I Like Plumbing

Not the water kind, the telecom kind.

Right now, I'm in the midst of planning and preparing to move our office to a new location. Since telecom is a lot of setting and forgetting, I've been having a great time reviewing the phone numbers we use, what they are used for, deciding if they'll be needed in the new location and refreshing my memory on some of the details of our Shoretel configuration.

Things I've been thinking about:

• Analog Devices - Our existing office has old 66-blocks wired back to the desks that I've used to punch down fax machines and analog polycoms.  Our new office won't have 66-blocks, so I need to allot space on or LAN racks for connecting the wiring pairs from the harmonica whips on the Shoretel switches.  And make sure that the two cable drops we are doing everywhere is going to be enough for each location.
• Backup Lines - The phone system will use a regular PRI trunk, but we also have regular POTS lines installed as a backup.  Those need to be grouped in a Hunt Group over at AT&T and the configuration on the DIDs need to allow for roll-over if the PRI goes down.
• AT&T is moving away from their legacy Centrex Voicemail service and with our move, we can't retain the few VM boxes we have for external uses. Turns out we'll only need one (as part of our disaster recovery planning) and I'm fine with having an new number issued on the new Unified Messaging platform AT&T is selling now. 
• We have a lot of guest phones and old devices on the floor now that won't be needed in the new office. It's time for me to wander around and start collecting that up.  Today I have that time, I know in the next few week, I probably won't.

Hope everyone has a great long weekend filled with turkey, stuffing and pie!