Release to share regarding Avaya and Verizon. I actually recently tested and did a review of Avaya's IP Office for the November issue of Internet Telephony Magazine, which Verizon will now be reselling. Avaya IP Office is a very good product for the small office/home office.

here's the release:

Avaya (NYSE: AV) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) have agreed to collaborate in offering to small and medium sized businesses a suite of communications solutions that include systems, applications and services from both companies.

Gee, FrontRange just sent me a demo copy of GoldMine v6.5 a few weeks ago for a product review and already Goldmine v6.7 is out! I feel so outdated...

I spoke with FrontRange a week or so ago and they are really pushing their developers hard to crank out new features. More importantly, they told me they truly value customer feedback (such as feature requests) and try hard to add them into the next release.

I've said for years that there should be a turnkey "box" that you can simply plug into a PBX and turn it into a PBX with VoIP trunks (or IP Centrex if you prefer.) The box would "simulate" analog or T1/E1 trunk lines so the PBX simply sees the box as the Central Office (CO) providing trunk lines. Then an Ethernet connection on the box would hook up to some sort of broadband IP connection. All voice traffic would get packetized and sent across this IP connection and terminating on an ITSP's (Intenet Telephony Service Provider) network, such as Level3 or Global Crossing. Maybe the box would have expansion ports for a 2nd or 3rd T1/E1.