You’ve got the name, the site, the idea and the people to support your great cause but something is missing… Aha! A telephone system – or even a telephone number would be good. That’s when the big decision has to be made. The obvious and expensive solution is to buy a PBX (Personal Branch Exchange). What’s a PBX you ask. We’ll, according to Wikipedia:

“A Private Branch eXchange (PBX) is a telephone exchange that serves a particular business or office, as opposed to one that a common carrier or telephone company operates for many businesses or for the general public.

A PBX locally control all in one communication center that controls your phone’s Auto attendant, Auto dialing, Automatic call distributon, Automatic ring back, Call accounting, Call forwarding on busy or absence, Call park, Call pick-up, Call transfer, Call waiting, Conference call, Custom greetings, Customised Abbreviated dialing (Speed Dialing), Busy Override, Direct Inward Dialing, Direct Inward System Access (DISA) (the ability to access internal features from an outside telephone line), Do not disturb (DND), Interactive voice response, Music on hold, Night service, Shared message boxes (where a department can have a shared voicemail box), Voice mail, Voice message broadcasting, Voice paging (PA system) and Welcome Messaging.”

A second option would be to simply let everyone use a cell phone, creating total chaos when it comes time to go over the phone bills.

Or you could simply outsource your phone system with a Virtual PBX (VPBX). I happen to love this third option as it’s very inexpensive to setup (usually free) and with all of the hype with VoIP, global oneness and clear call quality these solutions can definitely fill the void that you may need.

The Virtual PBX solution:
There are many great products available today: RingCentral (this is the one I currently use as my company “phone system”), VirtualPBX and OneBox just to name a few. Each one has its own pros and cons. Some charge greater per minute charges while others allow extra features such as calls being made from the desktop or a SIP compatible phone. While evaluating the product to figure out which one will fit into your new organization, keep these not so obvious but essential VPBX capabilities in mind…

1) Porting numbers in –Some providers let you port outside numbers into their system. This is great because many times by the time you’re looking at going to a virtual PBX system, you’ve already given out a million business cards, kissed a hundred thousand babies and told your mother and father about your new business’s phone number. Number porting is becoming more and more common in the US. There are a few hiccups in the current system but many times you can keep the number from somewhere else and bring it to your new provider.

2) Porting numbers out – The second thing to keep in mind is the ability to port a number away from the virtual PBX provider. When youdo finally get to the point that you have a hundred employees, a giant yacht in the Caribbean, you may want to move to a full-fledged PBX system. When you do this, you’ll need to be able to take that great 800-MY-COMPANY-HERE number with you.

3) Conferencing, faxing and more – Sometimes simply having a phone number isn’t good enough. Most providers offer great extra services. E-faxing, audio, and video conferencing are just a few of the things that can make not only your company sparkle but also can save you money in the long run. With a good, all-in-one conferencing pack built into your virtual PBX you can have fluid company and client meetings all from the comfort of the system that you came to know and love.

4) SIP or VoIP telephone support – Most of the virtual PBXs out there are setup to take in calls, play an auto-attendant, allow the caller to choose who they want and then they forward the call off to a cellphone, land line or VoIP line that you may already have (think call forwarding on steroids). A few of the providers offer their own “digital line” service. This means that you don’t have to be double billed for the minutes that you use. Instead of the call going to a third-party phone, it could go straight to your laptop or a SIP capable cordless phone.

For every problem your company faces there will be a host of products that solve the issue in a slightly different way, and choosing a phone system is no different. The most important thing to remember is to make sure that you aren’t shooting yourself in the foot by getting into a product that can’t scale with you.

Jesse Middleton is a network security professional, blogger and pain in the ass “I’ll tell you what you can and can’t do on your machine” type of guy.