Yesterday marked my 3rd installation of a Response Point small office phone system.

This time the customer opted for the Syspine system simply because of the Power over Ethernet features that Syspine has integrated.

They are a small company based in Vancouver and needed a system that offered maximum flexibility, virtual operator features and could scale to 30 or 40 seats.

Since they are all working during the day, having a receptionist answer the phone was not going to fly. When I showed them the virtual operator feature for Response Point coupled with the Voice Recognition and Voice mail to Email features, they flipped.

“It’s exactly what a company like ours needs.” Was the comment I received.

I set them up with a the Syspine system and 6 handsets, a Gigabit PoE switch, UPS and about 250′ of Cat6 cabling. I already knew the LAN layout so when I showed up for the install I knew it was going to go off without a hitch, or at least it should have.

Since my previous customers went with the D-Link VoiceCenter system, this was to be my first Syspine installation. I am not new to PoE so stringing the cable and getting the phones powered up went rather quickly. Then something strange happened. The devices on the LAN started picking up IP addresses that were not coming from my router. Hmm, my lab system never did this. On top of it the router was dropping wireless connections like crazy. Then I remember my distributor saying something about an embedded security gateway that shipped with the production Syspine systems, and that the lab systems did not come with the gateway.

I started poking around in the admin interface and sure enough I found the gateway DHCP settings tucked away in a hidden advanced settings menu.

Since we are not using any VPNs here and the administrator wanted to administer the LAN via the WAN IP, I connected all the LAN drops via the gig switch to the LAN router .

Now the the network was happy and so was I. Since the install spanned over a couple of days the timing actually worked out well. I was able to get the Response Point Service Pack 1 installed and now the customer can use SIP trunks (VoIP) for his call forwarding without using up an analog line. You should have seen the smile on his face when I told him that 🙂

I will give them a week or so to do some discovery and then I will get them up to speed on the Click to Call capabilities, Windows screen pops for incoming calls and some SIP call forwarding.