|TikPad

My company works with a company, Axia, to resell in house PBX’s. The OS on these PBX’s is Trixbox which is an advanced implementation of Asterisk. Axia adds their own features into Trixbox. They have a really awesome switchboard program called Qview that you use from your computer to see who is on a call, transfer calls, instant message, and much more all from a mouse click.

Anywho, a week ago I had my first experience actually setting up my first VoIP system and rolling it out. The setup was rather simple. The most tedious part is inputting everyones extentions in creating a layout of how the call flow will go when a person call the number. It makes it easier to use Visio to do this with.

Steps…
1. get clients needs on IVR’s, directorys, voicemails, etc. (where do calls go to basically)
2. build your call flow. You need to start with extensions first and work your way backwards. (from bottom up, cause you need to know where the calls are coming from)
3. You then build your call groups and IVR’s. Menu options. Call groups are groups of extensions that will be rang when an options will be chosen from a menu (ivr).
4. Configure any DID’s – these are direct inbound calls
5. Record your IVR messages (welcome messages, vm message/instructions, etc.) In trixbox, you can do this directly from a phone on the network or create a .wav and upload it.
6. Configure your trunks…ZAP or SIP normally. if its hosted, it will more than likely be SIP but if you have a PRI, you should have a Digium card installed.
7. Setup the phones and configure. We use Cisco 7940′s and Polycom IP330′s and IP550′s. You can specify TFTP server directly on the phone or leave everything Option 66 and configure Boot File on the DHCP server. Its your choice. Once you configured the phone, it will find the PBX and it will automatically pull its config file.
8. Now, when it comes to programming the phone its extension, from what I have been told, Axia created a feature so that you dial the extension that phone is going to be and if that extension is available, the PBX will auto configure the phone for you with that extension. Which is sooo easy! The phone reboots and you are done.

Now do your testing. Make test calls within the network. If you have PRI and its hooked up. You can call the T1 company and have the circuit brought up for testing to see if you can make outbound calls. Once that is good, you can then have the clients phone number ported over to the T1 from their existing phone service. Once that is finished, you should be able to make inbound calls to the client.

Now, my first experience was great. Instead of the cutover being real easy, it was a pain. Come to find out, we configured the PRI on the PBX with the wrong number of channels on the PRI. PRI’s usually come with 23 B channels and one D channel (24 total at 64kbit a piece = about 1.544 ). Well this was a special PRI where the client only bought 15 channels. We got that fixed. Then come to find out, I couldnt make long distance calls. After being on the phone for 2 hours with Axia tech help and Cinci Bell T1 support, the client had a Access Code dial plan. Meaning, in order to make a long distance call, you had to input an access code, that way, they kept track of who was calling long distance and so forth. Well that had to come off and it did. After all that, it worked great!