[Asterisk-Users] Avaya Partner ACS system, pre 7.0

[Jeb Campbell]

Sean Kennedy wrote:
> I'll give you more details:
> 
> We have two offices.  Medium sized office ( 20 phones ), and a small 
> office in a different city ( 5 phones ).  We have plans to open a 
> business office that will handle all incoming phone calls.  This 
> business office will be next door to the medium sized office.  So the 
> plan would be two fold:  FXO ports for incoming, and FXS ports to the 
> avaya system itself.
> 
> Honestly, the way this setup is looking, it may be more problematic to 
> band aid the situation as apposed to simply doing a full phone system 
> upgrade.  I'd prefer to do that, but I'm making sure there isn't a 
> shortcut so we could reuse our old equipment and avoid the retraining of 
> our staff.
> 
> Thank you for the input.

Sean, I have hooked up an Asterisk and Avaya system.  I don't remember 
the Avaya specs, but I asked for help here, so it should be in the 
archives.  I used asterisk as an IVR (data input application) off a T1 
from the Avaya.

Some recommendations:
1. Don't bother unless you can go T1/E1 into the Avaya.  From the mix of 
incoming and outgoing you would need a channel bank anyway.  And you 
have to figure what your time would be worth to debug and maintain on 
such a Frankenstein system.
2. Do you admin the Avaya yourself?  If not, figure the costs of setting 
this up and making changes.
3. Do you have T1 cards and the latest Avaya software.  We were going to 
extend our IVR to put voip phones off it, but would have had to pay to 
upgrade to the latest software to do any advanced routing (ie, DID) from 
asterisk to the avaya.

In the end we rolled out Asterisk at the smaller location to debug it 
and will soon be replacing the Avaya at the main location.  This was 
much cheaper than to upgrade the Avaya, pay to setup the Avaya to work 
with asterisk, debug the monster, then upgrade the main site to VOIP 
later anyway.

Assuming you want to go to asterisk, I would roll out asterisk at the 
small location to debug, then upgrade the other locations and tie them 
in to the VOIP system.

However if all you want is to make free calls between the locations, you 
get a 4 port TDM card (2 FXO, 2 FXS) at each location and hook into the 
avaya.  You could even setup asterisk and the avaya to pass the digits 
back and forth for extensions (but unless you do it yourself, it will 
cost a bit to setup).

Good luck,

Jeb Campbell
jebc at c4solutions.net