Microsoft's Response Point, Good for the Enterprise?Microsoft's Response Point, Good for the Enterprise?
Response Point is Microsoft's software based IP PBX. Its initial offering is for the S in SMB. It does not fit the medium and large enterprise location, but could satisfy the requirement of the small office of 5 to 50 phones. The retail branch, insurance office and remote government offices are all candidates, if the organization does not plan to interconnect these offices by an IP or legacy T1 network. In some companies, the remote offices are locally managed and independent, making them candidates for a key system replacement. Response Point may satisfy these situations.
May 5, 2008
Response Point is Microsoft's software based IP PBX. Its initial offering is for the S in SMB. It does not fit the medium and large enterprise location, but could satisfy the requirement of the small office of 5 to 50 phones. The retail branch, insurance office and remote government offices are all candidates, if the organization does not plan to interconnect these offices by an IP or legacy T1 network. In some companies, the remote offices are locally managed and independent, making them candidates for a key system replacement. Response Point may satisfy these situations.
Response Point is Microsoft's software based IP PBX. Its initial offering is for the S in SMB. It does not fit the medium and large enterprise location, but could satisfy the requirement of the small office of 5 to 50 phones. The retail branch, insurance office and remote government offices are all candidates, if the organization does not plan to interconnect these offices by an IP or legacy T1 network. In some companies, the remote offices are locally managed and independent, making them candidates for a key system replacement. Response Point may satisfy these situations.There are dozens of systems from Vodavi, Toshiba, Nortel, Avaya, Cisco.... that compete in this space. Because Response Point comes from Microsoft, the enterprise cannot ignore this offering even though the competitors have, in many cases, a better product. Response Point is not a variation of Office Communications Server (OCS); it is a completely different product that does not have all the licensing requirments of OCS. It is a complete IP PBX on a small scale; in contrast, OCS needs to work with a PBX to fulfill most communications requirments.
Since Microsoft does not offer the hardware, Microsoft OEM partners D-Link, Quanta and soon Aastra will be providing the hardware. The cost of an average 8 phone configuration is about $2,500. Additional phones are about $150 each. Notice that hard phones are part of the product lines, where OCS is pushing the softphone. There are no extra licenses to acquire like those necessary for OCS implementation. These are attractive prices for a small IP PBX.
The hardware is a base unit that can sit on a desk. The Response Point PBX runs on an embedded Windows XP system. There is no hard drive. Flash memory is used. If the base unit fails, it is easily replaceable. The unit comes with a LCD display for network and status information.
Support of analog phones and POTS lines are offered through a gateway. T1 support will probably come later. IP phones can be supported with PoE.
Response Point is a stand alone system. There is no capability to network multiple sites together via IP. Site-to-site connections will need to made using PSTN calls. SIP support and SIP trunking are not yet offered
Response Point has three software components:
Call processing software resident on the base unit
Response Point Assistant on a Windows PC
Response Point Administrator for changes and system support
The enterprise cannot buy the Response Point system from OEM vendors or Microsoft; instead, there are a number distributors providing these products. Response Point partners are listed in Microsoft's How-To-Buy directory.
Is Response Point ready for prime time? Yes, with some qualifiers. Although it can scale to 50 users, 10 users is a more reasonable number. Voice quality can be an issue. Adjusting the gateways, which are not offered by Microsoft, can improve the voice quality, but this is not obvious. QoS was necessary in one test environment. Without QoS, there was dropped speech and static introduced. This is a new line of products, so the enterprise should not expect decent support until the OEM vendors and the distributors ramp up their respective organizations.
The enterprise cannot buy the Response Point system from OEM vendors or Microsoft; instead, there are a number distributors providing these products. Response Point partners are listed in Microsoft's How-To-Buy directory.
Is Response Point ready for prime time? Yes, with some qualifiers. Although it can scale to 50 users, 10 users is a more reasonable number. Voice quality can be an issue. Adjusting the gateways, which are not offered by Microsoft, can improve the voice quality, but this is not obvious. QoS was necessary in one test environment. Without QoS, there was dropped speech and static introduced. This is a new line of products, so the enterprise should not expect decent support until the OEM vendors and the distributors ramp up their respective organizations.
