On Sep 9, 2004, at 9:53 AM, Matt G wrote:
I've been asked to determine which phones our organization should go with. And I've narrowed it down to the Polycom IP500 or the Cisco 7940.
From my travels through google, it's hard to find a definitive comparison of the two phones. So I thought I would ask the people that have probably used both.
From what I can tell, the only major benefit the Cisco has over the Polycom is
* 24 ring tones
* XML support
* Help Button
* Larger Screen (is this true? 2x24 vs the 160x80 on the polycom)
The screen on the Cisco isn't very big, either--192x96 or so, if I remember correctly. I'm running 6.3 on my 7940, and I haven't seen the ability to do anything interesting with ringtones. In theory, you can feed new tones to it, but you can't use them for ALERT_INFO-driven distinctive ringing. The XML support is okay, but rumors suggest that the newest Polycom firmware supports something very close to XHTML, which would be a lot more powerful then Cisco's sparsely-documented XML dialect.
Another question that came up while discussing the Cisco phones was if the 24 ring tones are 'assignable' (ie, user calls in with callerid saying 'sales' and it rings a certain way, if they call in with callerid saying 'tech support' it rings something else). I couldn't find any information on this on google, so if anyone has the answer to this that would be great.
I don't think it can do that. You can set ALERT_INFO in Asterisk to Bellcore-drX, where X is 1..5, and the phone will ring slightly differently, but that may or may not be good enough for your purposes.
Other than that, the polycom seems to have all the features we want, and according to the wiki works quite well with asterisk and has many features enabled that seem pretty interesting (MWI, etc). The Cisco's on the other hand seem less straightforward to configure and not as much talk on the wiki, nor support.
MWI works just fine on the 7940, so I'm not sure that I'd count that as an advantage for the Polycom.
I haven't seen a Polycom in person, but I haven't heard anything bad about them. My 7940 works well, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it, but for the money, the Polycom is quite likely a better phone. I didn't find the 7940 to be particularly difficult to configure, *EXCEPT* for the initial installation of the SIP firmware. It's a multi-step upgrade, because you can't directly upgrade from the SCCP image that it ships with to a modern SIP image. Once you get past that, it isn't too bad, particularly if you have multiple phones.
Scott
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