Avaya IP Office is a communications solution for small and medium-size businesses. It is available in the cloud, on premise or hybrid deployments are all supported with IP Office along with the ability to migrate from one to the other. The included Avaya Equinox experience provides a single app for voice, video, messaging, conferencing and calendar and keeps employees productive on any device, from any location.
$82
per user/per month
GoTo Connect
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
GoToConnect, from GoTo, is a cloud-based business phone system with built-in web-based video conferencing solutions. It includes features such as call analytics, call recording, softphone, fax to email, voicemail to email, and desktop integration.
Avaya IP Office was for us a complicated and inflexible on-prem solution. It could be made to do a great many things similar to GoTo, however it was not flexible and scalable in the same way as GoTo, which is to be expected of a cloud solution. In particular, as we aimed to …
Some of our offices had dedicated, on-premise Avaya PBX before we moved to GoToConnect. I found Avaya difficult to configure, troubleshoot and maintain. That is all a thing of the past now that we are on GoToConnect. I would never go back to a traditional phone system after …
So it's sold and targeted at small and medium enterprises, which is pretty perfect. So it maxes out at 2000 phones. You're never going to go bigger than that. It's probably by price, one of the cheapest phone systems out there. It fits really well in a dentist's office and a small medical office. It fits well in retail stores that are not part of a chain. So, independent shops, the general small business category, if it's a brand that's only in your neighborhood, that's one of the few spots where you can still sell an on-premise phone system, is for those types of folks. I've always recommended it to small businesses. I've got some family members, too, who have these in their own small businesses by my recommendation, and they love them. And I'm going to use the word cheap, the system's not cheap, but the pricing is pretty wildly low in a good way. So it's a stable machine. My recommended use cases are usually for small businesses. I would not put it anywhere that needs high availability, though. That's that.
It is absolutely perfect for flexible hybrid teams that want to combine daily calls, texts, and video meetings without needing a dedicated IT person. However, I would completely skip this software if you run a massive outbound call center because the system reporting is just way too basic right now.
So my favorite thing that it does well is the mobile client. It's very easy to use to access my contacts as if I'm sitting at my desk in the office. I can send text messages to other parties within my department as well. So that's the best thing. Staying in touch even though I'm not sitting at my desk.
Call reports: You can see and review calls received from the first receptor until the last who attend this call, also you can review all calls make and received by your teams
Voicemail options: Availability to create some voicemail with multiple receptors
Devices option: with several options to change on your devices
Audio library: Multiple option to create your own audio library with or without ambien music
Rush for updates. At times an updated will fix one problem, and inadvertently create another. However with due diligence from your business partner (Tektivity) patches are tested before being rolled out in production environments.
Part itemization. If you purchase a new system, the power cord does not come with the unit, that is a separate part. Very minor in the grand scheme of things but as a reseller and a customer still somewhat annoying.
Large convoluted organization. As a user trying to navigate the AVAYA website, and track down information can be daunting. Even calling support can be challenging, you never know if your call will be routed to India, Brazil, or Denver. That is why the relationship with Tektivity is so important. You can leverage your business partner to get the answers you need so you can spend your time tackling issues that need your attention.
Oddly enough I have been impressed with the IP Office platform so much that I have integrated one into my home. My wife was not happy with it initially but once she started using it she was very happy with the results. It helped that I programmed it to work just like a home phone but with features and options that I can utilize remotely. I would be more than happy to put an AVAYA IP Office against any other phone system on the market, and let you be the judge.
They are knocking it out of the park on all fronts. I love the service and support I am receiving and have no complaints. If they raised their prices substantially I would reconsider but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. They would have to mess up something consistently moving forward to make me want to move
Avaya IP Office is a great system that is somewhat affordable for most SMB's. However, In our experience, Avaya IP Office has a tendency to shelve some of the license as you upgrade the software release on the PBX switch without giving back any comparable license to compensate. The Voicemail Pro license is quite expensive and most of the functionality that most business needs are not covered in the standard voicemail offering.
Overall, it's a decent product for the price. It has the basic features our company needed when it was brand new and was not overly difficult to set up. As we've grown, it's become increasingly difficult to build out the features we want to implement within the PBX, and customer support can be less than helpful. Many of the more advanced features (dial plans, queues, etc.) take a lot of research to understand how to implement. Some of the features we paid for weren't even available when we were attempting to set them up.
I have never experienced or heard of unplanned outages when it comes to GoTo Connect. Most of the time the unplanned outage is always local power at a site or internet service provider having an unplanned outage. GoTo's service has never failed any of our orgs yet that I know of.
There is no lag in phone calls. There is no background noise or static/fuzz. Calls are crystal clear. With other dialers and phone systems, I have experienced delays between dialogue or delays with the caller picking up the phone and then being able to hear you. We do not experience this with Go To Connect.
One of the MOST challenging things in tech support is that some of the offshore agents "don't speak Texan/English", and are really hard to understand. GoTo Connect's support is usually someone who is VERY easy to understand their US/English, and are very helpful. In dozens of interactions for our business & our clients, we've only had a few tickets that couldn't be resolved on the first call
The training videos could be more in-depth. This would help our user base so that they can feel impowered to look up information that they need without having to ask our admins every time they have a question about the system. Online training videos are also inferior to an actual person explaining systems.
It was great. Provisioning the phones was the trickiest part, but once we figured that out, actually setting up users, lines, dial plans, and everything like that was really easy. We were easily able to provision phones, ship them out to all our outside locations, and make changes from the home office.
Much better feature set with Avaya IP Office, and I really feel you're getting feature-rich telephony for a well priced switch. The system is very adaptable and a much better fit than legacy key systems and cloud-based UCaaS solutions competing in the same market. With the Avaya brand behind the system, there is also a form of working with a Trusted partner with many years in the UC space.
Go-To was the more cost-effective option between these. They also had the closest alignment to our goals and what we needed for our company without going overboard. We are happy with our decision and will continue to recommend Go-To.
Its not readily apparent to me, other than cost, where you would run into any issues with larger scale deployments. When we went live on the product, the Jive team was always willing to do mass updates for us on our extensions, users, etc. in the system, so we didn't have to do too much manual one-by-one updates.
Cost Savings have been realized from reducing hardware .
We are all able to collaborate remotely and it has been seamless and easy to setup.
I'm able to pull reports, i wish there was improvement on the data analysis side. It has gotten better since LogMeIn, but something is a miss and can be improved.
