14. Enterprise VoIP Network Management:
Keep Track of Your IP Telephony Configuration

When extending your IP telephony network up to several hundreds of IP phones and more, an enterprise meets specific management challenges:

Inventory Management

Managing a large VoIP network with hundreds and thousands of IP phones requires careful IP phone tracking along with their allocation to employees. For example, when an employee leaves a company, you must mark his IP phone as “available” to allocate it to another employee. Otherwise, you may have unused IP phones, when nobody knows about their availability.

Phone number management

You need to keep track of phone numbers used in your company and configure the IP PBX accordingly lest your enterprise directory contains invalid and irrelevant phone numbers.

An increasing volume of day-to-day tasks

When you have a thousand of IP phones in an enterprise or more, the volume of routine procedures for IP-telephony administrators significantly increases. The most common procedures are:

• assign a new IP phone and a phone number to a new employee,
• reallocate IP phone and a phone number, when an employee leaves the company,
• change employees IP phone and number;
• configure call forwarding, when an employee is absent for a long time.

But the interfaces of most IP PBX are too complicated and these routine procedures require high-skilled and expensive specialists.

To solve these issues, you can use VoIP management software, integrated with your IP PBX and an HR application, to:

• track changes in organizational structure (maintained in HR system),
• automatically generate tickets for IP telephony administrators, when there are changes that need to be reflected in IP PBX configuration,
• provide an easy to use GUI for IP telephony administrators to process the tickets,
• make the corresponding changes to the IP PBX configuration.

In short, with the right software, you can simplify the management of your IP telephony network, because

• routing chores can be performed by a specialist without deep knowledge in IP PBX configuration, so
  • you can cut your expenses for IP telephony network management;
  • you motivate your IP PBX administrators by having them work on more interesting tasks;
• the configuration of your IP PBX always corresponds with your organizational structure, so the phone numbers are always valid;
• you keep track on your IP phones – you have an up to date information about which IP phones are used, and which are not.

VoIP Network Management Integration

As described above, your VoIP network management solution should be integrated with your HR system. If your HR system is not supported, you need to integrate it with a custom developed tool.

You can also integrate your inventory system with the VoIP network management software to track, when a new IP phone is in use or available.

VoIP Network Management Vendors

• PhonEX™ Pro/M.E.IP.S® by MIND CTI
• ACTS by BCS-IT

What to Do Next

A VoIP network management solution lowers your expenses for IP telephony network management and facilitates PBX configuration.

• Find out how much time your administrators spend to perform the activities described here - they can use it for other more valuable purposes.
• Check, if your enterprise phone directory is up to date – if not, a VoIP network and inventory management solution can help you.

Read the next chapter: 15. Unified Communications Integration Issues and the Software to Cover Them

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