@scottalanmiller said:

MediaWiki is the defacto choice here. Never had a speed issue. It's fast and easy to manage. If MySQL is a concern the pmWiki is good and only uses the file system.

Cool I'll probably stick with it for now.

@ajstringham Let me get back to you with the count.

Let me say first that our current phone system has not backup DR solution - other than call the vendor. If the Inter-Tel 5000 dies, I grab my cell phone and call the vendor. They grab a 5000 off the shelve - a hopefully current version of our call processing and drive to my site and install the new unit. This costs us nothing until we use this option.

@ajstringham said:

@dashrender That is certainly doable. I'm just thinking for failover, etc. We have people who have phones that can't go down. Ever. Others have a one-hour tolerance, two, four, etc. Higher need for little to no downtime will increase cost and complexity to varying degrees. $150/phone seems to be a bit high but it depends on what they're selling. Digium did NOT invent Elastix. It's an open-source product.

I can't tell you because they don't know. If I ask them they will of course say - we can't afford any downtime, but we know that's simply not true. It would be better to present options like

To be reasonably sure we suffer only 5 mins of downtime will cost $20k
To be reasonably sure we suffer only 1 hour of downtime will cost $12k
To be reasonably sure we suffer only 4 hour of downtime will cost $6k
etc

Then they can decide what level of risk they want.
As I said, they've already decided from a critical situation (think the surgical center) that they can use personal cell phones in case of an emergency. When it comes to patient's ability to call us, or us call them in non emergent situations, personally I think we could afford 4 hours without to much image damage. All calls could be routed to the answering service within 10 mins of the outage starting so the calls would not be simply ringing with no answer.

@ajstringham said:

How did management react to hearing a number like 25K?

They said, why are you even talking to me since we have a $6K solution from the current vendor? and no problems that we are trying to overcome.

We are using ACD to move calls around to different hunt groups as the ACD dictates. Beyond that, we have Voicemail, about 30 DIDs and a 2 operator console. The operators have a software console that show them all of the phones in the system (these two buildings) and their status. They can also use the console to send calls to those users, change the users status, etc.

We don't have a specific conference ability beyond putting one call on hold and then calling another person on a different line (though a call in type conference bridge might be nice). The ability to give console access to more people would be nice as well (inter-tel wants something like $2500-$5k for each desk).

What kind of uptime - That's a great question, one the board never seams to be able to really put into words.

I approached them many years ago with the DR plan we had at the time for our EMR. The software was installed directly on the hardware. There was no onsite copy of the installation media, backups were via Backup Exec to tape. The DR plan required that the new server be setup with Windows, a remote connection to the vendor established then they would push down the software via the remote connection (4 gigs), after which the data would be restored from tape and configured on the new server. The vendor told us our downtime would be 4 days (this was extreme, but they promised nothing less). This 4 days of course didn't start until we had the replacement server in hand.
To my utter amazement, the BOD said 4 days was tolerable as they could revert to paper during this time.

After a few 20 min failures (of which none of them were our fault so a better DR plan wouldn't have mattered), they realized that they could not live with 4 days of outage and a new Dr plan using Replay to do image based backups was approved.

OK so I tell you this story so you understand where I'm coming from. We've never experienced a phone outage before (at least not a global one) that wasn't power related, so I feel that we don't know what our tolerance for outage is.

I know we've discussed it before and the use of cell phones in cases of emergencies was deemed an acceptable solution when the main phone system is down. If we had a building failure of some time, we'd contact the carrier and have them forward all of our calls to our answering service until we were back online.

$25K is for the whole solution - drop in appliance running Digium's version of Asterisk (Digium invented Asterisk, right? so everything they do is Asterisk based) and 85+ phones and PRI port support.

The average phones appear to cost around $150/ea so that's $13K+. I might be able to reuse all of my current Inter-Tel phones though, read a little - seams possible - so that could save me around $3k.

@Minion-Queen said:

You can move to that now even if you only use it for just SharePoint.

$400 a month for something that I'll only access in house (and frankly I don't believe it will really get much use - but management wants it) I'm sure I can find a free or nearly free linux solution for this. Which is why I tried the Turnkey MediaWiki first (I'm a linux NOOB).

We already have 80+ Office Pro Plus with SA VL and Exchange with SA. In a thread on that other board I was asking if any of the O365 plans include an Onsite Exchange license, because I need to up my count for both Office and Exchange. Considering O365 version of Office allows 5 devices per user, I'll move my physicians to the new O365 licenses, covering the multiple devices they each use but I'll still need Exchange CALs for the rest.

@ajstringham We aren't looking at moving to O365 at this time. Perhaps during the next hardware refresh (OK, most likely during the next hardware refresh) we'll go that direction.

Management has the shock of replacing 40 PCs and upping our Office licenses (new ones will be either O365 E3 or Office ProPlus 365). The idea of approaching them for $2k/month forever to move now would probably get me lynched.

This is funny, but actually THANK YOU for posting it!

I'm going to be telling my users they should be replacing their home computers if they have XP. The few I've already spoken to have asked... how do I know if I have XP? My normal go to is if the start button is green, you have XP. But if they are in classic mode it will be gray, so that won't be any help.

This page will be awesome for them.

Well @texkonc told me that his MediaWiki install was slow as dirt (the one I decided to try first) so I figure I'll ask the community what they use?

I need the site mainly for hosting internal process documents, Announcements, Employee Handbook, etc.

Suggestions?

@Texkonc it's funny that you should mention it's slow... you're right, it is! though I'm not throwing much in the way of resources at it.

If I'm going to change to something else - I need to do it ASAP.

@Hubtech said:

That's the trick. If you have a high density environment, i'd do either a dedicated network to your VoIP service or get two ISP connections and a load balancer with QoS. Either way, i usually recommend QoS. If your ISP provides your SIP they can provision SIP priority on the delivery side of your pipe.

I spoke to Cox about SIP, they can provide it, but they will only do so for solutions that they have certified, and it must come over it's own connection outside of your internet connection (which in theory is fine... but you find yourself bound to that specific ISP).

I stood up a new Turnkey MediaWiki on Friday and I'm having some trouble.

I'm trying to paste our company handbook into a page. Unfortunately it's not obeying carriage returns. I pasted the text from Word into notepad first to ensure any encoding was stripped out before pasting it into the wiki page, but that does not seam to matter.

I paste something like:
3 COMPENSATION POLICIES .................................................................................. 3-1
Classifications of Employment .......................................................................... 3-1
Overtime ........................................................................................................... 3-2

and it shows up fine in edit mode, but once I save it, the lines are all merged together in a run on. I can 'fix' it by putting an additional carriage return in, but that doesn't look very good.

@NetworkNerd said:

Remember you will want 87-100Kbps of upload bandwidth per concurrent call. I can definitely understand having a tough time swallowing ISP pricing, but if it is going to ensure phone clarity,management will pay it.

What do you mean? ISP Pricing? If I'm using a SIP provider that is not my ISP, don't I simply have to ensure I leave enough available bandwidth open for incoming calls (not really sure how to do that?), Outgoing is easy to handle through QOS, but incoming? Our 6 meg pipe spends most of the day saturated because of our cloud EMR and VPN tunnels to other branches.

@ajstringham that only works for things that people tag you in, or at least where you are following the thread.

I remember this one.. I do enjoy watching Ted Talks!