After having several extended periods of evaluation time with Digium’s SwitchVox PBX appliance, the AA60 model, I’ve developed a list of what I love about it–and what I’d like to see improved.   It’s running the current SMB firmware (sorry I don’t have the revision in front of me at the moment).  I don’t normally run into SwitchVox gear in the field, but I visited a soon-to-be client that was running the AA60 with a full-on Polycom phone set.  The standard AA60 rig.  Of course, they had complaints (but they’re running 4 dial-tone trunks over SIP on a single DSL line, doy.) Naturally, I told him I could help.

Anyway, I’ve summarized what I love about the AA60, and what can be improved:

Pros:

- Recording calls from the web interface. Works great. Recorded calls end up in your voicemail box. Perfect. In-call recording using a dialed code to start and stop, not included.

- Panels can easily be integrated into desktop apps, like the experimental panel I built for my Excel contact sheet using RealBasic’s browser control.  Good stuff.

- No problems with call quality. Works great with Junction Networks IAX and SIP trunks (I’ve tried both but prefer IAX since it’s more firewall-friendly).

- Auto-provisioning is stupid simple.  And Polycom makes some of the best SIP hardphones money can buy. P.S. Polycom seems to be the preferred phone vendor for SwitchVox PBXs.

- Call-logging and reporting is great. There are a variety of built-in traffic reports, CDRs, and an Excel export that works very well.

Cons:

- No IAX endpoint support.  Given how downright simple it is to support IAX in an Asterisk environment like SwitchVox, this is just silly.  Add IAX support, guys. Really.

- The web interface could use a few tweaks. Setting up cascading call groups is tricky, for example. But hey the AA60 is a small business product so it’s hard to complain.

- No redundant power supply or storage (the higher-up model offers both).