Sangoma PBXact deployment tips

As I have deployed Sangoma PBXact VoIP systems the past couple years, I've gained a decent amount of hands on knowledge. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I haven't had the time to document my experiences. This post is the start of a series with tips I've learned on how and why to deploy PBXact, as well as a index of posts where I will describe in detail the complexity and things to consider when deploying these phone systems. I will update this post with links to other posts that I make, as well as any major clarifications that I think might be beneficial to the big picture of this topic.

There are a lot of features to talk about, and there are many others, as well as other things for the admin/installer for such a system to take into account. We will discuss these in this series.

As a final note, lets talk about why a client would be interested in on premise systems. Although the up front cost is a consideration for a client, in the long run they save money and gain flexibility. There are many reasons for premise based VoIP solutions, but here are five main reasons in my opinion:

1. Any of the features they would like to implement in their environment do not cost extra, they're already included in the PBXact modules licensing. (Granted these are 25 year licenses, but that should be adequate for most businesses.)
2. Any internal extension to extension calling is free because it does not traverse the SIP trunk provider, it's SIP endpoint to SIP endpoint. (This includes VPN remote workers, more on this in a later post)
3. The ability to tie multiple locations together for free via IAX trunking.
4. The monthly cost (minus the upfront PBX cost) is usually cheaper than using a SaaS solution like RingCentral. (Caveat - PaaS or IaaS sometimes can be comparable if there is a team that can deploy maintain the system, but the monthly cost of renting the hardware and paying the team could equal just purchasing the hardware outright over a span of a couple years. YMMV)
5. Flexibility for very specific configurations

Now that we have all that out of the way, let's start diving into the topics that are relevant.

1. PBXact - The basics of VoIP
2. FreePBX basics
3. _____________
4. FreePBX/Asterisk backup/restore

More to come, thanks for reading!