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The Seven Most Common Mistakes of IP Telephony
Deployment — and How to Short-Circuit Them
 After years in the field implementing hundreds of IP
telephony systems, Norm Jones has seen all kinds of unusual situations as
organizations of all sizes make the switch to converged voice/data
networks. An implementation services project manager at ShoreTel, Jones
shares the seven most common deployment mistakes he’s seen on the
job.
1. Skipping network assessments. “A thorough
network assessment is critical for multi-site deployments of IP telephony,
and even for single sites,” Jones says. Tests assessing network
latency, packet loss and jitter are conducted with software agents that
simulate voice traffic being transmitted across a legacy data network.
Thorough network assessments analyze traffic over a matter of
days, gathering data points that help customers judge the readiness of
their network to handle the impending surge of real-time voice traffic.
Point-in-time assessments measure only the network’s behavior at a
single moment—and thus are apt to miss sporadic capacity shortages
that take place during scheduled network replications or bulk-file
transfers, for example.
Performing a network assessment isn’t just a best
practice. When it comes to deploying ShoreTel’s
Pure IP Unified Communications solution a customer must conduct a network
assessment before deployment as a part of ShoreTel’s
corporate policy. If the customer conducts the assessment internally with
its own staff, its officials must sign a network-assessment waiver before
ShoreTel can proceed with the implementation. Learn more about ShoreTel
network assessments.
2. Omitting site surveys. Another up-front
consideration is a site survey, which entails the mundane but necessary
work of looking at exactly what equipment is in use around the site.
“Customers don’t always spend the time looking under
everyone’s desk to see if they have an Ethernet hub there,”
Jones observes. “Then all of a sudden you learn that they don’t
have dedicated cabling to the desktop or you find an area where they put in
an inexpensive hub or an unmanaged switch that is feeding a bunch of printers.”
Most installations have a Power over Ethernet switch which provides power
to the IP phone. If there is a hub or switch under the desk or in a small
closet, the power will not make it to the phone. While it may seem
time-consuming to make that walk-through for the site survey, it helps IT
understand the exact terrain that will be rolled over to IP telephony.
3. Staying in the dark about trunks. The IT staff may
not be in regular enough communications with carriers to know whether ground-start or loop-start trunks
(a.k.a. Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS)) are in use in the
organization’s telco network.
“Ground-start trunks are often from the legacy days, but if you have
ground-start into your PBX, when you attempt to cut over the lines to the
IP telephony system, you won’t get any dial tone since it is not
supported.” Carriers can make the change for you to convert to
loop-start trunks, but expect up to a month’s delay as they do so, cautions
Jones.
4. Not knowing other key circuitry
details. Get all the information you can from your carrier as you
prepare to cut over—such as confirming that the D channel is on the
24th channel when you order a new PRI. “In some instances, the D
channel is on some other channel, and this is something that is not
changeable on our side,” says Jones. ShoreTel implementation staff
will also need to know the type of CO switch in use, and how many digits
(four, five, seven or ten) the carrier will be sending. “We recommend
that it matches the extension length of the end-user at the company site or
sites,”Jones says.
5. Sticking with old client operating
systems. “Some people are shocked we don’t support
Microsoft Windows 2000 anymore,” Jones says. “We would hope
everyone has Microsoft Windows XP by now, but that’s not always the
case.” However, earlier versions of ShoreTel software, including 6.1,
do support Windows 2000, while upgrades to ShoreTel 7.0 are free and can be
quickly handled by administrators. “The best step here is to
communicate the desktop requirements with your solution provider before the
project starts.”
6. Not including training. Adequate
training—of administrative staff who may be adding new employees into
the phone system, supervisors who will be running both real-time and
historical usage reports, and other types of users
who will use the phones in the office and on the road—is too often
overlooked, Jones says. It’s not hugely time-consuming to teach
people how to use the ShoreTel system; perhaps one to two hours are
required to teach most employees the functions relevant to their roles
within the organization. But those hours can make a huge difference in
terms of your organization’s ability to get the most out of its IP
telephony deployment.
Training should be discussed and scheduled in conjunction with
the cutover to IP telephony. Training can be provided by ShoreTel partners
or from ShoreTel directly.
7. Cutting over on a Friday night. Many organizations
first consider a weekend as the ideal time period in which they will make
the switch to IP telephony, but Jones advocates a mid-week schedule for
several reasons. “For one thing, you want to slate your training for
the day prior to cutover,” so it’s fresh in people’s
minds and they can put into practice on Thursday what they learned on
Wednesday. Also, ShoreTel services or your solution provider can be on site
on the go-live day to solve problems and review procedures as end users get
accustomed to their new phone system. Having on-site support from your
reseller or ShoreTel may also come in handy to explain how to access
corporate voicemail from outside or to review the auto-attendant menu once
again with end users or to link up that lone overlooked fax machine.
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