24x7 Telephone Support

[Derek Neighbors]

> We are gearing up for 24x7 support, but are not planning to staff an
> office our selves.  We are looking at using an answering service that
> will send pages to on-call people.
> 
> I wanted to know if anyone has been involved in setting up 24x7
> support?  Did you use an answering service?  Was the answering service
> reliable?  I'm looking at using Answer 1 Communications.  Does anyone
> know anything, good or bad, about that company?  
> 
> What other ways are there to provide 24x7 support?

A call service seems expensive and probably doesnt achieve much other than 
giving someone a warm voice on the end of the reciever.  You might want to 
look at Bayonne Telephony server. 

You could likely do something clever.  Like keep a list of whom is on call 
on what days and times in a database, by priority (as I assume there would 
be more than one).  Then have an automated system answer (instead of the 
answering service).  Bayonne then could automatically call one or more 
people on the 'on call list'.  When they receive the page the could 
automatically call back the bayonne server and enter the ticket number or 
such to let the other tech's know its being handled.  

This solution loses the warm voice, but is cheaper than an answering 
service and allows it all to be in house with full logs of who called and 
how quick techs responded and such.  I could go on and on, but I wont. ;)

-Derek