The Road to IP Telephony

Book excerpt: A complete IP Telephony migration planning guide Includes Steps to Success Poster It's everyone's "must have." This is a reference book for the entire project team who works on the deployment of an IP Telephony solution. Take advantage of best practices. Includes more than 200 best practices, lessons learned, and tips for getting you through your IP Telephony deployment successfully. Minimize risk and learn from the mistakes of others. Read the list of the top 10 things that can go wrong during an IP Telephony deployment. Ask the right questions. Get the project team thinking and collaborating together with Stephanie's "Checklist of Questions to Ask the Project Team." Use proven planning tools. Work from sample checklists, templates, project plans, and workflow documents to guide your planning process. Keep the Steps to Success on the minds of your project team. Use the enclosed poster, which illustrates every major step associated with an IP Telephony deployment. There is no better path to the successful implementation of a new technology than to follow in the experienced footsteps of an organization that has already been there. The Road to IP Telephony tells you how Cisco Systems successfully moved its own organization to a converged, enterprise-wide network. You will learn the implementation and operational processes, what worked, what didn't work, and how to develop your own successful methodology. After presenting this topic to hundreds of Cisco customers, including Fortune 500 companies, Stephanie Carhee consistently encountered the same question, "If I decide to move to IP Telephony, where do I begin and what can I do to ensure that I do it right the first time?" Although the needs of every enterprise are different, some things are universal; planning, communication, teamwork, and understanding your user's requirements are as important as technical expertise. The Road to IP Telephony shares with you everything you need to know about managing your deployment. It starts with where to begin, including what needs to be addressed before you even begin the planning process, to building your project team. Key best practices are also offered to help you set the project's pace and schedule, get your users on board, identify a migration strategy, develop a services and support strategy, and work toward the final PBX decommission. "Cisco IT wants to share its implementation experience with Cisco customers and partners to aide in the deployment practices of new Cisco technologies. While conducting our own company-wide cutover, we learned a great deal about what to do and what not to do. This book shares our experiences." -Brad Boston, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Cisco Systems, Inc. This volume is in the Network Business Series offered by Cisco Press. Books in this series provide IT executives, decision makers, and networking professionals with pertinent information on today's most important technologies and business strategies.