Information Systems:While You Were Away (Darren, Aug 2017)

Virtualization

• Jeremy is to hoping submit the business case by the end of this month

VoIP project

• 3CX is activated on a demo PRO license, courtesy of Teldata.

• The 3CX Debian appliance is in Jim's old office, connected to a port on VLAN2 (Loomis). It's installed on your old desktop on the new Kingston SSD.

• We're also on a demo with ThinkTel, expiring October 13ish.
• 3CX Flow Designer is the Windows tool used to design call flows. When compiled, the result is a "voice app", which you assign to a call queue (e.g. when a user arrives at a call queue either through a menu or dialing an extension mapped to a call queue, the app is "launched"). This will accomplish all the stuff we would ever want with advanced call routing.

Accounting area network project

• I recommended the Cisco Small Business line after reviewing the OfficeConnect line and concluding that it sucked. Just google the interface and you'll see what I mean. It all made sense when I found out OfficeConnect was re-branded 3Com.

*The SG350-28P is what I recommended. It is a 28-port (24 PoE) switch with 195W total PoE budget. We don't need 48 ports - a situation where we run a separate cable everywhere there is a network device is not realistic.

Odds and sods

• Outbound ASW faxes have been fully migrated to Esker FoDC.

• Lucy maintenance was renewed for 1 year through CDW. This really didn't seem worth it for me, but considering it's still a good server with good parts that can be re-used even after Lucy gets virtualized, we figured we could benefit from continue maintenance. Clearly though, a 4-hour repair window still doesn't do you much when you're running a critical and RF and forms server on that machine.

• Monitor upgrade was approved for the DC but I bought 2 to begin with for Simon, as a demo of sorts for the bigger purchase. I opted for something smaller 21.5" but still 1080p, and I wanted a height/tilt/swivel/pivot stand.

• Sheila's old desktop is being used for Mike in HR. It was too good of a computer to leave sitting there - our other ones are garbage. I made a Windows system backup of the entire computer onto an external SSD but that's really just for peace of mind.