For the phones I would make sure your telephony switch supports VoIP handsets and wire anywhere you expect to have a telephone with PoE. All the VoIP phones I've used have a built in switch so you can plug the user's workstation into the phone. Newer phones will have a gigabit switch. I've done testing with Avaya and Cisco phones and I couldn't find any bandwidth limits when plugged into the phone vs. straight into the wall jack. It's a great setup because you don't need power dongles or redundant wiring for the phones. Each desk has one jack for voice and data.

Check the power draw from the phones and make sure your switch can provide enough. I've seen PoE switches that can't light up every port because some devices were pulling too much power. Current-generation phones seem to take far less power than they did a couple of years ago unless they have big fancy LCD screens.

This may require an upgrade to your PBX though, which can be expensive. For the size organization you're talking about (or for just about any size, depending on specific features you need) going with Asterisk might be a great idea. You get free conference bridge support, voice mail, menuing, etc. and can perhaps ditch the service contract you're paying right now. You can find IP phone service as well or if you want to stick with T1s (or copper if it's cheaper), Digium sells hardware to support that which is generally pretty affordable.

And, unrelated to the phones, you might want to put LAN drops in the ceiling throughout the office for wireless access points.

I'm pretty freaking tired of all this "advice" that you need this protection for Windows machines.

Why should I have a firewall? I have a NAT router (hardware firewall).
Why should I have antispyware? I know what I'm downloading.
Why should I have antivirus?
- I don't download cracks. When I DO need to use a crack I upload it to virustotal and then run it in a virtual machine.
- I run IE7 and Firefox. Although neither are perfectly secure I don't make it a habit to go to Russian warez sites.

Dear god, SOMEONE explain to me why any reasonable user should need this resource-hogging crap?

I thought their new ToS was pretty crappy, so I'm glad to see they've amended it - better still that they've actually apologized.

Now how about an apology for illegally spying on U.S. citizens?

You should have called your credit card company and cancelled the payment *to paypal* citing the fraud.

Oh, I know. I almost always do. Two things about this auction: 1) I just cleared out my junk and had a $800 balance in my paypal account. 2) I clicked through the "are you sure you don't want to pay by bank account" screen in the wrong way, after selecting my credit card for the remaining $200. (I swear they've reversed the yes/no buttons just to catch people like me.) Next time, I'll cash out and use my credit card instead.

So, it was the perfect storm of eBay scammery. Obviously, that gave me extra incentive to track the guy down. Thank God he was an idiot. When I actually said to him, "Now I know you're lying to me, this email has exactly the same originating IP address as the other one you sent me as [fake ebay name]" He said, "You can't read my IP, I'm behind a firewall!!!" Oops.

Cory