Teams phone system - Rooms

[CAWJames]

Afternoon all,

 

We are thinking about moving our phone system into Teams, being more portable in the post COVID times, and have the complication of room phones. We currently have a SIP phone in every room, and if we move to Teams, we aren't going to have a logged in Teams client in every room, and phones with Teams integration have price tags that make my eyes water!

 

Has anyone else made the move or thinking about it, had any bright ideas on this one?

 

Our current idea is an Anynode SBC hosted internally doing a 3 way connection between Teams, the trunks and our SIP system. Which would work, but it would be a lot cheaper and easier to just use a SIP trunk with built in SBC for Teams, which a lot are offering now.

 

Thanks

 

James

[bobsmith]

looked at teams but the pricing just put us off - 3CX is our preferred option at the moment. 90% of the staff would be happy with a softphone (i.e. their own device using an app) so that keeps the costs down a lot.

[supportman]

Why have a phone when you can use a laptop or webcam?

[CAWJames]

At the moment, we are paying circa £2k a month for all our staff to have a softphone on the Gamma Horizon system, as we tried using the various softphone options that come with our phone system, Zulu/WebRTC etc, but it just wasn't stable enough. The cost of teams phone system is the phone system addon at £2 something per person per month, then whatever your trunks and SBC cost. Companies like Gamma are now offering your trunks and SBC all rolled into one for direct connection to Teams.

[CAWJames]

Our safeguarding policy states that all rooms have a phone, and we can't guarantee the person in that room has a computer to access teams or teams at all, in the case of an external, cleaning staff, general students, etc

[mavhc]

I just installed microsip, or use the freepbx web page phone for people who want a personal number

[CAWJames]

We use PBXAct, the commercial FreePBX, but it collapsed under the weight of 180 people trying to use it at once!

[mavhc]

Did you give the VM more cpu/ram/iops?

[CAWJames]

Sorry, we use PBXAct appliances from Sangoma, ie 1u "servers", no RAM or CPU to give unfortunately, well RAM maybe. Edited July 7, 2020 by CAWJames

[mavhc]

Ah, yeah, don't do that, just make it another VM on your servers