options for ST phone at home

[southeasternMI]

Any experience or options with connection from home to shoretel system at the office, so we can use a shoretel phone at home.

[cburgy]

Any experience or options with connection from home to shoretel system at the office, so we can use a shoretel phone at home.

Yes, you can do it with hardware VPNs. You'll deploy firewalls such as Juniper's SSG line, Cisco's ASA, Watchguards, Sonicwalls, etc.

It works reasonably well but there is obviously not a gaurantee of quality with the Internet.

[southeasternMI]

What about a VPN router and configure a constant connection

[Forum]

Yes, a VPN router that has a VPN connection to the home office would work. Just plug in the phone behind it, and it should work, assuming you can connect to the devices on the other side.

Charles

[Jsunr31]

You could use "external extension assignment" which is a ShoreTel feature. I use this at home when I am away from my office. It assigns your extension to a number you choose (cellular, home etc...) If you can connect via VPN to your office and bring up the Personal Call Manager on your pc/workstation at home you can perform your call control using the PCM with your home phone as your extension. It works great. I use it all the time.

[Forum]

You could use "external extension assignment" which is a ShoreTel feature. I use this at home when I am away from my office. It assigns your extension to a number you choose (cellular, home etc...) If you can connect via VPN to your office and bring up the Personal Call Manager on your pc/workstation at home you can perform your call control using the PCM with your home phone as your extension. It works great. I use it all the time.

That feature is branded as "Office Anywhere". We have some salespeople using it right now. Next week, I'm gonna through a IP560 at my house, just to mess with it.

Charles

[Jsunr31]

Charles,

the External extension assignment is not the same as "office anywhere." With office anywhere/any phone feature, a user can log into any phone regardless of location on the network and that phone will be their extension until the user (or system programming) tells it to "go home" and revert back to users default location/physical phone. This feature is useful for users who travel between offices or fluid environments where users change physical locations frequently.

hope this helps clarify things

Jason

[cburgy]

Charles,

the External extension assignment is not the same as "office anywhere." With office anywhere/any phone feature, a user can log into any phone regardless of location on the network and that phone will be their extension until the user (or system programming) tells it to "go home" and revert back to users default location/physical phone. This feature is useful for users who travel between offices or fluid environments where users change physical locations frequently.

hope this helps clarify things

Jason

Actually Charles is correct, External Assignment is Office Anywhere. In fact, in early beta builds it was called Office Anywhere instead of External Assignment. The functionality you are referring to is just simply Any Phone.

The shoretel corporate presentation will provide some clarification on this for you.

[Jsunr31]

Oops, sorry. My mistake. I do know the difference in the functionality, just not the names they use for the features. Thanks for the clarification.

jason

[netwizzerd]

My company has experimented with a Watchguard hardware VPN solution to equip executives w/ IP 560's @ their homes. We never experienced any problems with sounds quality or reliability, but upon examination of the bandwidth footprint of each call we realized it was getting 'expensive' as we got close to 20 executives with the at-home setup. Not only do you have the cost of a $300-$500 hardware firewall at each endpoint, but each call, by the time all of the overhead was accounted for (VPN, IP, etc) was creating a 90K footprint. We realized that we were theoretically dedicating an entire T1 of bandwidth to the home phones. We replaced half of the phones with softphones and software VPN clients and, thankfully, the execs liked the softphone solution better.

So.....for some residential Internet service plans, 90K of upload bandwidth is quite a bit. I can see some people having sound quality issues (especially if they have kids using P2P apps) with the IP phones.
For businesses, at the end of the day the softphone and Office Anywhere solutions are MUCH more economical.

[cburgy]

My company has experimented with a Watchguard hardware VPN solution to equip executives w/ IP 560's @ their homes. We never experienced any problems with sounds quality or reliability, but upon examination of the bandwidth footprint of each call we realized it was getting 'expensive' as we got close to 20 executives with the at-home setup. Not only do you have the cost of a $300-$500 hardware firewall at each endpoint, but each call, by the time all of the overhead was accounted for (VPN, IP, etc) was creating a 90K footprint. We realized that we were theoretically dedicating an entire T1 of bandwidth to the home phones. We replaced half of the phones with softphones and software VPN clients and, thankfully, the execs liked the softphone solution better.

So.....for some residential Internet service plans, 90K of upload bandwidth is quite a bit. I can see some people having sound quality issues (especially if they have kids using P2P apps) with the IP phones.
For businesses, at the end of the day the softphone and Office Anywhere solutions are MUCH more economical.

It is expensive... Good thing Shoretel will be the first IP vendor to address this very soon

[kwanseng]

External Extension Assignment = Office AnyWhere (aka OA/E).

AnyPhone = ability a user can log into any phone regardless of location on the network and that phone will be their extension until the user (or system programming) tells it to "go home" and revert back to users default location/physical phone.

sometimes marketing terms could be confusing...

Charles,

the External extension assignment is not the same as "office anywhere." With office anywhere/any phone feature, a user can log into any phone regardless of location on the network and that phone will be their extension until the user (or system programming) tells it to "go home" and revert back to users default location/physical phone. This feature is useful for users who travel between offices or fluid environments where users change physical locations frequently.

hope this helps clarify things

Jason

[TJF]

My company has experimented with a Watchguard hardware VPN solution to equip executives w/ IP 560's @ their homes. We never experienced any problems with sounds quality or reliability, but upon examination of the bandwidth footprint of each call we realized it was getting 'expensive' as we got close to 20 executives with the at-home setup. Not only do you have the cost of a $300-$500 hardware firewall at each endpoint, but each call, by the time all of the overhead was accounted for (VPN, IP, etc) was creating a 90K footprint. We realized that we were theoretically dedicating an entire T1 of bandwidth to the home phones. We replaced half of the phones with softphones and software VPN clients and, thankfully, the execs liked the softphone solution better.

So.....for some residential Internet service plans, 90K of upload bandwidth is quite a bit. I can see some people having sound quality issues (especially if they have kids using P2P apps) with the IP phones.
For businesses, at the end of the day the softphone and Office Anywhere solutions are MUCH more economical.

I agree. With my experience you will not have a good quality connection on Cable/DSL even if you use a Hardware VPN.

[luckycharms]

I have a hardware VPN connection from my apartment to the office via a DSL line. Using Sonicwall TZ 170's on either end and it seems to work ok depending on the time of day you are making a phone call. I have yet to experience jitter on a call but I usually get disconnected from the call all together because my DSL router drops the connection for a split second. Just my two cents...

[mattwray]

If you have Citrix, the Office Anywhere is perfect! All you have to have is internet access and the appropriate Citrix backend. I open my Citrix Web Interface, launch call manager at my house and assign my extension to my cell.

Nobody knows that I'm sitting on my couch in boxers, and I have full functionality.