Migrating to Asterisk VoIP PBX - Part 1
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008This first series of articles will be a recount of my experience recently with a VoIP project that we implemented over the last 6 months where I work. I have taken a phone-system consolidation project from idea to research to testing to a completed project. Part 1 will focus mainly on our existing infrastructure and what the plan was.
We had tried to do this a year previous, but relied on outside companies to propose something to us, my opinion is that they didn’t do a great job selling their idea and really left it up to us to find the benefits. Unfortunately we failed to find enough benefits to outweigh the costs. This project was always in the back of my head and a year after that and I still wanted to do it. One day a co-worker said to me”Why can’t we transfer calls between offices?”. My reply was “Great question! You should go ask <our Manager of Finance>”, she was the one that was part of the original try at this, and ultimately the one that decided we couldn’t afford it then. My biggest problem with the system was the lack of ability to transfer between offices, being that I work at head office, I always overheard phone calls to our receptionist where people were looking for our staff members that worked for another program that did not operate out of our building, but operated out of the other 3. We would have to give the person the phone number for that program’s main office, and then that receptionist might end up telling them that person is in a different office and have to ask them yet again to hang up and call another number… we thought this was horrible client service and wanted to fix it.
After that co-worker said this to me, I began doing some research, a friend Matt Gibson had talked to me off and on over the past year or two about the Asterisk open-source PBX, however I didn’t really know a lot about it at the time. I began asking him a lot of question about it and eventually decided that it sounded perfect for us. I started doing a lot of research on my own time and did some number crunching to find out what it would cost to implement, and more importantly, how in the long run it would save us approximately $7000 per year. To a non-profit that is primarily funded by offering various government programs, that can be a big chunk of change. I poured a lot of heart and soul into this project, I truly believed it would be great. After I had crunched my numbers, I approached our Manager of Finance again with the project and said “What would you say if I told you the telephone system project would cost you $25,000 but it would save you $7000/year… would you be interested?”
