 Tom here from Lawrence Systems, and I'm assuming at the beginning of this video that the debate has already been had, and if you wanna watch a video about that debate of cloud versus on-prem systems, I have a video I'll link to. This is making the assumption you have decided to go with an on-prem system, and I wanted to talk about the business process by which we follow to get these deployed to clients and how we sell these systems. If you're looking for more technical and deep dive into FreePBX, which is the system we're going to be using here, I'll leave a link to the video in that, or of course, Chris from Crosstalk Solutions, I'll give him a shout out like I did in the last video. It's got a lot of great tutorials on it. He's much more knowledgeable than me. But let's talk about the business process, how we deploy phone systems, and like I said, this is already assuming that the argument has been won and the cloud system wasn't the right fit for that particular client. Before we dive into these details, let's first. If you'd like to learn more about me and my company, head over to larnesystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor-free and thank you to everyone who already has, there is a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated. If you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel, check out the affiliate links down below. They're in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store. We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out, well, randomly. So check back frequently. And finally, our forums, forums.larnesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel. Now, back to our content. Let's start with the hardware list. This is a Sangoma S505 phone. This is a Yealink W60B base station and this is a Yealink W56H phone. They're getting, actually, I believe a few of these Yealink phones, because they wanted some coreless. These are kind of the go-tos that I've been happy with and I know someone's gonna start hammering out what about an insert name of their favorite brand of phone. I don't know, I've been using Sangoma. They've always worked. I don't have a lot of experience with every imaginable phone system out there. These are at least ones I have tested, deployed in the field and been deploying for a long time. Hence, my endorsement of them is based on they don't fail, they've been really, really solid and we've done quite a few deployments with these. Now, the Switch we're using is a Unify 24-port PoE Switch. It powers these phones perfectly fine, but insert whatever Switch makes you happy. The little piece of hardware hiding over here, though, is an interesting add-on and this is the Cyber Data SIP Paging Adapter. And this is because this particular client is manufacturing. Their manufacturing place requires people to yell over a PA system. So what paging that is in like Beeper Pager, like the really old stuff, if you're old enough to know what those are, this is more the PA system that they have so someone can dial a number and say, hey, so-and-so and it'll cover their whole warehouse for all their different PA systems are and broadcast out. This is an important piece of integration and when you go out there and talk to these clients, you have to make sure you make a list of everything they need. Now, this is replacing an existing phone system so the needs are actually just being copied off their existing phone system and then you ask the future question of what else would you like to have and they have zero cordless phones so we are adding one there. The system we're going with is a PBX Exact 40 which is right here. Now, we have been using the same Gomez combination with free PBX for quite a while. I believe I may have just turned that thing off on accident. Hopefully it doesn't cause any more problems because this system is actively, well, it may not be at this moment, hopefully being programmed for setup. So this is why I walk through the process. First, we went through the client, talked to them, made a determined that we're going to sell it on-prem system. Second, we match up all of their extensions and everything else. So this is just done with a spreadsheet. Third, we flowchart out how their system works now. If that's the way the client wants it to continue working, I bring that up because sometimes they're used to it just ringing right into a person because it always has. Then you ask them, would it be better if it came and landed on like an IVR message of thank you for calling such and such company and then pointed people the right direction because sometimes their older phone system would either A, never set up that way or in the case of this system that was put in in the 90s that still is functioning 20 years later, kind of barely functioning because they had some problems with it. There wasn't really an option given to them. It's always been that way since the last 20 years of them working there. That being said, once you make those determinations that's kind of just a flow chart we put together to make sure we're aligned prior to all the programming. This is all the pre-work that's really important for doing this. Now, the pre-work means you should have all their extensions, you should have this kind of mapped out because that's when you start the programming process not before. I can't kind of partially set it up and set it up on-site. Our process for this is going to be, and I believe we're already at the point where there's a temporary number assigned to this particular Sangoma box and we make sure everything works in here. We make sure the recordings are right. If we have to, we have people that can do the voiceover part unless someone in their company wants to do it. Sometimes people like to hear voices from inside their company with the IVR system provided they go that way. But we go through all the testing, label everything, make sure every phone rings prior to deployment. And back to one of the reasons we go with the Sangoma PBXX systems is if there's ever a problem. Phone systems are still in 2020 a critical piece of technology for people. They will be very angry at you if it does not work properly, if it requires a lot of learning curves. So that's one of the reasons our preference is always to match whatever existing system they have in terms of functionality unless they ask for changes because companies are weird and even though I may have an opinion that something should be done in a different way, they may not and you want to be, is forthcoming as possible and making sure that it works for them or you have to deal with supporting it. And with the Sangoma PBXXX systems we can easily get a good warranty that we purchase on these because someone say, well, can I save a few dollars building it myself? Of course you can. And if there's a problem as long as you're willing to support whatever you built, that's great. I like the PBXXX systems because I know I can get another one just like it right off the shelf either depending on the type of problem they may be having with the system pull the drive out, put it in there or restore from the last backup whichever methodology is better. I know that having a matching system makes that relatively easy to do but back over to the deployment and hardware. Once this has all been tested here at my office and that's actually why this laptop is connected and there's a little neck eight box sitting right here which part of that testing includes us rebuilding it to be exactly as their network is. So we figure out what their network range is here and we lab it out just like this so it matches. So all the IPs are assigned everything's been pre-configured to match the way it will go into their network. That way on the day of deployment we're spending as little time as possible with the client. Cause, well, it's just easier and less expensive from all my techs to work here and get everything out. Plus some of these we do this same setup and then deploy it for people remotely. So we'll box this up and mail it to their internal IT team. So that's another thing we'll do. We'll do some of the network engineering here. We'll do some of the programming here. We've built out an entire larger scale networks here. Now a few things someone will ask. Yes, our preference is provided they have managed switches on there to put the LLDP med settings in so things go to a separate network because these do have pass-through and you want the phones on one network so you can easier control things. That is the preferred method. Would we do that absolutely every time? All or nothing? No, once again, we're kind of a custom company that works with whatever the methodology the client wants or in our decision we do it the way we want but sometimes we have to work within the client's parameters. Back to the deployment though. Once all this is done, we get it set up at their office. Now, part of the sales and we'll bring up this one more time was whether or not they had the infrastructure support this because frequently, especially with us in the local companies and manufacturing that we're doing with it's going to be a lot of just plain old telephone lines as in they do not have network jacks. So it was easy for any of these phones that we're going to be sitting next to a computer because we could just, well, use the path-through and install this PoE switch which actually this is one of the upsells for the client was not just the phone system but a PoE switch. We didn't have to plug in a bunch of adapters. Second, any wiring drops need to be added because well, back to manufacturing sometimes there are areas like in the back area where there are no computers or just a phone hanging on a wall because that's the way it's always been. And we pitched them on the cordless but also suggested a couple extra drops. So there's an infrastructure component to this or sometimes they want a lot of drops added because it's part of another project but you got to kind of calculate that out when you're putting things in and things like the paging adapter, the cyber data paging adapter, the nice thing is they have schematics. We took pictures of the exact paging system they have and made sure that we had a way to wire that in. So once again, we can't really test this as much. We can do some basic testing with the line out on it. That'll be kind of a day of testing but nonetheless it's still part of the testing process. Now, after all that's done then we put all the phones on the desk. So that day comes before. By the way, we still have only assigned a temporary phone number that I have and we use VoIPMS, I'll link to a video about that. We've assigned a temporary number that we've tested here and then we get it over to their office and we let them play with it with the temporary number if they want to, if they require any training. The reason doing all this beforehand and leaving this phone next to their old phone system is because when the porting process happens pretty straightforward to do porting, you get a copy of their old bill, you have to make sure everything matches. So the losing carrier versus the gaining carrier as in who is the number being transferred from to the inbound carrier, make sure all those details match, you file the reporting and then sometimes they reject it for reasons unknown and that's sometimes just the pain of dealing with AT&T. I will notoriously say they have been one of the most challenging companies to port things from because of being AT&T. But that means you may not know exactly when the porting is going to happen and when their new phone system will acquire and automatically work with everything. So this is why we have all the testing done. We don't want to do it day of because we don't know when that day of is. So whenever the port order becomes accepted, there's usually a couple of day dwell from, okay, we've accepted it and it's going to happen on like Thursday, but they don't necessarily give you a time on Thursday which also means sometime on Thursday, the old phone system will stop ringing and the new one will. Generally seems to do it sometime during the night but you don't know that for certain. Therefore, we have everything ringing and what we do is work with the client to have everything in place. Then the phones ring simultaneously, so to speak. Or I've seen them ring both at the same time. Doesn't usually work that way. But then once everything is ringing on the new phone system, we know it's time to disconnect the phones and we'll even tell the client, just you can just get rid of the old phone on your desk and we'll come back and collect it later. And this kind of minimizes the amount of stops we have to make at the client's office because well, they can pull an old phone off their desk and just put them in a pile for us to collect for recycling because there's really no value in those old phone systems other than rarely you can find a couple of them on eBay for old parts. But that kind of would conclude the process. So just to kind of recap all of this, it's figure out whether or not they need cloud versus on-prem. And in this case, on-prem made a lot more sense for this particular company because of recurring costs and they didn't mind putting a little capital up front. Then we do all the testing here. We assign a temporary number, make sure it matches their call in method whether it's IVR or ring directly to an extension, do all the testing and make sure all of this works. Then we deploy it at the client. And it's also as an opportunity because if you put something on the wrong desk, you'll know then because you're testing all of them. And it's easy to switch everything around before everything goes into production. It's real aggravation when things are in production. So you run through the test, you test all the extensions on there, you go through a quick training session with the client. This is all being done before the phone system is live so it's a lot better. And then finally, both phones on the desk, the old phone or new one, you do the porting whenever the porting number comes on, boom, we get rid of the old phone because these phones ring and the old phones stop ringing and then we can even schedule a time to come in if they want the old system. Some of those old systems are rather large and bulky and some people can just get that off the wall because we just don't want to look at it anymore and we'll do a wiring cleanup at that point because maybe they want it done, maybe they don't, but we'll ask them at that point in time whether or not they want the wiring cleaned up. So that's really it. It's actually not as complicated as you might think. One thing I want to be very clear is why we do all this testing. And I said at the beginning of the video, phones are still a critical part of infrastructure for many, many companies. That's just how they're used to doing things, especially in the manufacturing world, as much as email has an important role to play, digital communications is still not the primary method. Maybe these companies, they're used to answering the phone, they have a parts counter. This is just the way a lot of things are still happening, maybe in the future it'll change, but for now, this is why you have to be very confident in the process. This is why all these testing procedures, you just don't do a rip and replace and drop it in and try to do it on like the day of the port over because no one likes disruptions, but this methodology will give you the fewest amount of disruptions to their work, allow you to do the training and ask questions and occasionally change things around when they're doing the test number because they start thinking about it then. And it's great to get all that out of the way and only until then do we kick off the porting process. Hopefully this was helpful and that is the process by which we've been doing this and putting phone systems in. And all right, thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. 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