This is something I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. I won’t get it all out of my head tonight, but thought I should start.
We’ve been using Alarms for Windows for billing for almost 10 years now. It has some great ideas, but sadly not much of it is planned out very well (don’t even get me started on the database design!). After going to the user conference for SedonaOffice, I know where this product (Alarms for Windows) struggles and that’s with it’s developer. It’s a one man show and he does NOT like to hear that something doesn’t work or that it wasn’t executed very well. Anytime you mention something doesn’t work, it’s always your fault for using the program incorrectly. And, you’re told it doesn’t happen to anyone else, everyone else uses the program with no problems. Yeah, right.
I went to the SedonaOffice user conference and it was a completely different world. The co-founders were there and very much cared about the product and where it could go. Imagine this…they WANTED our feedback on how to make it better. They didn’t take it as personal criticism. The SedonaOffice community is very open in sharing ideas. I don’t know how many times the co-founders (Michael Marks & Don Faybrick) said, “Hey, that’s a good idea. Let me write it down and talk to the developers”. Such a nice change.
I learned something else, too! I met a President/CEO from an alarm company in Maryland that just switched to SedonaOffice last September. Guess what software they migrated from? Alarms for Windows! They used the software for 12 years and had MANY similar stories that we did. Turns out we were not the only ones that had a miserable failing migration to the Alarms for Windows SQL (we were told we were). We also didn’t have the largest set of data, they were told they did as well. I’m also not the only person who has recieved nasty, rude emails from the developer of Alarms for Windows. I feel better now knowing I wasn’t the only one treated that way.

So, I posted an opinion yesterday about PBXtra by Fonality. Imagine my surprise when I’m at work and there is someone on the phone from Fonality. They called for Robert since he was the one that did the actual order, but Robert made them talk to me instead not knowing why they were calling.
They saw the blog post. They wanted to know what things they could improve to make PBXtra a better product. I shared with them our frustrations with HUD and how it just didn’t work well for our use. They told me that they have a new phone available since we purchased that will show the lines on it instead of having to use HUD.
We’re still leaving and they didn’t offer to buy it back, but I’m quite impressed that they care enough to find out why we didn’t like it and ask for feedback.

So far, I don’t like it. It was installed several months ago so we’ve certainly had time to get used to it.
Some of it might depend on the phones we selected. We are using the Aastra 480i phones.
The biggest problem is that you can’t tell who is on the phone very easily. We spent an additional $1000 so everyone could have HUD on their desktops. HUD seems to work ok if no one is calling when you need to see who is on the phone. If you have a call in parking for someone and then tell them to get it and they drag it to their extention right at the same time another person is calling, they grab the incoming call instead of the customer that is waiting for them.
It’s also a pain to have to do everything through your computer. I finally turned off the pop-up that shows the caller ID on the incoming calls.
This phone system started out frustrating because our sales person cut HUD and the professional version out of the bid at the last minute. We didn’t know what he was cutting out so didn’t know to order it anyway. During the setup, every time I needed to set something I was told we couldn’t because we didn’t have the Professional version. Finally spent the additional $1000 and got it working the way we wanted (mostly). We also didn’t have the echo cancellation card, because our sales rep never told us about it. That was another $800 we had to add to the system.
Another concern I have is that it is all PC based so if our phone server has a power supply go bad (which isn’t uncommon) our phone service will be down until we get it repaired.
Long story short…you can do much more for under the $12,000 we spent on this system and we are about to go live with a new system just 6 months after spending so much for this one. The one feature, I’ll miss?? Automatic call forwarding to Central Station at 5 PM.