Is it possble to slowly move from our current PBX to an asterisk IP-PBX system?
Hi
Simple answer is yes. I have doen this on many occasions.
What type of trunks does your old pbx have ?
Ian
I dont know what you mean by trunks but I will briefly describe what we have now. We have 12 incoming lines which I believe are analog considering nothing has changed the last 10 years. We have approx. 40 Nortel PBX phones which roughly half of those have a voicemail. We have a toll free number which our customers call and it gets divided between the 12 lines.
I hope that helps
Thnk you in advance,
Daniel
I doubt the phones that you have now would for asterisk. I would build asterisk on the side to the current specs that you have and test away. Set up the new phones when you think are ready. Have them use it for outbound and maybe 1 or 2 calls for inbound till you think you are ready to move over.
Hi You can use Citel gateways, but to be honest new phones would cost about the same/
Ian
You can add an Asterisk between your current pbx and the telco
----pot lines—----<old_bpx>
The basic idea is that asterisk is telco for the old pbx. You can start with adding Asterisk and keep all the old stuff up and running.
If that is working you can start using the nifty features of Asterisk like voicemail for everybody, IVR, call recording, conferences etc. etc. In the proces you can start replacing old phones on the old pbx with new sip phones on the Asterisk server. Imagin phones connected to both the Asterisk server and the old pbx.
Technically it is not the easiest thing to do but it can be done. All you need is the hardware needed to connect the asterisk server with the telco and the asterisk server with the old pbx and some clever dialplan logic. As far as the dialplan is concerned the basic idea is that you route an inbound call to the old pbx if the Asterisk server doesn’t have an extension that fully match the number.