new phone system, need advice

[speck]

I'm in the middle of re-installing, an older Toshiba strata dk40i, and the boss came to me, and said she wants some very advanced features, that the system just wont do, and some of it, that it will do, will require pricey upgrades.

i was looking into asterisk and free-PBX, but 3cx has caught my attention now, so I'm debating between 3cx, asterisk, and just using Cisco call manager

ill have 15 7965g, 5 7925g, and no more than 5-10 users running soft phone software on their blackberry's or various smart-phones.

I'm a bit lost on what hardware i need to put in the server

I'm planning on purchasing another dell PowerEdge 2850 with dual 3.6ghz dual core Xeon's, and plenty of memory, running server 2003 enterprise (all our servers run this).

i have VoIP service from Nuvox, over a T1 Integrated access solution, with a Cisco 2431-8fxs, what id LIKE, to have, is some type of hardware card, that i can run the amphenol from the Cisco, to the telco 66 block, cross connect to my 66 block so the lines i want for the phone system are in the order i want, and the lines for my fax and alarm are where i want them, and then run an amphenol off of my 66 block, back down to my phone server. we also will have a block of 20 did's from Nuvox, that ill need to hook into the server as well

ill be using a dell 3424p switch to run the phones off of. and the server will connect to it over a 2gbit fiber connection

so i need to know, what hardware card(s) i need to purchase to do this the way i want, if its possible the way i want.
we want to do an auto-attendant, ivr, and an advanced voice-mail setup. I have en e-mail server, with exchange 2003 enterprise, and will likely be putting black berry enterprise server on that as well shortly.

if anyone can help me on knowing what hardware i should purchase, and what your experiences with 3cx have been, i would greatly appreciate it

 

[pjr]

We use Polycom phones throughout which are on a par with the Ciscos for look and feel IMO and the IP650 model features 6 lines.

We have on occasion used the Snoms, but we dont have much call for more than 6 lines on a phone. The Snoms are great in that they let you configure pretty much any button to perform any feature, but I dont think the look/feel is up there with other Enterprise products such as Polycom/Cisco.

One thing I would mention is that if you are planning to configure more than one line per phone, you will have to configure each phone manually (rather than auto provisioning via DHCP) as I don't think that you can assign more than one extension per phone automatically at present (please correct me if I'm wrong)?

Paul

 

[odf]

Hello, thank you if they know how to set up or if they have the xml files for 7945 and 7975 models, which can facilitate them to me.