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How to Set Up an IP PBX Setting up an IP PBX not your cup of tea? Just look how simple it can be!

By Mike Hogan

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Used to be, adding a phone to your office PBX meant waiting days or weeks for a technician to come out and program your phone panel at $80 an hour. Oh, wait, that's still the norm for legacy PBXs, isn't it? And it wouldn't hurt to have a networking certification or two before you attempt to configure most IP PBXs.

Try Avaya's One-X Quick Edition. It's the first truly do-it-yourself IP PBX any entrepreneur can set up in about 10 min-utes. The secret sauce is a mixture of peer-to-peer networking and Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP. They shortcut the client/server complexity of most PBXs, making installation just two steps.

Step 1: Plug one end of a Cat 5 cable into Quick Edition's Ethernet switch or other port on your wired network, and plug the other end into an Avaya desk set. Step 2: Rest while the phone configures itself, picks an IP address, and prompts you for a station name and password. My first phone took six minutes to install; the second, less than two minutes. Schedule two minutes for each desk set you add up to the network limit of 20.

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