CODA Inc. is an addiction recovery non-profit located in Portland, OR with 14 remote sites and approximately 300 desk telephones on a Cisco UCM running version 10.5 UCM code. All of these are Cisco 8845 and 7821 desk telephones. The Cisco UCM is at max licensing and because it is out of support from Cisco we can no longer buy licenses for it.
We do have a Managed IT Service Provider (Netcuras) that handles support for that system, but they are not interested in supporting any other telephone system than the Cisco UCM or Cisco Cloud Calling. (which we are not interested in due to the cost plus we have existing PRI/SIP trunk contracts)
We are opening a new site in the fall at another location that will need around 80 extensions. The problem with going with a Cisco solution is we would need to scrap our existing system and upgrade to UCM running version 15 code. This would (among other things) put us under subscription licensing which would be costly – Cisco has greatly increased prices for the on premise UCM product as a way of pushing their customers to go to their virtual PBX product.
Because of this I have been looking at setting up an Asterisk system at the new site.
To this end I setup a telephone test lab here at CODA and a number of phones on it. It’s a vanilla FreePBX system that just uses the Cisco phones as single extension endpoints, and uses Polycom phones for the few locations that might need advanced features (such as multiple line appearances, BLF, etc.) I also have sufficient Polycom instruments already on hand to cover that kind of setup. I did consider softphones but it’s not likely that our userbase would accept those for a variety of reasons.
I’ve had no problems setting it up to permit calling from extension to extension but the biggest problem that I have right now is simply lack of my time to put into this project as I have many other fish to fry, here at CODA.
I do have a tech in the department who can provision desk phones and who works with Netcuras but he also handles regular user helpdesk tickets and he is not an advanced telephony person.
So, I’m looking for an IT service provider who is willing to take on support of a FreePBX/Asterisk system. The way I envision this is as follows:
We would handle all of the initial provisioning of the phones, installing them, replacing them if an instrument failed, etc.
For standard deskphones we would use the Cisco devices provisioned off the usual TFTP server SEPMAC.xml files.
For advanced deskphones we would use Polycoms which can all be remotely provisioned via webinterface, and store their configurations via FTP
We would provision standard user extensions and voicemailboxes
We would need the service provider to do the following in the immediate short term:
- Work with Netcuras to establish intertrunking between the UCM and the FreePBX system. (I know this is possible to do as people have posted that they have done it successfully)
- Currently the trunking in and out of the Cisco UCM is via PRI and all our DIDs come in from that (we have 500 of those) and map to existing internal extensions on the UCM. However we have other SIP trunks into the network, one group is at Seaside OR terminated on a Cisco CUBE (AKA Cisco ISR4321) that currently ONLY handles 911 calls that terminate in the Clatsop county 911 call center for our Seaside site, and another group will be coming into the new facility and handling 911 for Washington County based sites (of which we have 5 that are currently using VoIP-to-POTS gateways). I want to look into configuring these SIP trunks as outbound failover for the new site should the main UCM fail. It’s also likely that I’d place another CUBE at the new facility to make it easy to interface to those trunks, and to allow the UCM to send 911 through those trunks.
- Assist us with advanced phone provisioning (BLF, etc) on the Polycoms
- Handle configuration of call routing and 911 (note that as a medical facility that runs secured buildings, many of the Kari’s Law/Ray Baums law requirements don’t apply to us so we route 911 a bit differently)
- Be available for advanced troubleshooting.
Go live date on the new facility is in last quarter of this year. Once the system is up and running:
- Assist in planning out future telephony migration (the UCM we have isn’t going to last forever)
- Integrating with a remote call center (we currently do intake call handling in house but we have looked at using an outsourced product since the UCM does not have a solution for this
Anyone interested in adding us into your fold please contact me at:
We would be most interested in someone in the US/Pacific time zone or nearby time zone.
Thanks,
Ted Mittelstaedt