Working with end users who were lawyers complicated matters because of the demands of their jobs at all hours, he said. "I got e-mails and nasty calls from lawyers who said they couldn't make a long distance call," Kolb recalled. "We'd check the VOIP server and it would be fine. No smoke would be coming out, but the voice services would be stopped. It was not a pleasant time for us."

Early into the rollout, "we had considered scrapping the entire US$750,000 VOIP investment," Kolb said.

Enter Compuware Corp., a Detroit-based application management software vendor. Kolb remembered talking to Compuware before implementing the VOIP system, but didn't think he'd need Compuware's management software then.

After implementing the Compuware Vantage software, the law firm saw a fast improvement in VOIP service, he said. "We quickly went from getting 50 problem calls a day from users calling me names to maybe only five, all about other areas of IT," Kolb said. "We implemented this strictly out of my need for sanity. My hair is growing back now. I was truly at my wit's end and even told my boss at one point that I'd had enough" of the problems.

In all, he said the law firm has invested "less than $100,000" for the Compuware software, which quickly paid for itself because he did not have to pay $100,000 for a network engineer who would monitor traffic and keep things in the VOIP system running.