Sangoma's Communications Platform, including the former Switchvox and Business Voice+ from Star2Star, is a UCaaS system, allowing users to simplify communications down to one solution delivered on-premise, on cloud, or via hybrid deployment.
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Unify Office by RingCentral, from Atos
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Unify Office is a cloud team collaboration and communications service delivered by Atos Unify in partnership with RingCentral, a market leader in UCaaS.
Really Digium Switchvox is a great product, it's more of an overall service and it's great. Starting at the phones, I think they're well engineered, from button placement to make call handling a breeze, bright status indicators and programmable keys that keep things simple, and a clear back-lite screen, to light up those late night support calls. I've watched the web management interface grow into a gorgeous, friendly, informational tool that gives me a system that can do 95% of the things my customers request. The only times I've seen it as less appropriate is when it comes to the more budget restricted. I've always believed you get what you pay for, and Digium Switch provides a lovely packaged, turnkey product, that doesn't require an expert to maintain once installed. On top of that, you're paying for the service. I can speak from experience, and countless support calls, that Digium Switchvox's support is second to none. They're efficient, intelligent, friendly, and professional, I've never had a bad experience, keep up the great work!
If you are looking for a tool for Teams to use where they can keep everything together, then this will work really well. A complete package than tools such as WhatsApp or Skype for Business when it comes to documenting handling and more polished than the likes of Slack or HipChat for the team working and communication element.
The mobile use of the platform is very powerful. To be able to answer a video call on your phone and them simply swipe when you get to your desktop to have a seamless transfer is impressive.
The simple interface makes it easy for new users. There is nothing to make them feel overwhelmed.
Keeping all the information in the threads of conversations makes it easy to find. There is also a search tool, so as long as you know what you need, you can look accross all your conversation to find the information you are looking for.
I've installed quite a few of these systems for a number of customers, and I've found a number of times having access to the second Ethernet port on some of the larger systems, and the ability to do some sort of static routing, and firewall functionality. I would love to have the ability to connect one port to the carrier's cpe router, and the other port to the customer's network.
I've worked with Voip products for a number of years, and various asterisk iterations. I'd like to see more access to the asterisk cli for troubleshooting, and/or potentially some sort of shell access.
I'd like to see the Digum Switchvox phones have vpn functionality. It would be great to deploy a field office with a pre-provisioned phone that automatically connects back to the corporate network via a secure vpn tunnel from most internet connections. Currently we either use a softphone, manually program a Cisco phone that does have the capability, or deploy an semi expensive router that support a secure tunnel. It would be much easier to sell a customer on a remote office and a fancy Digium phone, if they didn't need the extra hardware.
We would like to see the ability to break out to Group video conferencing systems. We understand that this is on its way in a software update in the near future.
I've installed, and maintained a number of different phone systems over the last few years, including nationwide level Voip service providers relying entirely on custom built Asterisk systems, to SOHO systems connected to cloud level services. So far Digium Switchvox has been one of my favorites when it comes to ease of use, customer service, and over all reliability. While there are a few things I'd like to see done a little differently, updates are released frequently with fixes, and new features.
Each of the tools above does something well. We have found that the Unify solution simply does a better job of combining all the features of the other services. \easy to start using, while remaining a powerful tool is a tricky task to pull off, but Unify have done this and they have done it well.
A shortening of timescales as information is not stuck on an internal server somewhere - we can include it as part of the thread. This also applies to updates and revisions. You automatically know which the latest revision is, as it is the most recent in the timeline.
The relative cost of implementation is low and there is a wide range of solutions for phones and clients, from software based solutions running on desktop and smartphone or quality hardware to make your desk phone a powerful tool in itself.
