How to Set Up an IP PBX Setting up an IP PBX not your cup of tea? Just look how simple it can be!
By Mike Hogan
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
Used to be, adding a phone to your office PBX meant waiting days or weeks for a technician to come out and program your phone panel at $80 an hour. Oh, wait, that's still the norm for legacy PBXs, isn't it? And it wouldn't hurt to have a networking certification or two before you attempt to configure most IP PBXs.
Try Avaya's One-X Quick Edition. It's the first truly do-it-yourself IP PBX any BIZ Experiences can set up in about 10 min-utes. The secret sauce is a mixture of peer-to-peer networking and Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP. They shortcut the client/server complexity of most PBXs, making installation just two steps.
Step 1: Plug one end of a Cat 5 cable into Quick Edition's Ethernet switch or other port on your wired network, and plug the other end into an Avaya desk set. Step 2: Rest while the phone configures itself, picks an IP address, and prompts you for a station name and password. My first phone took six minutes to install; the second, less than two minutes. Schedule two minutes for each desk set you add up to the network limit of 20.
Quick Edition doesn't yet work over the Wi-Fi networks populating home offices. But most small offices are already wired, says Geoffrey Baird, Avaya's vice president of communications appliances division, and Wi-Fi support, handsets and cellular/Wi-Fi handoffs are coming in 2007. Expandable to Avaya's next-largest system via software, Quick Edition will eventually be as functional as the company's big PBXs.
It already sports a full menu of intra-mural calling features like automated phone attendant, individual and corporate phone books, desktop voice mail with e-mail alerts, and call forwarding to a cell or home phone. It also works with the usual premium services from Baby Bells and a growing list of VoIP providers found on Avaya's website. These features don't require a manual or arcane code combinations to configure. Just punch your phone's well-labeled buttons until the right context-sensitive menu pops up on its big LCD.
You should be able to find a two-phone Quick Edition starter kit for about $1,000 from most retail and e-tail phone providers.
