Alcatel Unleashed

Good Evening

I have just taken over as IT Manager at a company that has a maintained OmniPCX Office R7 system with 20 IP Licences.

I am currently without a desk and would like to use a Softphone for the short term, I spoke to the company that maintains our equipment and they informed me that I would need to buy a licence for this as we can only use real handsets with the licences we have.

I had read about PIMPhony Basic on the Alcatel Website and this part took my interest

IP Telephony

PIMphony can function without a phone set if it is run in IP mode: it turns a multimedia PC equipped with handset or headset into an IPset. It is a cost-efficient option for users based on remote site and also for mobile workers over a secure private connection (such as IP VPN tunnel).

from here and questions could I use this but again I was told that I would need an "Media" Licence.

Am I being led up the garden path here or is this the case?

Hi. It is true. You need special licence for PIMPhony to work as IP SoftPhone. Regards.

Thanks for the reply. So they have us by the crown jewels then? Are there no free Softphone out there to use as the price I have been quoted is more that a hard phone,

Not sure if my last message got through. But are my only options pay for the Softphone Licence or buy a Hardphone. Are there no other apps I can use? It just feels that we have licences coming out of our ears but I cannot get the information anywhere as to what they allow us to do or use and anythign I want to do I have to buy more licences for.

What do

"Advanced users software license" and "additional IP user software license"

Give us?

This causes confusion a lot but it is summed up below;
The PIMphony sets (PIMPhony Softphone for the Basic, Pro, Team and Attendant applications) can be configured for:

- telephone + PC usage: standard configuration

- PC multimedia usage: IP configuration, with an optional handset or headset. In this case, the PIMphony IP media software licence

In essence you can use Basic in tandem with a desktop phone for free ; if you want to use Basic on its own (no physical set) you need the media licence

advanced user license is for a digital set
IP user is probably for an IP deskphone as normally the IP license for softphone is specifically called media license/user

As bigmac says, if you want to use an AL softphone (only pimphony in OXO) you will need an specific license.
If you want to try a standard H323 softphone, you may try something like netmeeting, but you will need a IP trunk license. SIP sf can't register in OXO.

Bye