Office telephony choices...3CX, Horizon etc

[Matt999]

So with most of the company working at home and enjoying it we are looking at our existing Asterisk based telephony and realising that it is a bit outdated and doesnt easily allow telephone calls to be made from home. Internal comms and customer conferences are now all in Teams which seems to work nicely.

We have about 25 users that need physical and soft phones and I have been looking at alternatives:
* Adding telephony option to teams. This seems mighty expensive
* Going to a 3CX solution
* Going to a Gamma Horizon solution

We are being drawn to the latter Gamma Horizon option, but are stuck in a little bit of a loop where the people selling Horizon say 3CX is pants and the people selling 3CX say gamma is pants.

Any of you chaps have any experience with either from a user or admin point of view? I'd be interested in any feedback thats out there.

 

[ShadowMan]

We use 3cx. It does work. We have it on prem and users require VPN for soft phone as when it was setup the wrong entry was added for a dns record which would require a reinstall to change. We let an external company configure it all and didn’t pick up the mistake as it was never intended or external use.

for 25 users I assume you will buy a hosted solution so should have the problems. It does everything we need from ring groups and voicemail to basic conferencing (now replaces with teams).

never used gamma but I can’t say 3cx is bad. It work for us for 350 people.

 

[Matt999]

Thanks Shadowman thats some good feedback. We sure are planning on going hosted for our solution. I think its likely to be the standard thing where we move users over and they will moan no matter what new system is.

 

[d_brennen]

On prem 3CX here too, ~200 extensions. Works very well, it's a dream to administer compared to the Cisco PBX/ISDN combo it replaced.

Due to lockdown having the mobile app has been a godsend. I only got it 3CX installed and up just before the world went mad. Lucky!

I have a slight issue that webclient/browser voice calls don't work off site. That's either our ISP or firewall, both are far from friendly when it comes to VoIP.

 

[Throrik]

I used to do Infrastructure for a 3CX Platinum partner and it's not a bad product for smaller places. Uncomplicated and simple, their support is however useless.

 

[d_brennen]

I used to do Infrastructure for a 3CX Platinum partner and it's not a bad product for smaller places. Uncomplicated and simple, their support is however useless.

Can echo this. Our "partner" basically installed the server and bounced. Neither them or 3CX themselves were able to help troubleshoot our off site webclient issue more than running the server port checker and saying "yep it don't work"

 

[Matt999]

I used to do Infrastructure for a 3CX Platinum partner and it's not a bad product for smaller places. Uncomplicated and simple, their support is however useless.

That is what the guys offering the Gamma Horizon have said, the support is not good for 3CX.

Can echo this. Our "partner" basically installed the server and bounced. Neither them or 3CX themselves were able to help troubleshoot our off site webclient issue more than running the server port checker and saying "yep it don't work"

Handy feedback....

Mind you looking at the reviews of the Gamma Horizon app on Android I should not be touching it with a barge pole.

 

[ShadowMan]

For the remote stuff with 3cx I managed to get it all working and passing port tests but the provisioning link is wrong and references a 3cx domain address as if using hosted. We have dns configured in our external dns and internal for what we would use but the misconfigured address in the system tries to continually send provisioning traffic to 3cx and not us so nothing will provision outside of the LAN. It’s the 1 hurdle we have but like above support have been bad. I found the fault myself and after sending it over their “solution” is to reinstall from scratch and restore a config. Not going to happen at present.

 

[d_brennen]

For the remote stuff with 3cx I managed to get it all working and passing port tests but the provisioning link is wrong and references a 3cx domain address as if using hosted. We have dns configured in our external dns and internal for what we would use but the misconfigured address in the system tries to continually send provisioning traffic to 3cx and not us so nothing will provision outside of the LAN. It’s the 1 hurdle we have but like above support have been bad. I found the fault myself and after sending it over their “solution” is to reinstall from scratch and restore a config. Not going to happen at present.

TBF I'd just snapshot the server and tell them to have at it out of hours. If the brown stuff hits the fan, restore the image. My issue is compounded by the fact our industry specific ISP also sells (overpriced) VoIP and isn't really willing to help. Our firewall is out of contract due to cost and I'm not renewing with them due to how crap it is! Got some downtime arranged in August and a provider who's eager to help. Thankfully it's a very minor issue and I've just instructed users not to use the webclient but it's a shame as calling from your laptop would be very handy for remote workers