I'm looking for a decent option to organize freelance projects.

Some goals:

1. Reduce the total number of programs and apps I need to organize projects and data.
2. Securely communicate with individual clients with complete separation between client projects.
3. Store all relevant data including secure info, account access, files, notes, etc
4. Ease of use for clients with as painless onboarding as possible.
5. Robust archiving and backing up of project data.

Some typical features I don't really need:

1. Due dates and calendaring stuff. It's rare to deal with deadlines and due dates, I don't want to waste UI on date based tools.
2. Invoicing, estimates, payments.
3. Conferencing, video chat, screen share, etc.

To list specific features, I'll describe a typical project life cycle.

1. New client comes onboard. I need to start gathering information. This could be described as CRM type stuff. Record the client, their details, start a new project file, etc. We are typically communicating over email, but it's important early on to establish secure communication before we start sharing passwords and so forth.

2. Project scoping. We start defining the project, what needs to be done, project specs or standards, whatever. This may involve both text and files. You might even describe this as wiki-like and could be written by both the client and myself collaboratively. Often it will just be them sending me Word files and PDFs, mockups, etc.

3. Store secure information. I need passwords, FTP, SSH, key files, maybe even credit card info. While most every online tool will be over HTTPS, they are rarely "trust no one". All I have to do is get on live chat or something, and within a couple seconds the tech is inside my account browsing around my data. I've even asked a couple tools I use, if they are safe to store passwords and credit cards, and they said no.

4. Finally the project starts and I begin work. Organizing work into sub projects and tasks and subtasks is perfectly fine, using typical styles found in today's software. Chat, inline file uploads that remain contextual, file upload revisions, task assigning, etc. I don't have a preference for whether it's list style or kanban style or whatever. What IS important is that it's easy for myself and clients to stay on top of everything.
   What I find often happens is there is too much activity, thus too much notification. So and so commented, so and so uploaded file, so and so commented on uploaded file. You being to lose track on what activity is important. For example someone commenting on a file may or may not be a brand new task. "I like this logo, but make it green". This is an actual task, not just a comment on a file. The ability to micro-manage communications is a very difficult problem, and keeping notifications in check while also being notified of everything important.

5. File storage can get out of hand. Tools often pool all files uploaded from any context, into a single file storage, and lose all context. I'll end up with a folder with 12 different version of a logo but not really knowing which is the latest, or why it was uploaded in the first place or what I was supposed to do with the file etc. For example "here is the new header image for XY page". Typically people can upload a file, but the file storage system doesn't keep track that the file was meant for that purpose, or connected to a task.

6. Public verses private notes. I do my own time tracking, I also need to keep notes about my work and research during the project. Not everything should be visible to the client. I may want to store code snippets or tools, keep a sideline commentary for myself, etc. There is very much a public and private world during a project. And this needs to be very easy to distinguish in the interface. I need a private notes section connected to tasks or files, private files, private documents/wiki/pages whatever.

7. Sharing. I need to be able to always link a client directly to specific projects, tasks, subtasks, files, conversations etc. And to some degree, if possible, publicly share things like work progress (screenshots) mockups with other people without having to invite them in the project.

8. An easy way for the client to create tasks. I'm talking more like a ticketing system here. Something looks off, a bug is found, they can quickly just shoot an email or something and it auto-generates a task in the project.
   Keep in mind here that one client may have many projects, new and old or archived projects etc. So sending in a "ticket" would be connected to the client themselves, not necessarily any particular project. I feel like if I have a good project management tool with this kind of bug reporting/ticketing, then a separate ticketing system would be unnecessary. Clients I've once worked for should be able to submit a ticket and then I can attach it to a project or not or handle as an independent issue.

The bottom line is I'm trying to find a tool that can replace needing to use 3 or 4 tools. I.e. Slack, email, OneNote, FreshDesk, CRM, Trello.

I don't need every feature of all those, I just need a general mixing of them. We can "chat" about projects, send messages and have "threads" about topics, write documents, store files, submit tickets, manage tasks and notes, and keep everything contextualized with very smart notifications and managing of activities. Store public and private information, share stuff, and be secure.

Is it too much to ask? Probably. A typical "all in one" service generally lacks one or two very important features, or is just ridiculously expensive, like add $10/m for every single person! Yeah, not as a freelancer, I don't have thousands a month to communicate with everybody!

I could do a self-hosted solution but it needs to be very robust. The whole point of consolidating services is to same time. It takes a lot of time to communicate over email, copy stuff to notes, copy notes to tasks manager, get incoming tickets, copy to tasks, save to notes, prepare my private notes into public notes to send back to client, gather files incoming from emails into file service, handle revisions manually.
Passing data all around various services takes a metric ton of time when multiplied by even a handful of clients and active projects.

I'm just looking for recommendations beyond the top google results. I know about Asana, Basecamp, Trello, etc.

Are we using IVR and voicemail greetings the same way?

Isn't IVR the interactive thing with menus and "press 1 for this" etc?

Nothing interactive about standard voicemail.

Does FreePBX have separate voicemail vs. IVR or is it all one in the same?

@dashrender said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

My original goal is basically to allow for multiple switchable voicemail greetings.

This is a weird goal - are you sure it's voicemail greetings you want to change? I though from the postings it looked like the incoming announcement is what you wanted to change.
Voicemail notices are specifically for whatever mailbox a user ends up in.. is that where you really want a simple change?

Can you give us an example of your full end goal?

Just think "25 year old system" and it makes sense.

We have a few phone numbers that the Avaya system just rolls over if line 1 is busy it rings on line 2 etc. If no one answers, just like a cell phone, you get a voicemail message, beeeeep, then someone leaves a message. Yes, we are using this simple voicemail greeting beep thing for people to leave messages for the business. There is no auto-attendant, there is no "press 1 for jane, press 3 for tech services" stuff.

So our system has ONE greeting, "hello, you've reached Troglodyte Systems Inc, we're avoiding calls right now, please leave a message and we'll paste a sticky note of it somewhere in the office that nobody will respond to, maybe. beeeep".

But the boss wants to switch to other greetings like one for the evening "hello, we went out to lunch but decided not to work any more, so we consider this after hours now. leave a message!"

Or a holiday greeting "you are calling within 3 weeks of a government sanctioned holiday, therefore we are very busy and don't want to talk to you, leave a message and our receptionist will delete it in the morning, thanks!"

All we want to do is pick a custom greeting. But now we have to literally record a new one every time we want to change it.

If I go through all the trouble of converting the whole office to VOIP, at least internally, we must have this feature at the least.

Other features we use, I would consider just as normal to have on a VOIP phone. Intercom ability, call hold, 3 way call, individual voicemail, shortcut buttons, speakerphone, caller ID, call history, etc.

I admit the more I dig in to this, the more confused I am.

I'm learning a bunch of the acronyms and trying to reason about what is a new tech and what is old tech, ITSP, PSTN, POTS, SBC, TDM, DIDs, trunks, SIP trunks, bridges. Software tools versus appliances, and what providers like voip.ms or 1-voip do.

Things easily get confusing. On one website they are comparing FreePBX to Voip.ms. But on another website a person is asking how to configure FreePBX with voip.ms as the provider. What? Are they competitors or does one provide a service and the other uses it? If I had a voip.ms account would I need FreePBX or not?

I get it that if we keep our POTS lines, then we need essentially a bridge device to convert our internal phone network to VOIP. But of course this isn't "true" VOIP since it's only internal and converts to POTS on the way out, so what good is that? Are the benefits of VOIP in this case based entirely on the features of the phones then?

My original goal is basically to allow for multiple switchable voicemail greetings. So with the VOIP internal, plus bridge appliance and POTS service, who would be controlling voicemail and inboxes? Is that what FreePBX does? Would I need the appliance AND FreePBX AND the phones and this would get the voicemail (and other) features of VOIP even if the signal still goes out over POTS? I assume FreePBX alone doesn't actually do anything, it must connect somehow to some kind of phone service.

I'm reading as much as I can and there are a few sparse diagrams here and there but I think I need some more visual tools to understand how all this fits together. Which device controls what, which is a provider and which is a bridge and what are the requirements of a basic VOIP setup? Some network diagrams of a bunch of different kinds of arrangements or topologies would be nice.

You're all saying don't bother talking to Avaya, they'll just try to sell me appliances. But then you're linking me to buying appliances anyway from Sangoma or Grandstream. Is Avaya not in this market? I really don't know who the players are, not that it matters, the prices of Sangoma and Grandstream are just fine by me.

I just need to keep studying a little, it's hard for me to work out an issue without understanding it and what each piece is responsible for. Visual learning would be good at this point cause everything else turns to acronym soup and hypotheticals.

@bnrstnr said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

Ok, so 11 phones. Do you have an onsite server with hypervisor installed?

Ya we have an R430 with a ton of unused RAM and HDD. My only beef with it is that I can't put it downstairs in the dusty pathetic little wiring closet/hole where the rest of the stuff is. It's upstairs in an office, plugged in through a little 6 port switch with all the rest of the stuff in that office.
It's been reliable enough, but not the LAN connection I would like it to have.

Setup and learning curve are important but not the main issue.

The main issue is just that it runs reliably. We do have a good server running Zen already.

@scottalanmiller said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

If we can get new phones, better service, better controller, and keep our current phone service (for time being only with option of upgrading), for less than around $3000, that's doable, at least worth pitching to boss and landlord.

Your cost is all in the phones (and the bridge.) A cheap bridge is like $100 maybe? Mabye Jared has bought one recently that he would recommend. It's not a large item. How many POTS lines does it need to handle?

All of the real cost is the desk phones. These range from super cheap (under $40) to around $150 at the top end that you would ever consider. Most people buy somewhere in the middle. Obviously these add up quickly, but they are a one time cost and visibly replace ancient phones on desks.

We would need 8 phones for people but at least 3 more for around the office. One as a cordless would be good.

Support for 4 lines, though only 2 are main voice lines, another is fax. 2 line phones would be sufficient for most of us I think.

@scottalanmiller said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

I'm looking for the least intrusive and least expensive way to just bring an improvement to phone system without a whole infrastructure update.

Ah, that's the difference. I'm looking for "the list intrusive and least expensive way to just bring an improvement to the phone system"... I'm not ruling out the simplest and best options. You are ruling out (or casually thinking you want to avoid) the easiest solution if it includes an infrastructure update. But why? If that is the cheapest and easiest option, why not take the path of best business value?

Ok let me start over here.

All the phones are near computers but offices are wired with single rj-45 and single rj-11. Switch is full, no PoE, no QoS, no vLANs. I can certainly upgrade all this to support a new phone system, it just has to fit in budget too.

If we can get new phones, better service, better controller, and keep our current phone service (for time being only with option of upgrading), for less than around $3000, that's doable, at least worth pitching to boss and landlord.

I want least amount of management needed by myself, it's all about stability and uptime. Ease of use for the people here, who are quite non-technical.

@jaredbusch said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@coliver said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@mike-davis said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

since they are an ecommerce, they do make a lot of outgoing calls to customers long distance.

wait, what? You're eCommerce business and your internet isn't reliable and you don't have a second connection? That doesn't seem to fit.

Hopefully they are hosting their site.

I hope they are not hosting it and pay a provider to do so.

$1670/month to host it in fact. I outsource as much as possible.

@jaredbusch said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

Handset costs are not relevant here. His problem is bad internet service.

Bad internet service = no SIP

But as I said, the cost of POTS versus SIP needs calculated. Once you know that, then you can determine how expensive you can afford to go on your internet costs to get good service and still reduce your monthly spend.

Then you can look at handset options and determine a cost for that.

And then you can calculate and RoI for the project.

ISP isn't THAT bad, they are the only option in town, our one cable provider. We have a 50/5 connection.

What I mean by unreliable are just normal things. Fairly regular outages due to storms, fires, accidents, line upgrades. Plus we've had like 5 router blowouts over the years which leave us offline for a couple hours. We had critters chew through lines once which was a full day outage.

Just knowing the temperament of the owners if some newfangled "internety" phone thing goes down, where the "old stuff" would have still been functioning, my job would probably be on the line. It's barbaric I know. But imagine you are the boss and one Monday morning the internet doesn't work, so you pick up the phone to call your IT guy, but the phones don't work either! I wouldn't want to be anybody in the office at that time.

By the way there are a lot of things at play here. We're in a leased commercial building, the landlord will have a say in how much infrastructure we can hack up.
The dealer says for some of their options we'd have to replace the phone jacks for example, landlord probably wouldn't like that.
It's their system. We only want better voicemail, it's not a complex need here, but we are used to the fancier phones, intercom system etc.

I'm looking for the least intrusive and least expensive way to just bring an improvement to phone system without a whole infrastructure update.

@scottalanmiller said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@scottalanmiller said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

... the controller still functions externally over existing phone lines (since our ISP is spotty, no internet phones)

There is a standard bridging component for that that is dirt cheap. You don't base PBX decisions around that. I understand why your current ISP doesn't make VoIP on the WAN an option, but that shouldn't influence anything here.

The boss makes the decisions, they don't want internet phones.

I didn't argue with that. I'm telling you that the Avaya guy is preying on you.

That's a pretty drastic suggestion on such a small potential client. So far she has done nothing but show me their options. Doesn't mean I have to buy anything.

@scottalanmiller said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

@guyinpv said in Small office phone setup, looking for improvements...:

... the controller still functions externally over existing phone lines (since our ISP is spotty, no internet phones)

There is a standard bridging component for that that is dirt cheap. You don't base PBX decisions around that. I understand why your current ISP doesn't make VoIP on the WAN an option, but that shouldn't influence anything here.

The boss makes the decisions, they don't want internet phones.
Not my ISP that doesn't make VoIP on the WAN an option, that's just what the dealer suggested, there is no need to use ISP for external stuff.

@scottalanmiller
They know stuff and I don't.

I've talked with Avaya. On this particular setup you can only have one greeting per voicemail box. It's just old.

I also talked with a dealer and their suggestion is to go to a VOIP system that basically uses IP phones on the internal network but the controller still functions externally over existing phone lines (since our ISP is spotty, no internet phones)

We have a building equipped with an old Avaya Partner ACS system and voicemail module 509. So the phones are multi-line RJ-11 systems.

The main feature the boss is clamoring for is to have multiple selectable voicemail greetings we can switch between.

Based on my research so far, there really isn't much left in the market of RJ-11 phone systems, everything has gone VOIP to some degree.

And of course they don't want to spend any money or have to replace all our phones etc etc. I also don't want to be reliant on our local cable company because downtime is not uncommon here.

Our local telco is also about to raise prices on long distance fairly significantly and since they are an ecommerce, they do make a lot of outgoing calls to customers long distance. It amounts to hundreds of dollars a month.

One of the options we talked about is to get an extra cell phone added to their Verizon plan and use the cell phone for outgoing long distance calls. The problem is being locked in to the plan, into a phone number we'll want to keep around forever, and inconvenience of sharing one phone around the office to make calls out on, etc.

Another option is to get some kind of internet phone account that can be used with headsets or something, and make calls over the internet at their employee workstations.

Regarding the voicemail issue, I haven't the foggiest idea how to get this feature while keeping all our current hardware.

All that said, I have two main goals with one main requirement:

1. Multiple selectable voicemail messages the company can choose between (day message, night message, holiday message, etc etc)
2. Reduce our long distance costs.
   Requirement: Champagne taste on a beer budget. Unreliable internet access, Avaya RJ-11 phones. Rental building, we can't necessarily redo their entire phone infrastructure in any permanent way.

Ideas?

In the web development world, I'm still searching for an adequate workflow for working on other peoples' websites.

In other words, I need to turn any website, hosted on any host, with any number of server configurations, into a dev/staging environment somewhere else for dev/testing. Then convert that back into the live site, and include backups along the way.
But beyond that I need to often download the dev/staging site to my local machine so that local development IDEs can work on the source code better. But the files have to continue to be updated on the staging site. Typically over FTP still.
But not only that, other people might also need to work on staging, so we don't want to overwrite each other. So what is this? Some kind of constant Git-like code merging has to happen at all times.

This kind of workflow is easy enough when you just work on your own site and you picked the host and you run the right tools and software and plugins or whatever. But it absolutely sucks when every job is a different host and different setup and different sized sites. One site might have a gig in pictures. It's not necessary to pull those down anywhere, but sometimes it kinda is.
And other times the client continues updating the live site even if it takes days or weeks to develop the new stuff, and you don't want to copy back the dev work and overwrite the new stuff on the live site!

There are so many little gotchas it's unbelievable, and very hard to make all this work, especially in an automated way. Sometimes it takes me hours to set up a proper dev environment and get all the files copied over. Then you deal with https issues, licensing of plugins that don't want to work on other domains, environment configurations that might have to change for localhost or staging servers but can't be copied back to live. The list goes on and on.

Some kind of ultimate site development workflow tool would be on my wishlist. And it can't involve demanding I move to different hosts, use different CMSes, etc. It has to work around whatever limits might be there.

Artificial intelligence searches!

When a new ticket is submitted, the system should compare it against every other ticket and present to the ticket owner/assigned/whatever a list of other tickets where the problem was similar.

Tickets should not be considered just a list of old problems, but also a list of solutions and how they were done. Almost like a self-building KB. As such, within permissions of who can see what, the system should make an attempt to suggest "this problem is kinda like that one or that one or that one."

I also second the idea of being able to store lots of other meta data, notes, files, whatever. If I want to attached to a user something like a login to a service they use, that should be possible, and secure, so the next time they make a ticket, I don't have to store this data in some other system, or ask them for it over and over.

Storing files within the ticket is nice, but the system should collect all these files and keep them attached to the user, making it easier to browse them and search.

I really really wanted to get a Ubiquiti product, but they aren't sold locally and I didn't have a spare in the office.

Ended up with this monster http://www.tp-link.com/us/products/details/cat-5506_Archer-C5400.html

That's not the price I paid though, through twist of fate, I got a price match on a leaser model that wasn't in stock so they gave me this one.

I avoided a Netgear router cause I bought a decent one for home and had nothing but problems for months. Just buggy software or firmware or I don't know what, don't like it.

Also avoided Linksys/Cisco stuff. I hate their UIs and I do have a pile of dead Linksys stuff at home.

Never used TP-Link, so what the hay, I'll try it. The thing will blow up next year anyway like all the rest! But already I can say the UI is much better. My old Linksys AC1200 didn't even tell me what my external IP was. Everything was like for babies or something, never giving me the technical details. But this Tp-link actually shows me everything I need. Feels more advanced.

I don't disagree but I also don't think there is any reason to poopoo A+.

The books you go through to study are good all around computer nerd knowledge, even if it is connectors and driver installations and BIOS edits and whatever. Even though you consider it super duper extra "basic" knowledge, it's actually quite difficult generalist knowledge. Sure there is some almost-useless "trivia" questions to memorize, but still, you won't pass the test without serious study and cramming. Even having a few years as a bench tech won't help a terrible lot when you still need to prepare for the obscure trivia questions.

Here is my point, if someone is a computer nerd, likes computers, likes working with them, wants to work with them in some capacity or another, just take the darn thing! It's not that terribly expensive and it will give you experience in technical test taking.

I am a horrible test taker. I second guess myself constantly and am always freaking out about "trick" questions like the question is trying to confuse me or something. I actually failed part of my A+ when I first took it in like 2001. I didn't consider it "easy" by any stretch, even after cramming for weeks. Either I'm a bonehead, or I'm just that bad at test taking!

My take is that A+ might be on the "low end" of the spectrum, but there is nothing whatsoever wrong with taking it. You'll have fun stuff to study if you like computers, you'll get one cert rolling, experience taking a test, and it doesn't cost much.

I'm happy I have mine, the whole thing was a good experience and there wasn't anything else to help show knowledge for bench work (computer repair). So A+ might not be a true "IT" cert, certainly computer repair and bench work is often on the path to IT and is where a lot of people get their start. Heck, some even just stay there. The place where I got my first job in PC repair is still in business, a friend of mine, still fixing computers to this day.

Why am I not surprised?

LAN ports on router are completely dead. Lightning or something on the previous Friday (when I wasn't here of course).
So I try to get a few people online using a Verizon passport thingy. One computer got on but another one I plugged in a USB wireless stick (brand new) and after it was just about to connect, BSOD. BSOD every time the USB is plugged in.

I give up on that and head to Best Buy. That's a 10 minute drive, I show up, and they are still closed for another hour.
Staples is closed.
The only one open is OfficeMax. I head there.

I pick out a router and bring the empty box to the counter, but nobody is doing checkout. I wait for their one employee to come over from the printing station, only to find the box I picked is not in stock. I go back and pick a different router, now someone is in front of me. I wait some more. And that one is out of stock too.

Well finally they go in the back to see what the crap they DO have in stock, and luckily they had a newer model and gave me a price match to the one I wanted.

I head back to the office and start installing and all that, then find the port on the switch also blew out. And now our finance person is trying to remote in and can't.

So I sort out a port to use (our switch is completely used up so somebody has to get unplugged).
Then I fix finance computer.
Then I start getting others online and letting the new network through the firewalls.
Then I gotta fix the BSOD computer.

Now finally, three hours after getting here, we're finally online, but looks like I'll be replacing our switch next.

And just how am I supposed to prevent lightning strikes through the network?

Freaking Mondays!