Creating Company Infrastructure

This week we brought a new person on board and I realized that we are actually a company now. I mean not just that we have people working in an office, we have evolved to the point that after sitting down with her for a couple of minutes I had to have our system administrator set her up with email, intranet access, WEP key for Wi-fi etc. I found myself laughing and later after our company meeting (I think that's funny too) I thought it might be interesting to share some of the tools we use.

Phones - VOIP. We are in this giant 14,000 sq. foot office where we have been on a month to month lease for over a year. And we get a great deal. Because we wanted to be able to move quickly if need be we started out with Vonage. I have been using them for around 3 years and have been pretty happy. Unfortunately they aren't as good for office stuff so we move over to Junction Networks for outbound VOIP and we finally broke down and installed a POTS line for fax.

PBX - For our PBX we use Switchvox where our good friends are busy cranking away making the world of IPPBX good for normal business users like us. We use softphones so far but I imagine at some point we will get some SIP phones.

Intranet - At MP3.com we had the mother of all Intranet's known as Gotham. At Intercasting we have our own little version of that intranet brought to you by some of our former/current co-workers at MP3.com. On the Intranet we have a Wiki from Media Wiki. (The same tool that powers Wikipedia) We use a calendar that nobody is really happy with yet called WebCalendar. You can tell a marketing person didn't name that tool. I want to get a client based tool that synchs with WebCalendar. I have been playing with Sunbird but it is still a bit early for that.

For stats we use Awstats but will move to a custom solution from one of our friends known as Cheeseburger in the coming months.

We also use some geeky tools like Nagios for system monitoring and Bugzilla for bugs. I am hoping we get some kind of open source contact management and project management tools in the coming months.