PBX and file sharing solution
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Elastix will work great for them. The only handsets i've had experience with are Polycom, Snom, Yealink, Cisco, and a few others i'm sure, they will all work great. Do they need shared access to files, meaning will they be working on documents together? Sharepoint could be a good fit on the "complex" side of things, or you could look into something like OwnCloud (which scott will tell you bout ;)) or any of the myriad of other DropBox-esque offerings.
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They work on shared files. Owncloud could be an option but then I still need to find an offline storage solution. They also need backup with email notification so the boss can make sure his files are being backed up!
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Since they want any place access to files, how about something like Office 365? Though I don't know how their real backups work.
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RE Phones: look at SNOM and Yealink. They are the best options for most companies.
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@ambarishrh said:
They work on shared files. Owncloud could be an option but then I still need to find an offline storage solution. They also need backup with email notification so the boss can make sure his files are being backed up!
ownCloud can be backed up anywhere as a normal Linux backup.
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You can backup ownCloud using any Linux backup method.
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Avoid QNAP. Not a business class device. Check ReadyNAS, Synology, ReadyDATA and Buffalo instead.
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Elastic is great. FreePBX is great too. 3CX is decent.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Elastic is great. FreePBX is great too. 3CX is decent.
If you have the skillset, I would use FreePBX over Elastix simply because Elastix is falling too far behind.
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I'm loving freepbx It has pretty much any feature you could ever need.
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Synology has great NAS offerings with a lot of features (most that you'd never use) for a NAS
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Elastic is great. FreePBX is great too. 3CX is decent.
If you have the skillset, I would use FreePBX over Elastix simply because Elastix is falling too far behind.
Elastix 3 is out soon. That will close the gap a lot.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Elastix 3 is out soon. That will close the gap a lot.
I will only believe that when it actually comes out.
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So PBX. I am almost finalising Elastix, just need to check the phones and the overall setup check and then suggest this.
On the file server side, one good think I just learned that they are using google apps for business already, so may be its best to integrate a Synology NAS with local storage and sync to Google Drive. I am still waiting to get the details on the type of plan they have with google apps.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Elastic is great. FreePBX is great too. 3CX is decent.
If you have the skillset, I would use FreePBX over Elastix simply because Elastix is falling too far behind.
Elastix 3 is out soon. That will close the gap a lot.
Isn't 2.5 still in beta? as well as 3.x? sounds like very slow development.
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It's a PBX. You don't want fast development. The 2.4 branch has the latest Asterisk. It's not like prod isn't up to date.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's a PBX. You don't want fast development. The 2.4 branch has the latest Asterisk. It's not like prod isn't up to date.
If the Elastix guys were doing things to the Asterisk side of things I would agree, but they generally do not. It is a pretty clean Asterisk build to my understanding.
It is being so extremely out of date with their chosen interface to Asterisk (FreeePBX) that is the problem. A lot of improvements have been made to that side of things and it is all not available.
Primary example I have personally ran into: blf hints
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@scottalanmiller Since I couldn't find much spare time to help my friend to setup Elastix, found a company who does elastix implementation here in Dubai. They sell an appliance based on Elastix and are scheduled to give us a demo, Any recommendations I need to look for while getting this done by a third party? They were suggesting Yealink/Polycom phones.
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@ambarishrh said:
@scottalanmiller Since I couldn't find much spare time to help my friend to setup Elastix, found a company who does elastix implementation here in Dubai. They sell an appliance based on Elastix and are scheduled to give us a demo, Any recommendations I need to look for while getting this done by a third party? They were suggesting Yealink/Polycom phones.
NTG would happily do that too, you know
Make sure they are looking at Elastix 2.5 and 3.0. The 2.4 series has been replaced since this thread began.
I would avoid an Elastix appliance, that is a point of fragility that you do not want to deal with. You want either a hosted solution or a virtualized solution on-premises so that you can integrate the PBX into your existing backup, failover and DR strategy. PBXs are essentially stateless and so failover is trivial when virtualized (technically stateful but only in-flight calls are dropped and you can pick them back up again immediately.)
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Yealink and SNOM are the low cost phone leaders. We use them almost exclusively. Polycom is excellent and probably the best phones made but will cost a bit more, not necessarily worth the price premium but their price/quality ratio is still very good so well worth having on the short list.
The new player is Ubiquiti with desktop Android phones. We don't have one in the lab yet so we can't vouch for it beyond the idea being great, the price looking good and Ubiquiti having a great reputation. We plan to get some soon-ish as they really look interesting.
