Microsoft Response Point SMB PBX - Install and Review

Part 1: Site Analysis

I’m glad I did a site visit before I a showed up to do the install. Although, it should not surprise me that there were wires everywhere, I have seen worse.

It became obvious rather quickly that I was going to have to do some wiring, to every desk. I made some sketches of where the drops needed to be and ensured there was power to support the phones as well. Within 10-15 minutes I had my shopping list and a decent sketch of the LAN. “It puts the Ethernet cables in the basket.” 1 hour later I had all I needed.

Part 2: Pre-config & Testing

I spend the next couple of hours on some other business which left me about 30 minutes for a quick pre-config and basic testing. It went flawlessly, apart from some Mac versus XP issues I will share with you later.

Part 3: Site Installation

I showed up on site on schedule at 4pm to start the job. By 5 pm I was basically finished the wiring and had the base unit, gateway and Ethernet drops all ready. I plugged the telephone lines into the gateway and we were ready for full-on geekness. Let’s add some phones and assign some users.

Microsoft did a phenomenal job with the phone and user provisioning methodology. Brainless provisioning is something that I have been ranting about for some time, glad to see someone got it right for a premise-based SMB phone system.

Within the next 20 minutes I had 5 phones configured and ready for use. The Response Point interface is very well done, very little margin for error for PBX newbies.

I spent approximately 20 more minutes configuring the router to assign a persistent DHCP address for the base unit and gateway. 10 more minutes for configuring the voicemail to email SMTP settings.

At 6:10, we made our first internal call, to the voicemail system. “I suppose I have to enter my first born’s date of birth via the key pad to get into the voicemail system?”, said an eager employee. “No, not at all, simply press that blue button and say VOICE MAIL. And if you want to call anyone else in the office just press that button and say their name.” That look on her face was absolutely priceless. It was like I just gave her a winning lottery ticket.

Part 3: Basic Training

Again, more fun than anything else. “This is how you use voice recognition to call people. This is how you geek out on telephony.” Needless to say, they love their new phone system.
Summary: It’s hard not to like this PBX. For SMBs it’s like a gift from above. Sexy, and it works. I was out of there by 7 pm and aside from replacing a faulty Ethernet cable I will likely not have to go back anytime soon.

Hats off to Microsoft, it’s been a while since I have been this impressed about anything that has come out of Redmond but they have certainly won my vote. SMB PBX of the year? Could very well be just that but let’s see how Service Pack 1 goes over before I get ahead of myself.