Telephone Products

Now that you know what type of telephone system buyer you are and determined your business needs, you should begin to narrow the variety of telephone products down to the phone systems you need. Regardless of your business size and needs, there are some basic "must-have" features that are standard to most business telelphone systems such as:

• Call management features including call transfer, call back, call hold, call recording and speed dial
• Auto attendant
• Security features including firewalls and device authentication
• Monitoring features including Caller ID
• Conference call support (with no operator required, at least for small groups)
• Voice Mail
• Intercom

Depending on your business’s requirements and your budget, look for additional features such as:

• Call routing management features such as call hunt and seamless call transfers to mobile phones (sometimes known as “call flip”)
• Contact center features such as automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), computer-telephony integration (CTI) and outbound dialing
• Mobility features such as find me/follow me and remote extensions
• System administration features such as operator console and real-time monitoring
• Multisite management
• Unified messaging (and perhaps other unified communications [UC] features)
• Conference bridge setup and management

Src: http://www.focus.com/research/buyers-guides/pbx/buyers-guide-enterprise-pbx/