PBX and file sharing solution
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Hi guys,
One of my friends requested me to check his company infrastructure and help his IT guys to make some changes.
They basically have an old Panasonic PBX server with analog phones but willing to change to IP phones now, First thing came to my mind is to suggest to setup something like Elastix/3cx and during my search I am pretty much planning to tell them to use Elastix- @scottalanmiller seems to be a big fan of Elastix and saw the post talking about his cancellation of 3CX
I still need to do some research on the IP phones to be used (have polycom/alcatel in mind), any suggestions?
Next thing what they want is to have a proper file sharing solution, in that office almost 95% are MAC and they have a windows small business server! which does nothing. Files stored on a Seagate black armor with smb and cifs configured and users access it using that.
They want to have offsite access of these files and also would like to have an offsite backup of the files. Since they are planning to change the storage drive due to space requirements, currently looking at 6TB data, I am thinking of looking at QNAP NAS with backup to google drive, so external access can be given via google drive
or
Completely avoid local storage and give them box accounts, as they would like to have reporting on file sharing, granular access etc. But still not decided, they have a 40Mb internet line, and so speed is not an issue but I am still leaning towards an onsite storage with google drive just to avoid the issue of loss of access due to an internet outage.
Another option came to my mind was to use local storage, enable offsite backup to crashplan and give them pertino for accessing their internal network
Its all ideas now, need to sit down evaluate the costs per solution and see what is the most feasible option for them.
What are your recommendations?
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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.)
