Microsoft Cloud PBX E5

Hi All,

I had one of those dreaded mid week emails tasking me to come up with a disaster mitigation plan for a clients 15yr+ phone system. The client is mid sized, three sites, 20,000 users etc etc

My priority is obviously focused on what's been asked, but I am going to propose a second option for them (that's the salesman in me). This led me to look at the new Microsoft offering of the new Office 365 phone system. The reason is that this client has no funding available for a PBX replacement, hence the initial request.

Has anyone looked into this yet?

It seems perfect for certain clients, especially those operating in the public sector.

for those who have not heard of it (shame on you all for not keeping up to date with tech news ) it's a way to entirely replace your on-premise phone system including phone lines and sip trunks and using it via Office 365. The calling plans have just launched in the US, with the UK following shortly.

I've been in touch with Microsoft, and I'm down there way next week for a meeting.

So anyway, has anyone looked into this yet?

Luckily this client already has Office365/Exchange365 with dual active/active 1gb Internet connection hosted from two different nodes.

Cheers!

the MS solution looks good on paper but until people get on the platform who knows what it will be like!
I think any cloud based PBX solution will work, I know they have budget constraints but possibly going from say an E3 plan to an E5 could be quite costly.
A SIP cloud based PBX might actually save money if they still have ISDN circuits so it maybe worth getting costs alongside the E5.

Edit: we are going through the process of moving away from an on prem Mitel system, we looked at the E5 but it doesn't fit with our time constraints and as we are currently going through a multi tower tender, we bundled it into these costs (same WAN provider for example).

Just got out of meeting

UK calling plans launch next month!!

Costings for public sector

£20 per user a year for PBX add-on
£8 per user a month for domestic calling plan

very interesting, and like you say, when factoring in ISDN costings could be cost neutral

Just got headsets / handsets to budget for basically

Small order placed for R&D, will let you know how it goes

Does any one know what the compatibility is like with handsets? were already on a hosted pbx so if we could switch to MS using out existing phones it might be worth looking into for ourselves.

LizardKing said:

Does any one know what the compatibility is like with handsets? were already on a hosted pbx so if we could switch to MS using out existing phones it might be worth looking into for ourselves.

Click to expand...

I've just ordered a batch of Polycom VVX 300

They are one of the very few which officially supports MS cloud PBX. Talk to the manufacturer to see if they have a firmware update.

glen8 said:

I've just ordered a batch of Polycom VVX 300

They are one of the very few which officially supports MS cloud PBX. Talk to the manufacturer to see if they have a firmware update.

Click to expand...

Thats a real limited range of supported products!

We use cisco so doubt they will upgrade the firmware, going to be new phones i suspect.

Turns out our supplier is sending us the 310 model instead. Will let you know how it all goes when they arrive.

Being 'limited' to Polycom handsets isn't a massive hardship. I mean yeah you can't use Cisco ones but Cisco phones aren't really known for their compatibility outside of CUCM either.

If you want something cheap then there's the Yealinks.