Just before Christmas Break, we began preparations to look at some lower cost phone system options for Penn State offices that are not at the University Park location. TNS has not historically been involved in this type of telephone work beyond a consulting role. I am trying to determine how we can deliver easily and consistently repeatable systems to run these offices. I am also trying to get us away from solutions that require an office with 20 phones to spend upwards of $30,000.
I am pretty excited about this project since it is a break from the constant maintenance upgrade cycle that I have been living with for nearly four years. We have finally started to slow down on upgrades since we are now catching up the University Park systems to currently supportable versions. Logistically, these upgrades have been challenging. After all, with 15,000 active devices in 300 buildings, including highly available departments like Police Services and the University Park Airport, tracking the moving pieces keeps us on our toes. The downside to these projects is that from a technical nerd angle, upgrades are fairly boring due to the requirement that we not implement new features at the time to streamline troubleshooting. On our scale, it only makes sense, but where is the fun in playing it safe?
This new small location PBX project gives me a sandbox that I plan to use. I will be attending a training at the end of this month for Asterisk, which is an open-source telecommunication platform that we haven't used in production here at TNS. Bill Simon on the other hand uses it at home as you can see from his blog where he talks about all this fun tinkering type stuff. See that Bill, I hope we get you involved in this stuff and I am trying to blog again.
So what am I trying to do?
- Figure out how to make this software work for our needs.
- Build a configuration template that could allow us to just drop one of these systems in an office that already has network facilities.
- Offer some telephone functionality that is perhaps a little newer than "Mr Watson come here I want you".
- Save Penn State some money overall by leveraging our in-house telecomm knowledge.
We are very early in our planning and testing, so who knows exactly what we will have in the end. That in a nutshell is the fun part.
