Successful long lived ShoreTel on premise PBX deployment
November 30, 2015
Successful long lived ShoreTel on premise PBX deployment
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ShoreTel
ShoreTel on-premise IP PBX is used for global deployment across multiple offices in North America, EMEA, and APAC. It is also used to support employee telephony as well as client facing call centers that are geographically distributed.
- Ease of admin - in a single image deployment, all edge devices are managed from one GUI console.
- Least cost routing - though you can get quite granular on LCR, you can deploy initial LCR capabilities quite easily.
- Longevity of equipment - We have ShoreTel devices in our network that have been running and supported for many years.
- Support - over the years I have observed a decline in the quality of the support function. I believe some of this can be attributed to their support function not growing as rapidly as required to support their growing account base.
- International operations - I have observed only a few technical issues with the PBX devices in EMEA, and APAC, mainly around carrier interoperability. I do think, however, that as a company ShoreTel needs to strengthen their relationship with vendors, and make it easier for end customers to work through the logistics or operating on a international scale. ShoreTel is aware of this.
- System upgrades - Over the years, the quality of upgrades have ranged from average to poor. I think ShoreTel would acknowledge that they have had some challenge with this.
- Huge cost savings on international toll bypass.
- Significant savings on equipment purchases due to longevity of hardware platform.
- A few challenges with international compatibility created some cost as a result of making changes to our processes and footprint, but these minor costs were far eclipsed by what we have saved on least cost routing.
- Level 1 administration is easy enough that PBX specialists are not required for MACD.
We deployed ShoreTel at a point where there were very few players in that space. There were special circumstances that make our installation non-applicable to this question.