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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Overall I have been impressed with Cisco
CallManager and Unity. There have been things which I have not been pleased
with, but let's be serious, every vendor/product has their weaknesses. If you
are migrating from an existing solution to a new solution, then I would strongly
suggest evaluating what your current system can do now and what the proposed
system can do very carefully. Take promises of features with a grain of salt and
don't expect those to come to fruition any time soon - plan on deploying what
you can see in front of you. And don't underestimate the importance of any one
feature - or in our case any one person that might be using that feature. ;)
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>There are many features that are common place in
other PBXs that for some reason are not in the Cisco product, e.g. forwarding
from secondary lines and PLARs, and require additional steps and or programming
to make things work. In the case of forwarding secondary lines they will point
you to the user's phone configuration web page - since there is a solution,
there has been little effort to including that as a feature. In the case of a
PLAR, you have to create a special class of service for that phone which only
contains one dialable pattern - a lot of work if you have a lot of PLARs with
different destinations. Other systems have a dialdown field parameter. In
actuality, many of the features you might need require seperate classes of
service definitions to make them work. That's one of the things that I don't
like. Not scalable in my opinion.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The other thing I've found difficult to deal with
is the lack of documented changes in the upgrade cycle. There are some
documented changes but many are missing. Phone upgrades in particular seem to
change quite a bit of the asthetics of the phone without any sort of
documentation whatsoever! Enterprise and System Parameter changes are not
documented in new releases so you have to sort through them to see what might be
missing or added - with over 300 of them, it is time consuming. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Your deployment is similar to ours, except ours is
a central campus with ~7500 phones. We've deployed 6 servers - publisher,
TFTPserver and four subscribers, two each for our distinct groups - business and
residence. An upgrade can take the better part of the whole day.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I'm sure others will join in in the discussion.....
;)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>-----
-----<BR>Lelio Fulgenzi,
B.A.
<A href="mailto:lelio@uoguelph.ca.eh">lelio@uoguelph.ca.eh</A><BR>Network
Analyst (CCS)<BR>University of
Guelph
FAX:(519) 767-1060 JNHN<BR>Guelph, Ontario N1G
2W1
TEL:(519) 824-4120
x56354<BR>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^<BR>mob
lawyer: your people insulted my brother.<BR>dr. house: what? romano in the
parmesan cheese shaker again?</DIV>
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style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=stephengustafson@gmail.com
href="mailto:stephengustafson@gmail.com">Steve G</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=cisco-voip@puck.nether.net
href="mailto:cisco-voip@puck.nether.net">cisco-voip@puck.nether.net</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, May 28, 2005 12:24
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [cisco-voip] Nortel vs. Cisco IP
Telephony deployment</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Hi Again,</DIV>
<DIV> Does anyone have experience with comparing
Nortel's VoIP solutions with Cisco's? I am currently evaluating the two
beasts and so far have only got my hands on Cisco's CCM 4.0(1) and a Unity
Server. I must say they are pretty slick products. I have no
experience with Nortel equipment as of yet, and would like to know if there
are any caveats to either one that would rule it out of the comparison. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Background:</DIV>
<DIV>Deployment size will be 10,000+ phones at the end of the project.</DIV>
<DIV>All Cisco Data network is existing.</DIV>
<DIV>40 WAN locations (Frame Relay) would talk to a Centralized CP and have
SRST enabled routers.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Any help would be great. +s and -s of the two products would be
appreciated.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Steve</DIV>
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