We start a small project called Pidgin Talk: a phone system for offices that just need their phones to ring.
We are an IT company in Hawaiʻi, and phones are part of what we look after. Lately the phone systems we resell have been getting harder to love, so we have started something small of our own. We are calling it Pidgin Talk.
What it is for
The goal is modest on purpose: an office of about ten phones, calls in and calls out, on a server the office or its IT company controls. No license count, no account to sit under, no feature list as long as your arm.
Most of the small offices we look after use a phone system the way most people use a spreadsheet: a tenth of it, every day. They pay for the other nine tenths anyway.
The first decisions
A few things are settled before a line of telephony works:
- It speaks standard SIP, so it works with ordinary desk phones and ordinary providers.
- It runs on a server you can point at, in the office or hosted, not in an account you rent.
- It is managed from a web page, because nobody should have to edit a configuration file to add a new hire.
- Its data sits in a regular database, so it can be backed up like everything else an office owns.
What we do not know yet
Plenty. We have resold phone systems for years, and that is not the same as writing one. We expect real desk phones to behave differently from the documents that describe them, and we expect office routers to surprise us.
We will post here as it comes along, the wins and the faceplants both.