[asterisk-users] Decent Voip Phones for enterprise

[Gordon Henderson]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Kev Szaszvari wrote:

> Hi there
>
> Our company is using the Linksys SPA-942 Phones, and they are pretty useless.
> They dont have any central management or provisioning, as well as a pretty bad interface.
>
> Can anyone reccomend any voip phones( Cisco, Polycom, SNOM ) that have
>
> * Central Management for all the phones (We dont mind if we have to buy 
> the software to manage them)

I always wondered about this - my target is the SME - say 4-150 seats - 
people don't move desks, change office that often, staff "churn" is 
typically low, so I program the phones once then leave them there. If you 
move desk you take your phone with you. If you leave then the phone can be 
renamed via it's web interface relatively easily.

Maybe I'm just dealing with simple (dumb?) offices, but I'm curious as to 
what people do with the phones that require this sort of central 
management. (And regular phone updating)

> * Programable shortcut buttons, So i can program in on certian phones 
> quick dials to queues.

How about implementing this in the PBX.

> * Optional but bonus, The ability to have a shared address book accross 
> the phones.

Same here.

So some phones do have nice programmable buttons - and that's good, but in 
my PBX I have the space for about 600 speed-dials (3-digit extensions) 
which are web managed by the admin, and 30 personal ones settable on the 
phone *00 through *29 ... (I know this sometimes might clash with a phones 
own 'star' codes though)

But maybe this is just me ... When I started playing with asterisk I 
bought a small number of different phones to get a feel for them and was 
frustrated by a lack of common functions across them, so put all features 
back into the PBX - things like diverts, follow-me, voicemail and so on 
are all handled by my asterisk system rather than relying on a particular
SIP phone to handle it...

However if you want to know what phones I use, it's mostly Grandstream for 
now. I provision them using gsutil, and when customers want something a 
bit more posh, it's Snoms.

Gordon