Phone System Overview
What is a Phone System?
A phone system or PBX is a business communications system that handles your call control functionality, management of telephones and your connection to a voice service provider.
The basic features of a phone system
A phone system comes packed with features (and you’ll probably never use all of them). Here are the most common phone system features you’re likely to use:
- Auto Attendant
- Direct Inward Dialing (DID)
- Caller ID, Call Transfers, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Three-way calling
- Call Park, Call Pick-up
- Call Monitoring and Call Recording
- Call Queues and Call Routing
- Voicemail (and voicemail to email)
- Conference Calling
- Remote or Virtual Extensions
- Analytics and monitoring tools
- Call reporting
- Ability to utilize VoIP and PSTN calling methods
- Web based management
- Application integration
Again these are just the basics. Most phone systems come with dozens of other options.
It should come as no surprise to you that there are different types of phone systems. Even though there are different types of phone systems all of them provide you with the features and benefits previously described. In addition to those already discussed you will also find that there are features and benefits unique to each type and classification of phone system.
There are two types of VoIP phone systems.
- Premise Based – A premise based phone system is a phone system that is housed and maintained at your physical location (office or otherwise).
- Hosted – A Hosted phone system is a phone system that is housed and maintained by a third party service provider who delivers your PBX services over your Internet connection. The only physical hardware to house and maintain are your desktop phones.
Within each of these two phone system types there are three distinct classifications.
- Proprietary – A proprietary phone system is a phone system with underlying operating system and PBX software that is closed “black box” technology specific to the manufacturer. With a proprietary phone system you have no access to system source code or insight into how the underlying system works.
- Open Source – An open source phone system is a phone system with underlying operating system and PBX software that is generally available to the public (for free). With an open source VoIP phone system, you have full access to and control over the source as well as insight into how the system works.
- Open Source Based – An open source based phone system is a phone system with an underlying operating system and PBX software that is open source at the core with proprietary code built on top. This proprietary code is comprised of additional features, functionality, graphical user interfaces or other advanced options not commonly found in an open source based phone system.