<div>Thanks for the reply Lelio. Today we are a Nortel PBX shop, so Nortel is deffinatly a player. Perhaps the largest + that Cisco has going for them is</div>
<div>their presence on a weekly bassis. By making hardware readilly available and coming on site every week to help with LAB and design puts them</div>
<div> way ahead. I can't remember the last time a Nortel Rep was at our location to see how they can sell us products in the future. Cisco may not be</div>
<div> the absolute best in any 1 area, but they will support the heck out of their products. At least that is my experience.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Steve</div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<hr>
</div><pre>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. ;)
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure others will join in in the discussion..... ;)
----- -----
Lelio Fulgenzi, B.A. <a href="https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip">lelio at uoguelph.ca.eh</a>
Network Analyst (CCS)
University of Guelph FAX:(519) 767-1060 JNHN
Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1 TEL:(519) 824-4120 x56354
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----- Original Message -----
From: Steve G
To: <a href="https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip">cisco-voip at puck.nether.net</a>
Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2005 12:24 PM
Subject: [cisco-voip] Nortel vs. Cisco IP Telephony deployment
Hi Again,
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.
Background:
Deployment size will be 10,000+ phones at the end of the project.
All Cisco Data network is existing.
40 WAN locations (Frame Relay) would talk to a Centralized CP and have SRST enabled routers.
Any help would be great. +s and -s of the two products would be appreciated.
Steve
</pre>