A couple weeks back, I was part of a demo or sales pitch for a potential client who was considering installing a ShoreTel system. This client used to be a a very large Oil & Gas company but has since downsized to less than 50 people, one of which was the head IT guy, who we were presenting for. Not being knowledgeable enough with the ShoreTel system to run with the demo by myself, I mostly kept quiet and just listened to Ben (my Project Manager) pitch the product. When it was time for Q&A, the IT guy, also named Ben, had a lot of tough questions for us; one that had us stumped, was when he asked about support for Secure Socket Layer (SSL) when logging into the Administration interface. A very reasonable question, but with me being the only technical guy, and being without the knowledge, we had to do some research before we could give him an answer; and I was the one to find out.
After spending an afternoon on Google, I wasn't finding any clear answers, I was even starting to lose faith in the product and thinking maybe it did not have the support, but even Cisco's CUCM has https on by default!
Eventually, I started seeing the bigger picture of it, unlike CUCM which is an all in one appliance, ShoreTel requires you install Microsoft IIS before installing the server. I did some more Googling and found a document on how to enable SSL on the IIS Server. After installing a Certificate Authority, certificates, reconfiguring the website in IIS to require SSL 128-bit encryption, I tested it out and could confidently reply with Yes, the ShoreTel will support encrypted SSL sessions.
What a week that was!
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