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Thanks Ants posted:Pay 8x8 a lot of money, you can hook it up to Teams as well if you want. quote:if you're happy to self-host, that's a big no
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Aug 16, 2022 19:32
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Bitching about experiences with phone systems: I had an awful experience with 8x8 whereby they'd fail to ring through roughly 10-50% of inbound calls for their all software system. This was 2019 and was only detected when a customer eventually bitched at us about it via email. We then found error logs, about had a heart attack, and switched to teams. Also with 8x8, we had a credit card expire and they cancelled our phone service completely without any notice. Like, didnt even both emailing oh hey you're behind on payments nothing. 1 month late? Cut off. Teams has been better though it was also not without its inbound call dropping on connect issues. This was all dont through teams client on Win 10, no on prem, no desk phones at all. We had to build an MS graph integration to monitor for dropped calls and call people back. After ~2 months of randomly failing to connect calls, it was traced to one of the forwarding numbers, set through the Admin Portal so they should have validation FFS. on one of our call queues not being E.164 formatted. Fixing this resolved it. Even with that headache I rather like teams.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:57
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Teams is great for enabling your users to make and receive phone calls, but it doesn't cover what people often mean when they say they want a "phone system". Reception consoles with a load of flashing BLFs, support for ATAs, faxing ( ), reporting (very clear that you need to go to a third party for stuff like that).As soon as Operator Connect Mobile launches and we see what carriers are prepared to offer it then we're rolling that out, but we don't have phone system requirements.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:00
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CarForumPoster posted:Also with 8x8, we had a credit card expire and they cancelled our phone service completely without any notice. Like, didnt even both emailing oh hey you're behind on payments nothing. 1 month late? Cut off. I had this issue with our current phone system. Since everyone WFH and nobody brought their handset when covid started, it was like 2 days before we found out there was anything wrong. Ticket came in when a user happened to show up to the office: "can't make a long distance call". Turns out our whole thing was suspended due to FIFTEEN DAYS PAST DUE invoice. Give me a break. I'm going to really really try to push just having no phone system. We issue iPhones to like 70% of our staff, let's just get them for the remaining staff and call it a day. Everyone has been WFH without a proper phone system for the past two years anyway. Wish me luck, goons.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:13
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I'm not a fan of people using their cell phone number for business purposes. I've seen it cause way too many problems. I am however a fan of not hosting your own PBX and using softphones. I was working at a law firm when the pandemic hit and we went from "you'd be laughed out of the room for suggesting anything other than handsets" to "we've all been using softphones for a year, no need to buy handsets." It would have been another decade before it was possible to make that change without the pandemic, IMO.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:21
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Agreed, we did loads of phone system upgrades while people were fully WFH by just rolling out apps and porting numbers. We’d never have been able to deal with shipping hardware around to people (and for home users you’d have to get power supplies and Wi-Fi modules), and the supply constraints at the time didn’t make it an option anyway. A few weeks of being softphone-only and pretty much everybody forgot that their initial requirement was to have a deskphone.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:25
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For an all-in-one, fully hosted solution, RingCentral was pretty great for ~300 users over multiple locations, although this was pre-Covid. Not sure how well this would work for users logging in/out of handsets on their own. I'm also not sure about voicemail transcription. At my MSP gig we resold Zultys systems, which is a low-cost option but pretty good for users that need a "phone system". It also allows you to bring your own SIP, which can be beneficial if you are multinational and need to be able to make "local" phone calls from different countries, or you want to be able to mange DIDs and dialtones on your own without being tied to your system provider. They also offer an on-prem box that can handle ethernet handoff, T1, and traditional copper. As well as offering a virtual machine image, and a fully hosted cloud option. The system itself is compatible with pretty much any SIP capable handset, so it was easy to mix/match with existing hardware to help lower the upfront cost of a system migration.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:26
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Internet Explorer posted:I'm not a fan of people using their cell phone number for business purposes. Can you tell me more about why not (assuming this is corporate-owned iphones with, hopefully soon, intune for MDM)? I get I wouldn't have as much usage visibility but I think I'd have enough visibility.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:30
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carlcarlson posted:For an all-in-one, fully hosted solution, RingCentral was pretty great for ~300 users over multiple locations, although this was pre-Covid. Not sure how well this would work for users logging in/out of handsets on their own. I'm also not sure about voicemail transcription. I wonder how that works now that Zoom also sells phone....
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Aug 16, 2022 20:32
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nvrgrls posted:Can you tell me more about why not (assuming this is corporate-owned iphones with, hopefully soon, intune for MDM)? I get I wouldn't have as much usage visibility but I think I'd have enough visibility. Oh, if it's corporate owned devices and those numbers belong to the company, then I don't really have any objections. You'll lose some metrics you might want to have, some IVR features, and things like hunt groups, assistant pairing features, voicemail to email, delegation, etc. But objections were really rooted around using personal numbers.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:46
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nvrgrls posted:Yeah I used to see ringcentral all the time. Do they still resell Zoom for their video conf solution?
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Aug 16, 2022 23:02
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Internet Explorer posted:Oh, if it's corporate owned devices and those numbers belong to the company, then I don't really have any objections. You'll lose some metrics you might want to have, some IVR features, and things like hunt groups, assistant pairing features, voicemail to email, delegation, etc. But objections were really rooted around using personal numbers. Cool. Yeah I'm thinking maybe we get like, instead of a 50-100 seat phone system we get a 5-seater with auto attendant, and have normal people use cells.
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Aug 17, 2022 14:45
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carlcarlson posted:Cursory internet searching says that RingCentral built their own video conferencing app, which you can subscribe to separately. Suspicious
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Aug 17, 2022 14:45
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nvrgrls posted:Cool. If you have company cells then see if you can put things off long enough for Operator Connect Mobile to launch, because it looks great for these sorts of requirements. Then you can meet the reception console requirements with a 3rd party Teams add-on.
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Aug 17, 2022 14:54
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I talked to a sales person yesterday about Ring Central and she said it was "powered by Zoom" so I'm guessing it's still Zoom. Still might sit through a pitch though because the staff at my company chose zoom and only zoom which is a pain in the rear end (speaking of account sharing) and Ring Central at least seems to have more adaptable plans.
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Aug 17, 2022 19:26
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Rick posted:I talked to a sales person yesterday about Ring Central and she said it was "powered by Zoom" so I'm guessing it's still Zoom. Still might sit through a pitch though because the staff at my company chose zoom and only zoom which is a pain in the rear end (speaking of account sharing) and Ring Central at least seems to have more adaptable plans. Those sales reps are being untruthful: ringcentral is ending their zoom partnership. Hell they even went to court over it. They don't even let you download the dedicated app for meetings anymore. We've kicked everyone to the dedicated zoom app and their own logins.
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Aug 17, 2022 19:41
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Thants mentioned 3CX but dismissed the cloud hosting option-- it's worth a look in your use case I think, it meets nearly every requirement you have. It's a very solid platform that's really affordable and words perfect for SMB. I've deployed both hosted and on-prem for a half dozen clients, it's super easy to stand up and administer.
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Aug 18, 2022 14:46
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Nice one, thanks for the tip
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Aug 18, 2022 22:50
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But you know what, gently caress it, I'm gonna roll my own asterisk. My life is too easy.
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Aug 18, 2022 22:50
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incoherent posted:Those sales reps are being untruthful: ringcentral is ending their zoom partnership. Hell they even went to court over it. They don't even let you download the dedicated app for meetings anymore. We've kicked everyone to the dedicated zoom app and their own logins. Nooooooooo Well, to me, it not being Zoom is a mark in its favor but yeah that will be no go for staff.
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Aug 18, 2022 23:19
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nvrgrls posted:But you know what, gently caress it, I'm gonna roll my own asterisk. My life is too easy. We use Sangoma/FreePBX on-prem for some of our customers, and it's not terrible. Not sure that it easily meets all your needs though. Looks like they also have cloud options too.
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Aug 18, 2022 23:20
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I rolled out 8x8 in fall of 2020 and honestly, I've had a very positive experience with it. Minimal issues, kinda "just works". We have mostly x2 and x4 license levels. One thing I will say though, is that their meetings solution is....adequate. It often trails behind platforms like Zoom and Teams in terms of features, and they are way behind in terms of integrating into other software/hardware. There is a lot of conference/meeting room hardware out there that touts tight integration with zoom, teams, go-to meeting, WebEx etc and 8x8 is almost always missing or not supported.
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Aug 19, 2022 01:44
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We run FreePBX Distro both on-premise and on VPSes, it's brain dead easy to run 99% of the time. If you can maintain a Red Hat derivative you can run it. The catch as always is that phones, like email, are the kind of service that needs zero attention for months or even years but the second it hiccups everyone will be breathing down the neck of whoever is responsible wondering when it'll be fixed. You don't want to be the person who has "support phone system" somewhere deep on their list of responsibilities.
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Aug 19, 2022 02:53
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Yall I was joking about asterisk I'm not touching that poo poo. The only good thing about it is that it forced me to learn linux when I had to janitor it someplace where the IT guy set it up and then quit. chocolateTHUNDER posted:I rolled out 8x8 in fall of 2020 and honestly, I've had a very positive experience with it. Minimal issues, kinda "just works". We have mostly x2 and x4 license levels. I'm meeting with 8x8 tomorrow. I don't see us using 8x8's video conf solutions but I want to see its integration with teams.
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Aug 19, 2022 03:04
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Internet Explorer posted:Oh, if it's corporate owned devices and those numbers belong to the company, then I don't really have any objections. You'll lose some metrics you might want to have, some IVR features, and things like hunt groups, assistant pairing features, voicemail to email, delegation, etc. But objections were really rooted around using personal numbers. I have a client who is doing the worst of both worlds: personal phone reimbursements and corporate issued, unmanaged devices. I wonder how tall the stack of locked devices will get before they come to Jesus.
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Aug 19, 2022 20:02
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We're doing corporate-managed and if someone wants to BYOD they can use Outlook app only.
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Aug 19, 2022 20:50
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Anyone have suggestions for a static IP VPN service for teams? It would be for 7-10 people and has to be static because one of the vendors we work with needs an IP to whitelist on their side. Would like it to be unlimited bandwidth, but can work with limits if I can somehow specify what kind of traffic to route through the VPN on the clients. Also would need to work with VPN routers(?) as the aforementioned vendor has us use devices that phone home through the white listed IP. Are VPN routers the correct terminology for this? EDIT: not an admin per se but we're pretty small and being a sys admin has rolled into my responsibilities as tech director. ShinAli fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Sep 9, 2022 |
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Sep 9, 2022 02:06
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I'm a bit confused at what your looking at? Are you looking for STATIC VPN services for your infrastructure? for Microsoft Teams? What kind of infrastructure do you have right now? a business comcast line (1-5 static ip addresses) and a sonicwall will give you all the unlimited VPN service you need. incoherent fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Sep 9, 2022 |
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Sep 9, 2022 07:22
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lol. Just got a quote for identical Dell servers, one in North America, one in Australia. Australia was like 70% more expensive, until we showed them the NA one and then suddenly it wasn't.
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Sep 9, 2022 09:59
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ShinAli posted:Anyone have suggestions for a static IP VPN service for teams? It would be for 7-10 people and has to be static because one of the vendors we work with needs an IP to whitelist on their side. Would like it to be unlimited bandwidth, but can work with limits if I can somehow specify what kind of traffic to route through the VPN on the clients. For the bolded part, you are looking for Split Tunneling. Does your ISP provide a static IP and plenty of bandwidth? What firewall do you use? Seems like your asking for a service, but you could possibly do this with your existing setup through OpenVPN or Wireguard or something.
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Sep 9, 2022 13:13
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I’d be tempted to deploy something like Azure Virtual Desktop and a NAT gateway for this, rather than messing around with VPN.
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Sep 9, 2022 13:39
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Should've specified that we're purely remote with people in different locations across the US. Our infrastructure currently is a loose collection of services that don't really need to be accessed through VPN, this would be just for the sake of vendors requiring a static IP from us and benefits that a VPN would give us as a team, like remote software debugging. I've considered doing one from my home as I have a gigabit pipe and am able to get a static IP with my ISP, but I'm aiming to move out of this state as soon as I'm able. I guess that'd be the cheapest solution as my IP hasn't really changed since I got this ISP hooked up 5 years ago so not sure I'd need to opt in for a static IP add on which tacks on $15/mo to my bill. I'm also considering an unmanaged VPS, as the cheapest plan I can price out runs about 8.50 a month with 12TB of bandwidth. I can mess with throwing OpenVPN up on my machine and transition it over to the VPS, which where split tunneling would come into play since there are bandwidth caps. I can also do an unmetered option that limits the VPS to between 30-60 Mbps, which might be enough for what we need? It would tack on $3.50 for the 30Mbps option, so perfectly doable. I was asking about a dedicated service for small teams as it'd be less stuff for me to mess with, but it's not very easy to find a list of these kinds of services. I'm basing what I've seen from GoodAccess which has it at $5 per user with a 10 user minimum, but not sure if provides unlimited bandwidth as other services seem to have a cap. I'm thinking the VPS is the most economical option that provides me with a guarantee of a static IP, but I'm not sure what kind of bandwidth usage I should be expecting. The biggest usage I would think is from downloading SDKs from the vendor, which I can mitigate by downloading them once and spreading it with the whole team outside of the VPN from another secure location. Aside from the aforementioned device phoning home and internal site access to the vendor, the only other bandwidth usage would be remote software debugging on other people's machines, which wouldn't be done very often. ShinAli fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Sep 9, 2022 |
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Sep 9, 2022 17:56
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Not going to lie, everything you've described sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me. Let me try to back up for a second. You should do absolutely everything you can not to introduce a VPN. They are absolutely awful to deal with. Really hammer on that vendor and see if there is literally any other way. When you say home devices, do you mean Windows, Mac, Linux devices, where you can just install a VPN client? Because that's going to be better than installing a physical router at everyone's home. Split tunnel, as was mentioned, means you can only set specific IPs to route through the VPN. This means that you'll likely need considerably less bandwidth. How much are you pushing strictly to this vendor? Remote software debugging. I suppose it depends on the details, but there almost certainly has to be more modern solutions available that don't involve a VPN. Can you go into some detail on exactly what you mean here? Seriously, I would be trying to avoid what you're describing with all of my heart and soul. It sounds awful. And this whole spin it up at home, etc... no, stop.
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Sep 9, 2022 18:28
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Yeah it sucks but they don’t budge on this rule for anyone, no matter their size. They are extremely protective of their internal site and devkits, which will not work unless they can communicate from the white listed IP. They don’t have any ability to setup VPNs on the dev kits themselves so I’d have to use another device that can route its traffic through the VPN. Honestly it’s probably not going to use much remote traffic, so 12tb would be plenty I think. The remote debugging is mostly for convenience and some layer of security for others as they’d have to expose a range of ports for our debuggers to hook into, and don’t really allow for specifying direct connections as they depend on broadcasting on a local network for discovery. These folks would be on VPN software clients but people using devkits would need a VPN router.
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Sep 9, 2022 19:42
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Can you look to see if all of your users can get static IPs on their home internet connections and just pay for that? Otherwise, if you absolutely have to go the VPN route, and you have to put VPN hardware at everyone's homes, then my suggestion would be to aim for the moon and not "I could run a VPN server at my house." In my opinion, you want the cost of this solution to be appropriately high to discourage the use of a "low cost" solution that will add up to a lot of soft costs, mostly you and the rest of your team's time in constant troubleshooting. Your stack either sounds really niche, in which case just fork over the $$$, or really lovely, in which case it might be time to look at modernizing. Easier said than done, as always. Internet Explorer fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Sep 9, 2022 |
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Sep 9, 2022 19:51
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would tailscale be a viable solution?
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Sep 9, 2022 19:55
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Thanks Ants posted:I’d be tempted to deploy something like Azure Virtual Desktop and a NAT gateway for this, rather than messing around with VPN. After reading the back and forth on what OP is trying to accomplish I agree fully to just get everyone into remote desktops. It looks like you need an infrastructure without an infrastructure. you can still do the VPN bullshit requirement on top of it!
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Sep 9, 2022 20:22
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Or send everyone a Meraki MX68(W) or MX75 if you need the throughput, and tunnel all their corporate traffic back to a pair of boxes in your data centre.
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Sep 9, 2022 21:39
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I'm pretty sure op is dealing with Sony playstation devkits so they probably can't virtualize this. My friend is a solo dev and complained about the static IP requirement.
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Sep 10, 2022 02:33
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Tailscale.
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Sep 10, 2022 03:20
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