Travel Technology - Does anyone use skype in a multiple line office?

I'm thinking of doing a small project within my company. I want to allocate 3 people to this project and move them to a different building and kind of make it a seperate company. Since this is going to be a 6 month trial to see if they can make it I don't want to do a whole seperate phone lines and pbx systems. I want them to have phones but I don't want to spend that much. They will have everything else but I'm just trying to keep cost down. Well, I was thinking about using skype. We use macs in our company and I just bought a handset that will do skype and it is very nice. I was thinking of getting the $29 US plan and get them an incoming number. They would be able to transfer calls between each other and also call each other within the office. What do you think? Pros - cons.

Are you tied to skype specifically?
This sounds like a great project for a Trixbox (http://www.trixbox.org it is free for download) system. Its a free VoIP system (PBX) that you can install on any old PC or Mac (there is a mac port!). Anything that is at least 1ghz with 512mb of ram should do more then well. You can then get some incoming numbers from Voxbone or telasip or somewhere cheap and use softphones on the desktops...basically its a "roll your own skype" solution.

The beauty of the solution is that you have total control over the system. From voicemail boxes to faxing to anything else...way more control than skype allows.

I'm only suggesting it b/c I dont use skype so I cannot answer your question directly. But I think this sounds like the perfect application for Trixbox.

If you use Skype I would get proper Skype standalone handsets like the cordless Philips one. Skype on the desktop is good but nothing better than a real phone. Saves issues if a PC is rebooting, etc, PC crashes, etc...

You could then get Skype In numbers and use the Skype Out Control panel to watch credit for any outgoing non skype calls:

http://skype.com/products/controlpanel/

We use Skype for our travelling users - in general it works fine but as the previous poster suggested there are other options and providers if you need the connectivity within an office only.

You can also look at packet8.com They do hosted voip phone systems. Most of their international rates are on par with Skype. What you get is a proper phone system. So there is a hardware upfront and monthly fee. You control the extensions, rate plans, etc...

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8830/4.2.2 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/104)

Are you tied to skype specifically?
This sounds like a great project for a Trixbox (http://www.trixbox.org it is free for download) system. Its a free VoIP system (PBX) that you can install on any old PC or Mac (there is a mac port!). Anything that is at least 1ghz with 512mb of ram should do more then well. You can then get some incoming numbers from Voxbone or telasip or somewhere cheap and use softphones on the desktops...basically its a "roll your own skype" solution.

The beauty of the solution is that you have total control over the system. From voicemail boxes to faxing to anything else...way more control than skype allows.

I'm only suggesting it b/c I dont use skype so I cannot answer your question directly. But I think this sounds like the perfect application for Trixbox.

No I'm not tied to skype so I will definitely take a look at tribox. Thanks.

You may also want to consider looking at Asterisk http://www.asterisk.org/ This is an open source PBX similar to Tribox. IT is a free download and works on Mac OS X as well as several other flavors of *NIX.

You may also want to consider looking at Asterisk http://www.asterisk.org/ This is an open source PBX similar to Tribox. IT is a free download and works on Mac OS X as well as several other flavors of *NIX.

Trixbox is Asterisk + the FreePBX web GUI all rolled up with the CentOS Linux OS to make an all-in-one install.

Asterisk itself is the core and is an amazing platform, but without a webgui like FreePBX its rather daunting to configure the first time. You can always install Asterisk and FreePBX on their own on a Mac or Linux (even windows if you are willing to do some legwork)