As Murphy's Law would have it, just after I blog about how great Skype is as an office phone system, Skype has a big outage. This definitely affected us at DataScaler. We were unable to make or receive calls on our "office phones." The impact was lessened by two factors:
- We are still pre-release, so we didn't have any customers calling us
- We all have cell phones.
Despite the above, we were annoyed not to be able to use our phones. I had scheduled a vendor to call me on my desk phone, and of course he couldn't get through. Eventually, he checked his email and called me on another number.
So, what have I learned from this? I have decided:
- We'll get some (not many) "real" phone lines when we move into our new office in a few months
- We'll connect those lines to an Asterisk PBX and still use soft phones and our Plantronics wireless headsets. I have loved not having to type numbers into a desk phone. Soft phones are great, Skype or not.
- We'll still use Skype for most calls. Only Sales, Support, and a few other key inbound numbers will be on the "real" lines. For most employees, if the phones are down, it's usually a good thing: No one can interrupt them with a phone call.
So, our experiment with Skype is still a net win; we just won't rely totally on Skype for all our office phone needs.
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