Cisco vs. Polycom - Phone System
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Depending on the size of the district, something like changing phone numbers might not be at the school level, it might require board approval.
At that point it's not about a budget.. it's about communications.
That's a dangerous game to play. You would really need a lot of confidence that those are really just incompetent people. If they control the budget and direct decisions like that, they control your job too.
What? we seemed to have changed gears.
The communications I'm referring to are the phone numbers, the ability for the community to call the same number they have for the past 50 years. Not about communication between admins and the board.
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Depending on the size of the district, something like changing phone numbers might not be at the school level, it might require board approval.
At that point it's not about a budget.. it's about communications.
That's a dangerous game to play. You would really need a lot of confidence that those are really just incompetent people. If they control the budget and direct decisions like that, they control your job too.
What? we seemed to have changed gears.
The communications I'm referring to are the phone numbers, the ability for the community to call the same number they have for the past 50 years. Not about communication between admins and the board.
But the numbers get ported. Should be no issue there.
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And unlike a business where customers might just move on, schools just announce new numbers and people use them. Even if you can't port the numbers you just move on. There is no need for a school to maintain numbers in perpetuity. That's a silly idea. Sure, they might use that as a "reason", but it is a flimsy excuse.
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Which leads me back to, whomever spoke to the board about this project did so half assed and likely the board asked for more info and the presenter said, awww screw it.
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Here is something to think about...
- What is the cost of the old PBX? What if the public found out that that cost could have been zero?
- What are the cost of the current handsets? What if the public found out that those could have been half or less what they are ($80 - $120.)
- What is the cost of the POTS lines? What if the public found out that likely those are 1,000% the cost that they could have been (common markup on those lines compared to VoIP.)
Add up those numbers. Now multiple by what, a decade? How big is that number? How big is the number that you could save in the future? That's great. But that's the number of what could have been saved in the past and has been blocked.
Even if you are dealing purely with incompetence and not corruption (and I'll argue all day that the incompetence is just a form of corruption), you are still talking about exposing and embarrassing people who are in a position of power. Even if they are just idiots or just uncaring and not at all getting kickbacks or making money from this decision... it will look to the public like they are.
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@Dashrender said:
Which leads me back to, whomever spoke to the board about this project did so half assed and likely the board asked for more info and the presenter said, awww screw it.
The board should have asked for more info before denying it then. There is a difference between waiting on clarification and denying a project.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Which leads me back to, whomever spoke to the board about this project did so half assed and likely the board asked for more info and the presenter said, awww screw it.
The board should have asked for more info before denying it then. There is a difference between waiting on clarification and denying a project.
We, through the OP, were told the board denied it.. what if the OP was lied to because the presenter didn't want to bother going back? This really seems like the most likely situation.
I look at the possibilities:
the board had all information but is corrupt and said no to savings
the board wasn't give all needed info and the presenter decided not to follow up and instead made their own decision to kill that avenue.the second option is even more likely if the only reason this even went to the board was because of the phone number change, and not a budget request... but we don't know that part either.
there are just to many unknowns.
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@Dashrender said:
We, through the OP, were told the board denied it.. what if the OP was lied to because the presenter didn't want to bother going back? This really seems like the most likely situation.
Always valid to consider that the source information is wrong. But then we really know nothing. If it is a major player in IT, same issues would apply. Do we risk upsetting someone who can fire you?
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@Dashrender said:
there are just to many unknowns.
Yes, but only if we choose to decide that the presented facts are unknowns. If we accept the presented framework as is, we can narrow somewhat. If we consider everything as suspect then we have to include the possibility that @BBigford made the whole thing up and just wants Cisco. Or maybe he made up working for a school? Maybe he made himself up and he's a bot
My point being, you have to accept reasonable constraints as true or it always becomes an exercise in guessing which constraints are made up. Which I get, there is value to it. But it becomes more philosophical than useful, I think.
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All great points, and we'll back to doing what they want because they can fire us, and it's rarely worth caring more for our jobs than the company does.
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@Dashrender said:
All great points, and we'll back to doing what they want because they can fire us, and it's rarely worth caring more for our jobs than the company does.
Right, that's the biggest deal. If you are confident with your boss, a quick "I've heard that VoIP and Asterisk could save us a large fortune and protect the school long term" and see if that is met with a "oh, let's dig into this" or "never mention this to anyone" stare.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
All great points, and we'll back to doing what they want because they can fire us, and it's rarely worth caring more for our jobs than the company does.
Right, that's the biggest deal. If you are confident with your boss, a quick "I've heard that VoIP and Asterisk could save us a large fortune and protect the school long term" and see if that is met with a "oh, let's dig into this" or "never mention this to anyone" stare.
Oh man... my boss at the K12 would give me that stare all the time. I know it well.
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LOL - my friend started working for a small district about 3 years ago. Almost on day one he had to find a vendor to install a new server for them...
He shelled out over 20K for a one server SAN solution... and to top that, it only have one VM on it.
I laugh my ass off every day I hear about that.. glad it's in another state wasting their money... If it was local and I KNEW about it.. I'd report it to the news.. see if they'd make a story out of it.
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This is the kind of thing I often point to about how schools aren't short on money at all. They spend it lavishly all of the time. In places where it does no good. Schools might be short on education, but if they are cutting programs it is because they want to not because they lack financial resources. The money is flowing out of them like crazy and no one cares.
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To add some on topic input. Last year I ported 50 lines from TDS Telecom ($25k/year for hosted PBX with metered use) and it took almost three months to port all of our numbers. In the end we ended up being unable to port some, namely ones that had been previously ported from Vonage to TDS. Now we run FreePBX in house with all Polycom IP450 (found a lot of them going for $35 each) and spend far less than that.
My point here is, even if you get approval to move forward, and for the political reasons outlined above I wouldn't poke the bear, it will likely be an uphill battle with TDS.
