Locating Your Phone System: Whats in Your Closet?

Locating Your Phone System: What’s in Your Closet?

Before you can maintain, upgrade, or replace your phone system, you need to find it. If you are in charge of the phones in your office, take a field trip to get to know your phone system. Or talk to the hardware vendor that takes care of your phone system and find out where the system lives.

Phone systems are generally shoehorned into a small broom closet somewhere in the office, or possibly even farther afield. You should know how to get to the phone closet by using the most direct route possible in the event of a telecommunications crisis. If you have a larger company, the phone system may even be sitting comfortably in a corner of the room that houses the company’s computer servers.

 Tip  If nobody has any clue where your phone system is stashed, you need to follow the cabling from your phone to the point where it meets up with all the other phone lines and becomes an indistinguishable mass of wires. That mass ties into a large panel or a large plastic or metal box with pretty green and yellow lights flashing on it. When you see this, you have probably arrived at your phone closet.

 Remember  Phone rooms are frequently locked to prevent corporate espionage or someone from backing up into the wiring blocks with a wrench, taking out ten people’s lines in the process. If your company does lock the phone closet, make sure you know where the key is so that you won’t be scrambling when you need to get into it to check things out.