Crawford began telecommuting for MIS last year, when he moved to Tampa with his wife after her acceptance into a doctorate program at the University of South Florida. Managing the network from afar was an adjustment for Crawford, who had joined the company just a few months before at its headquarters. "For the first month, people who would normally come to me didn't. I mostly did a lot of behind-the-scenes work rather than fielding help calls," he recalls.
All that changed quickly, though, once Crawford's colleagues realized that his physical location really didn't matter.
MIS, which offers title search, title insurance, closing and other services to the mortgage industry, began installing Shoreline Communications' IP Voice Communications System at its remote sites in February. The company already had been running VoIP in the IS department for its helpdesk. During the VoIP installation at MIS' remote sites, Crawford was able to configure the new switches from his home and went on-site only when it was time to train users on the new IP phones. The VoIP system cost the company about $200,000 and didn't require any hardware or software investments other than the Shoreline VoIP equipment.
The company's IP VPN runs on Qwest Communications' and Sprint's IP services with a BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)-based multihomed router for redundancy. "So if one goes down, we don't lose our voice service," Crawford says.
It's a big change from the bad old days of the PBX, when Crawford and his team would hear from a remote office that its phone system was down, and there was no way to tell what caused the problem. Thanks to the VoIP switches, MIS' team is now able to diagnose problems it couldn't have found with traditional PBXes.
The VoIP system already helped the team pinpoint a trunk problem in Cleveland, where the first callers to hit the hunt group had needed to hang up and redial to reach the company. The VoIP system found the culprit: One of the trunks was bad. "We had no idea before that this was the problem," Crawford says. Another advantage is that as its own telecom provider, MIS has cut out the middlemen -- the local and long-distance carriers -- which makes it easier for the company to track any problems with the system.
Crawford's home-office setup comprises his PC with a Web interface into the Shoreline VoIP system over a cable connection to MIS' VPN. "I don't have any telnetting or command-line interfaces," he says. The cable network itself is a bit inefficient, though, he admits. "There are many hops to get me anywhere on the Road Runner network," he says. Crawford also has an Ethernet LAN at home for testing equipment.
MIS' VoIP system consists of Shoreline software running on a Microsoft Windows NT Server, plus the VoIP switches, which complement the company's VPN equipment. "Our PBX picture now is rack-mountable switches like we have in the network," Crawford says. "Each office has the number of switches it needs."
Still, VoIP has its trade-offs, namely the delays inherent in the use of packet technology. The system has an occasional hiccup on the line. "Latency is always the downside of any VoIP system: You're only as good as your IP provider," Crawford says.
The next step for MIS is to add redundancy to its lone VoIP server. Crawford says the company will cluster a group of Windows 2000 servers to run the Shoreline software, so if one server goes down, the others can automatically pick up where it left off. Crawford also will manage those servers from his home.
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IT Department Info
- Size of IT Staff: 10, including helpdesk staff, network administrators and programmers
- Crawford's Biggest Challenge: "Having to ask other people in my department to do on-site tasks that I can't do from here, like change CDs when installing new software. That sounds small, but it takes time out of their days, too."
- Latest Projects: Converting all offices to a Windows 2000 Active Directory network from a Windows NT 4.0/Novell mix, upgrading clients to Windows 2000 Professional, installing helpdesk tracking software, and expanding and moving the server room in the corporate office.
- Coolest Part of the Job: "I work from home. How many network admins work from home? I'm living the life of a programmer without staring at code all day."
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