The Life and Times of Seattle’s Small Business Systems Consultant. Articles and advice on small business phone systems, phone and internet services, VoIP, and all things technology related.
Selkowitz Technology | Seattle’s small business network and telecom consultant
Highest Rated
- Polycom vs. Konftel - Conference Phones Compared
(4.67 out of 5) - AastraLink Pro 160 Phone System Review
(4.6 out of 5) - Response Point vs Talkswitch - a comparison of small business phone systems
(4.2 out of 5) - Why You Shouldn’t Hire ADR Data Recovery for Reiser Recovery
(4 out of 5)
- Polycom vs. Konftel - Conference Phones Compared
-
Click stars to vote (left is low, right is high)
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Being a technology guy, I generally like to use and learn the newest (hopefully more effective) ways to get things done. In the phone business that means the PBX model rather than the Key System/KSU model. Basically if you’re used to telling someone to pickup line 2, you use a KSU. If you transfer calls or use park orbits you use a PBX.
What I’ve found is while many businesses want the new underlying features (VoIP lines, telecommuter support, cell phone integration, email integration) they often don’t want to learn the PBX model when they’ve spent years or decades with KSUs. The PBX model scales better and is the modern approach, so most modern phone systems follow it. But there’s nothing wrong with the KSU model for small businesses.
I’ve realized one of the great strengths of the Talkswitch and Allworx phone systems over many competitors is both support KSU and PBX modes. For example a recent business had old GE 4 line KSU style phones - the owner had used KSU phones for decades and wanted the new phones to work similarly. At the same time they wanted more - an autoattendant, voicemail to email, follow me routing to cell phones, and generally better voicemail notification. By putting in a Talkswitch with 9133i phones they kept their 4 line KSU model while gaining all the new abilities of a modern IP PBX.
The Author: Kevin Selkowitz
About: Kevin Selkowitz is the founder and lead consultant for Selkowitz Technology, a Seattle-area small business systems consulting company. We focus on the four major technology needs of small businesses - phone systems, phone and internet service, servers/network infrastructure, and business applications.
This entry was posted by Kevin Selkowitz, on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 10:43 am and is filed under Phone Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response on the right, or trackback from your own site.
December 10th, 2009 at 2:30 am
Thanks alot for valuable info