Module, which serves as a RAID setup to mirror both hard drives at all times and if one fails, simply move the secondary into the primary position, install a new secondary, and Viola! Everything is back on-line. ESI has also started offering solid state drives in place of the regular spinning platter drives that most of us are used to since solid state drives have no moving parts, the occurrence of failure is greatly reduced, and performance is also boosted usually at least 3-5 times overall. I am no installer, but I have been working very closely with my installer for the past two years learning every aspect of the system I can and if I were to learn any more about the system, I would be just as well off to become an installer for ESI systems. The systems are so easy to understand and ESI has worked diligently on any problems that I have occurred in the past 2 years with this system and have come up with viable solutions that make sense even from a Computer Systems Administrators standpoint. Basically, all systems are going to have their "quirks", but this system is very well engineered and very well feature equipped (I usually tell people that this system is the fully loaded Hummer H1 of business phone systems) and I have yet to see a better system with more features, additional options, and simple expandability.

Actually that is still an issues BCHC, even with mirrored memory, what happens is that the secondary drive (or backup) is an earlier software version than the new drive that ESI ships to you, so it's still not as simple as replacing the bad drive with a new one. The new drive can not auto sync with the secondary drive due to incompatible software versions. Our tech's fixed this same issue on an ESI-1000 recently, I'll have to ask them about the specifics on getting it up and running again and post.

On the other hand,if the drives are running the latest and greatest...... no problems. Like you said, every system manufacturer has "issues", but this is a case where you need to be updating software when ESI releases it!

This is in fact still an issue. When this particular site crashed we specifically asked for the version hard drive that was originally installed because we have come across this in the past. When we were shipped the latest version ESI tech support said it would work just the same. We spent hours on the phone with tech support trying to get this to work and then an ESI engineer said it would not and the system would have to be programmed from scratch. It would of been nice to know this from the start. This system was a 128e GenII Feature Set I and was running the latest software at the time. We never upgraded it to Feature Set II becuase this would have initialized the system. Saying that the system is poorly engineered may be a little harsh, but the fact that the system has been in for a little over two years and the drive has crashed and the original software cannot be upgraded without initialization are some big problems. Now that ESI has abandoned the IP, E, and X class platforms where do these customers stand in the long run. I have a customer with an IP200E that has been in a little over four years and has a known issue with trunk to trunk transferring. There will no more patches for this system becuase it is now a legacy product. Are there any other phone systems that build their model systems this way?

I meant to say "we never upgraded to Feature Set III" because this would have initialized the system.