[11024] in APO News
The office phone has been VoIPified
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Sun Jun 8 05:23:10 2008
To: apo-news@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2008 05:22:38 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
Hi everyone,
If you've been in the office recently, you may have already noticed
this, and if not, you no doubt will next time you drop by. At the
very end of May, the phone on our desk, which was an ISDN phone, was
replaced with a VoIP (Voice Over IP) phone that uses the network instead
of a traditional phone line (*).
There's a "welcome to MITvoip" packet (which they didn't actually give us,
but I scanned LSC's copy) sitting on the desk next to the phone giving
the basics of how to use it if you want to read something. It's also
available as a PDF in our locker and on the web:
/mit/apo/office/voipwelcome.pdf
https://web.mit.edu/apo/office/voipwelcome.pdf
From most of your perspectives, it should work just like you'd expect a
regular phone to, but with some of the buttons rearranged. Our phone
numbers have not changed. To check the voicemail if the red light is
blinking, push the little oval button next to the word "Voicemail" on
the left side of the phone; the password is the same as it was with the
old phone, but the menu options are a little different. We'll post a note
on the phone with instructions again.
There are a variety of issues that groups who've been subjected to this
sudden (involuntary) changeover have identified with the phones, and
some things are indeed non-intuitive and flaky about them... I for one
won't defend the design of this system, but we're all stuck with it,
and the people who've been designated administrators of the new phone
will help you use it and make it do what you need.
Those people, at least initially, are: me, Kevin, Matt, Ian, and Jessy.
Please e-mail us at apo-phone@mit.edu (or zephyr -c apo or something)
with any questions you have.
Exec: if you're wondering what all this means in relation to the other
line we bought back in January for use at BookEx, it's a little complicated.
Stay tuned for mail from Kevin about that sometime in the near future.
Mitch
(*) We didn't mean for this to happen without people being aware of it, but
Telecomm did it without giving APO any appropriate notice (I noticed it
around 3am on Sunday June 1st when I wandered into the office while taking
a break from toolage). We've been working on getting it set up correctly
since then, and there's still some work to be done; we hope to have
everything fixed this week.
