Are we using IVR and voicemail greetings the same way?

Isn't IVR the interactive thing with menus and "press 1 for this" etc?

Nothing interactive about standard voicemail.

Does FreePBX have separate voicemail vs. IVR or is it all one in the same?

@dashrender said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

My original goal is basically to allow for multiple switchable voicemail greetings.

This is a weird goal - are you sure it's voicemail greetings you want to change? I though from the postings it looked like the incoming announcement is what you wanted to change.
Voicemail notices are specifically for whatever mailbox a user ends up in.. is that where you really want a simple change?

Can you give us an example of your full end goal?

Just think "25 year old system" and it makes sense.

We have a few phone numbers that the Avaya system just rolls over if line 1 is busy it rings on line 2 etc. If no one answers, just like a cell phone, you get a voicemail message, beeeeep, then someone leaves a message. Yes, we are using this simple voicemail greeting beep thing for people to leave messages for the business. There is no auto-attendant, there is no "press 1 for jane, press 3 for tech services" stuff.

So our system has ONE greeting, "hello, you've reached Troglodyte Systems Inc, we're avoiding calls right now, please leave a message and we'll paste a sticky note of it somewhere in the office that nobody will respond to, maybe. beeeep".

But the boss wants to switch to other greetings like one for the evening "hello, we went out to lunch but decided not to work any more, so we consider this after hours now. leave a message!"

Or a holiday greeting "you are calling within 3 weeks of a government sanctioned holiday, therefore we are very busy and don't want to talk to you, leave a message and our receptionist will delete it in the morning, thanks!"

All we want to do is pick a custom greeting. But now we have to literally record a new one every time we want to change it.

If I go through all the trouble of converting the whole office to VOIP, at least internally, we must have this feature at the least.

Other features we use, I would consider just as normal to have on a VOIP phone. Intercom ability, call hold, 3 way call, individual voicemail, shortcut buttons, speakerphone, caller ID, call history, etc.

I admit the more I dig in to this, the more confused I am.

I'm learning a bunch of the acronyms and trying to reason about what is a new tech and what is old tech, ITSP, PSTN, POTS, SBC, TDM, DIDs, trunks, SIP trunks, bridges. Software tools versus appliances, and what providers like voip.ms or 1-voip do.

Things easily get confusing. On one website they are comparing FreePBX to Voip.ms. But on another website a person is asking how to configure FreePBX with voip.ms as the provider. What? Are they competitors or does one provide a service and the other uses it? If I had a voip.ms account would I need FreePBX or not?

I get it that if we keep our POTS lines, then we need essentially a bridge device to convert our internal phone network to VOIP. But of course this isn't "true" VOIP since it's only internal and converts to POTS on the way out, so what good is that? Are the benefits of VOIP in this case based entirely on the features of the phones then?

My original goal is basically to allow for multiple switchable voicemail greetings. So with the VOIP internal, plus bridge appliance and POTS service, who would be controlling voicemail and inboxes? Is that what FreePBX does? Would I need the appliance AND FreePBX AND the phones and this would get the voicemail (and other) features of VOIP even if the signal still goes out over POTS? I assume FreePBX alone doesn't actually do anything, it must connect somehow to some kind of phone service.

I'm reading as much as I can and there are a few sparse diagrams here and there but I think I need some more visual tools to understand how all this fits together. Which device controls what, which is a provider and which is a bridge and what are the requirements of a basic VOIP setup? Some network diagrams of a bunch of different kinds of arrangements or topologies would be nice.

You're all saying don't bother talking to Avaya, they'll just try to sell me appliances. But then you're linking me to buying appliances anyway from Sangoma or Grandstream. Is Avaya not in this market? I really don't know who the players are, not that it matters, the prices of Sangoma and Grandstream are just fine by me.

I just need to keep studying a little, it's hard for me to work out an issue without understanding it and what each piece is responsible for. Visual learning would be good at this point cause everything else turns to acronym soup and hypotheticals.

@bnrstnr said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

Ok, so 11 phones. Do you have an onsite server with hypervisor installed?

Ya we have an R430 with a ton of unused RAM and HDD. My only beef with it is that I can't put it downstairs in the dusty pathetic little wiring closet/hole where the rest of the stuff is. It's upstairs in an office, plugged in through a little 6 port switch with all the rest of the stuff in that office.
It's been reliable enough, but not the LAN connection I would like it to have.

Setup and learning curve are important but not the main issue.

The main issue is just that it runs reliably. We do have a good server running Zen already.

@scottalanmiller said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

If we can get new phones, better service, better controller, and keep our current phone service (for time being only with option of upgrading), for less than around $3000, that's doable, at least worth pitching to boss and landlord.

Your cost is all in the phones (and the bridge.) A cheap bridge is like $100 maybe? Mabye Jared has bought one recently that he would recommend. It's not a large item. How many POTS lines does it need to handle?

All of the real cost is the desk phones. These range from super cheap (under $40) to around $150 at the top end that you would ever consider. Most people buy somewhere in the middle. Obviously these add up quickly, but they are a one time cost and visibly replace ancient phones on desks.

We would need 8 phones for people but at least 3 more for around the office. One as a cordless would be good.

Support for 4 lines, though only 2 are main voice lines, another is fax. 2 line phones would be sufficient for most of us I think.

@scottalanmiller said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

I'm looking for the least intrusive and least expensive way to just bring an improvement to phone system without a whole infrastructure update.

Ah, that's the difference. I'm looking for "the list intrusive and least expensive way to just bring an improvement to the phone system"... I'm not ruling out the simplest and best options. You are ruling out (or casually thinking you want to avoid) the easiest solution if it includes an infrastructure update. But why? If that is the cheapest and easiest option, why not take the path of best business value?

Ok let me start over here.

All the phones are near computers but offices are wired with single rj-45 and single rj-11. Switch is full, no PoE, no QoS, no vLANs. I can certainly upgrade all this to support a new phone system, it just has to fit in budget too.

If we can get new phones, better service, better controller, and keep our current phone service (for time being only with option of upgrading), for less than around $3000, that's doable, at least worth pitching to boss and landlord.

I want least amount of management needed by myself, it's all about stability and uptime. Ease of use for the people here, who are quite non-technical.

@jaredbusch said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@coliver said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@mike-davis said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

since they are an ecommerce, they do make a lot of outgoing calls to customers long distance.

wait, what? You're eCommerce business and your internet isn't reliable and you don't have a second connection? That doesn't seem to fit.

Hopefully they are hosting their site.

I hope they are not hosting it and pay a provider to do so.

$1670/month to host it in fact. I outsource as much as possible.

@jaredbusch said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

Handset costs are not relevant here. His problem is bad internet service.

Bad internet service = no SIP

But as I said, the cost of POTS versus SIP needs calculated. Once you know that, then you can determine how expensive you can afford to go on your internet costs to get good service and still reduce your monthly spend.

Then you can look at handset options and determine a cost for that.

And then you can calculate and RoI for the project.

ISP isn't THAT bad, they are the only option in town, our one cable provider. We have a 50/5 connection.

What I mean by unreliable are just normal things. Fairly regular outages due to storms, fires, accidents, line upgrades. Plus we've had like 5 router blowouts over the years which leave us offline for a couple hours. We had critters chew through lines once which was a full day outage.

Just knowing the temperament of the owners if some newfangled "internety" phone thing goes down, where the "old stuff" would have still been functioning, my job would probably be on the line. It's barbaric I know. But imagine you are the boss and one Monday morning the internet doesn't work, so you pick up the phone to call your IT guy, but the phones don't work either! I wouldn't want to be anybody in the office at that time.

By the way there are a lot of things at play here. We're in a leased commercial building, the landlord will have a say in how much infrastructure we can hack up.
The dealer says for some of their options we'd have to replace the phone jacks for example, landlord probably wouldn't like that.
It's their system. We only want better voicemail, it's not a complex need here, but we are used to the fancier phones, intercom system etc.

I'm looking for the least intrusive and least expensive way to just bring an improvement to phone system without a whole infrastructure update.

@scottalanmiller said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@scottalanmiller said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

... the controller still functions externally over existing phone lines (since our ISP is spotty, no internet phones)

There is a standard bridging component for that that is dirt cheap. You don't base PBX decisions around that. I understand why your current ISP doesn't make VoIP on the WAN an option, but that shouldn't influence anything here.

The boss makes the decisions, they don't want internet phones.

I didn't argue with that. I'm telling you that the Avaya guy is preying on you.

That's a pretty drastic suggestion on such a small potential client. So far she has done nothing but show me their options. Doesn't mean I have to buy anything.