I would not rely on it for primary communications. I get many service outage emails from Zoom regarding phones going down - although in targeted regions. And Help Desk is a joke now."
Well, If we go to Zoom Phone it's not really my choice. I work for the California State University and some campuses have already gone to it and the Chancellor's office is already on Zoom Phone. If it were up to me I'd like to stay on Avaya at my campus...who knows, at the end of the day we may stay on it...but it is pointing in the opposite direction. I don't plan on going anywhere if we switch to Zoom Phone, I'll just learn that. Change is inevitable. I was resistant to changing from Avaya, at least in my mind, but I decided to have a better attitude about changing to something new. We also had a small trial, 10 phones, on Teams Phone. It seemed terrible and that idea was scrapped.
I've had a chance to poke around in the Admin section of Zoom Phone and it seems like it would be easy enough to learn, and has everything we'd need. We don't have any major call center stuff, just basic hunt groups. It has all that in the basic version of Zoom Phone. There are a handful of different SIP phones by Poly, Cisco, Grandstream, Audio Codes, and Yearlink for places where we'd need hard phones, such as a department admins and guest phones. My co-worker has one. Very easy to configure. Just put in the phone MAC address in software and then when you plug in the phone on the network, the updates/firmware are just pushed out to the phone and it's up and running in a few minutes. We'd have to get a bunch of analog gateways for alarms, faxes and elevators.
I'm trying to have a a good attitude, like the opposite of the "Who Moved My Cheese?" book. If I'm grumbling about the changes and wishing for whatever used to be I'll end up being miserable. I'm sure there will be drawbacks and outages but there may be some unseen pluses and advantages. Who knows. It is just a 150 person pilot, but it is one of our IT division's top five projects for the year. Our CIO wants it...we'll see.
If it happens I'll come back here and make a new post and give an update on how the transition/migration is going.
-James
