I work for a rural electric cooperative in Southeastern Ohio that is looking to move from Tribox CE to FreePBX. Currently all trunks terminate via SIP, either from our VOIP provider for inbound 800 server and outbound long distance, or our IVR system for local. The IVR is a cooperative industry specific IVR that interfaces with our customer information system. The connection to the IVR with the current system is via 2 SIP trunks, one for inbound, the other for outbound. There is currently no other interaction between the 2 system. We would however like to some FXO/FXS for faxing, as those currently handled outside the system. As for extensions we around 60 extensions mostly consisting of various Polycom phones, a few softphones, an overhead paging system, and a couple Snom DECT cordless phones. It is our preference to continue using the end points we already own. We do have small call center with 2 queues and about 5 agents. All queue members are recorded in addition to about 10 other employees, basically any employee that deals with customers have their calls recorded.
As for things we want to change on the new system. The ability to generate and manipulate reports is a big requirement. There are also a couple caveats we experience with recording messages on our IVR system (I’ll be happy to go into more detail for anyone that would like). We also require some form of redundancy. Ideally we want a high availability pair with automatic fail over, but manual switchover is acceptable as long as the servers stay in sync.
The reasons we are looking for someone else to install and support the system is do to myself being a one man IT department. As much as I want to dive into asterisk and freepbx, my responsibilities just don’t allow me to spend enough time with it for me for comfortable supporting the system alone. My apologizes for the long post, but I wanted to provide as much information as possible.