CatalystTech

IP Office has a great feature for multiple branch offices called Small Community Network or SCN.  Features distributed over SCN trunks are a robust offering that makes remote branch offices seamless in the telephony environment.  Easy to setup IP trunks share a great deal of information between nodes in the network with the enableing of the Voice Networking Option.  Centralized Voicemail, distributed Hunt Groups, and Multi-Site Hot Desk users are as simple as turning the features on.  SCN does have it’s limitations.

The first hard limit of 16 sites and 500 users per SCN make it a challange for chain stores with hundreds of locations.  The second limit of hub and spoke design make fail over and efficient voice routing more of a concern as larger numbers of branch sites come into play.  The answer to these concerns come in the form of a SIP server known as Avaya SES.

The Avaya SES (SIP Enablement Server) is an alternative that expands well beyond the 16 site 500 user limit, into the thousands.  Using SIP trunks, each site communicates with the SES server for all extnsion calls not in it’s local dial plan.  The SES server can be programmed with users and gateways to route calls to the appropriate node or to the PSTN.  Multiple SES servers can ballance or back up each other.  SES can also be used to tie in a larger Communication Manager based switch.

SES does not provide all the features of SCN.  The features pushed using the SES trunks are restricted to normal call features and do not include automatic population of users, groups, central voicemail, etc.  By expanding the number of nodes into the thousands, the trade off is well worth it.

For more inforamtion on SES see support.avaya.com