Office Phone Systems

[4c design]

We are about to move into our own premises having spent a year in the luxury of serviced offices. We are investigating all the various equipment suppliers including phones and servers and wandered if anyone has any suggestions before we become saturated by the biased sales forces out there.

We want to be able to bounce phone calls around about 5 different points with maybe 2 lines from the office (have been reading the advice on Broadband on the other thread and will take on-board). We will need the system and actual handsets.

If anyone has experience on servers for about 4 CAD workstations, 3 printers, data storage and connection to the outside world, please advise with less jargon than some of the suppliers seem to give us!

Any nightmare suppliers or customer service experiences? We like Dells and work on them on a peer-to-peer network at moment but storage running out and want to get Outlook synchronised.

Hope we aren't being too optimistic...Thank you and good night!!

Nick

www.4cdesign.co.uk

[leehellcat]

Sorry, can't help much with the phone side, but I may be of more use with the servers.

To make it fairly simple, you have to think about how much you are prepared to pay for 'redundancy'. for example, if a power supply blows up in the server, do you need ti to keep running. If so then you need a second power supply.
Secondly, how important is the data that will be stored on it. If it is business critical then you will again need to plan in some 'redundancy', so a couple of hard drives that are mirrores (ie they both have the same data on, os if one breaks the other carries on with no problems).

Then you need to think about what you want/need the server to do. If it is just to store files then you probably do not need to go for a power house server.

One final point. what do you mean exactly about synchronising outlook ?
How do you currently get your emails ? (directly from ISP, or via an on site mail server).

[choc]

Hi 4c,

Take a look at my site and have a browse.Landline,Mobile and office calls are all quoted and we offer you these services with NO contracts.Also there is broadband and basic internet.

All of our services are also billed on 1 monthly bill,itemised free of charge with some of the best rates in the UK.We where the first company in Europe to launch this billing system,very good.Also which may be of interest to you,we curently offer the UK's guaranteed cheapest domestic gas and elec and will be offering corperate gas and elec soon,again on the same bill..

As for the equipment side,i have a couple of colleges whom specialise in that area so i would be happy to pass on thier numbers if required..

Hope this helps..

Mark