Modeblue

I’ve been in Germany this week installing a new branch office.  The phone system is to be the very capable IP Office 500 from Avaya – which is great for branch offices as its pretty cheap and remotely configurable, and has the capability for small community networking across the VPN.

A couple of things caught me out on this install:

Licensing:  I wont go into all the licensing details, because there is plenty of that info all over the web.  Suffice to say that the new IPO500 switch requires a license for most of the good features, the one that jumps out is SCN (Small Community Networking) – you need a license for this on each of the community switches.  But if you want the key feature of inter office dialling, but dont want to splash out and get the searchable database, you can just set up internal lines and shortcodes to route the calls around your network.

Software: The unit ships with a test version of the software – which can catch you out if, like me, you are used to receiving configured units.  Download the Admin software from Avaya Support, install onto a Windows machine, then in manager, select File / Advanced / Upgrade IP Office.

BRI Daughter Cards:  It urns out that Dual = 4 and Quad = 8.  Confusing, but get it wrong and you could end up with 4 lines instead of 8!  (Dual/ Quad is the number of cables with 2 lines per cable.  Rookie mistake when you think about it).