VoIP Management Support for Small Businesses VoIP has evolved to a point where businesses need to develop a formal approach to VoIP management. By developing a management approach, businesses can pursue large production deployments. VoIP management strategies should include: 1) Planning and assessing. This phase is to determine whether the network infrastructure is sufficient to support telephony and if upgrades in the network are required. 2) Pre-deployment testing. Stimulating the production environment is essential. Network managers should use active testing tools to generate video, synthetic voice and data traffic. Measuring the quality, network and protocol performance become part of the VoIP management program. Network managers should also use passive monitoring to gauge their ability to monitor the voice quality and the infrastructure. 3) Ongoing operations. Monitoring the production environment is key in VoIP management. Network managers should also assess performance of the network and identify faults. Active testing for service assurance and passive monitoring for performance troubleshooting needs to be conducted regularly. 4) Optimization. Managers need to gather data from all available sources to generate reports. Managers should use this information to assess the performance of the infrastructure. This is a continuation of the pre-deployment testing. Testing the production environment to ensure the network supports increase traffic and new applications is important in VoIP management. Managers must optimize capacity of IP networks, ports, gateways and PSTN interconnects. Having a solid VoIP management plan is crucial in maximizing the capabilities VoIP technologies can bring to your business.