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

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.