Hi All,

At work we are in the process of upgrading all our comms gear over the next year or so. I'm kind of just after opinions and making sure we are somewhat on the right track. This is not a project we intend to fully tackle in house it's far too important and complex for us to guess our way along. 

We are a professional services firm based over 3 sites Dun/Qtn/Chch with around 130 staff. At the moment we have an oldish Sony Video Con system in all sites used almost daily in the board rooms for team meetings and the likes. Avaya IP400 in Dunedin and Qtn, and an IP500 System in Chch (was an IP400 but got stuck in our old building after the quake). This is used mostly with analog phones and phone manager...so nothing flash really.

What we are looking at:

Upgrade all 3 sites with Polycom RealPresense 500's to replace the Sony's for Video Con work and possibly some content sharing work. 

Phone system wise, nothing has been picked yet but ShoreTel is looking pretty good on paper for deskphones and phone system back end. 

Then the thought is we use MS Lync 2013 to tie it all together. Polycom gear looks to tie in with Lync pretty nicely, but while ShoreTel mentions they are Lync compatible I can't find a lot of documentation on just how compatible.

I guess the other option is to buy Lync Enterprise Plus licensing and use that as our Voice solution, I'm not sure how mature Lync is as a voice platform and how good the support would be if it goes pear shaped (support is important to us)

We are in the very early stages of this project, I would say the Polycom gear is pretty much a given, and Lync is likely to happen but nothing is confirmed phone system wise as of yet.

Your thoughts and ideas appreciated.