The question on people’s mind considering telephony upgrades is whether a softswitch is better than hardware based switch.

Softswitch is a phone system based on software. The benefits of using only software for such a task are huge, you can upgrade software easily, you make changes on the fly and with abundance of high power low cost x86 machines, you can get the whole thing setup on the cheap!

In the past, PBX companies had to come up with hardware to do the switching, this kept switch prices high and required manufacturer trained people to perform maintenance as interfaces were not as user friendly and the smallest of enhancements required a special card or some piece of hardware.

3CX is a softswitch that runs on top of Windows. You can use Windows XP, 2000 or 2003. It is bundled with Apache web server for admin interface and Postgressql to provide a back end database.

This software has a very small foot print and is a breeze to configure. Unlike some other open source based closed systems,  you can use any off the shelf SIP phone with no license or certificate giving you more flexibility. As stated in my previous post, 3CX integrates very well with Exchange 2007 UM and combine it with a SIPConnect telco connection and you’ve got a scalable, reliable, high performance phone system built using components you can replace from any computer store.

I’ve been testing the UM part of Exchange 2007 and let me tell you, it has a big wow factor!

Integration of 3CX with Exchange 2007 Um is a breeze, and requires little configuration (like giving each machine the other machines IP) and voila, you can start taking advantage of true unified messaging.

Some of the things that will blow away people is the ease of use/administration on tech side and the ability of Exchange to give you access to your entire mailbox via voice. You can now check your voicemail, email, calendar and even contacts by calling your phone system. After you’ve heard your email (yes including the body) you can delete, forward or reply to them, just as you were at a computer typing.

Exchange handles voice command really well and can handle your auto attendants in addition to being the mailbox store.