We are a CCM4 shop similar to your (dozen offices, central management), and I play with * to be familiar with the options available.
Your pros/cons are pretty accurate. A few points though- CCM5 will run on a unix-like platform. SIP support is initital and for trunking only. While the web management is not optimal, it does permit us to allow our helpdesk staff to perform moves/adds/changes with no fear that they'll screw up the critical gateway/dialplan configuration. I suspect that as RealTime matures this will change. Good support is relative. I've found excellent engineers and less than excellent. Troubleshooting is a major pain, as is the fact that the different components of the Cisco platform are on different development cycles. To get support for one new feature might mean upgrading half a dozen unrelated components, then chasing the bugs through half a dozen different support orginizations. So it comes down to what you company can afford and the experience of the staff assigned to support it. I can manage either, but the bulk of my coworkers could not manage * and I have much better things to do with my time to manage day to day phone operations. Before anyone takes this as an * flame, it is not. If I had the development skills, or could convince the powers to be to assign a couple web developers to me, I'd contribute the changes I think would help simplify day to day operations. Dan -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Asterisk Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2005 9:37 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Call Manager or Asterisk Hello list. No intention to start a flamewar here but I would really like opinions from those who know both the Cisco and Asterisk system. I'm working for a company with 15 offices in 11 countries, offices are relatively small (3-20 people each) and most of them have a Cisco 1760 Router installed with Call manager express (CME) and 1-3 ISDN lines (2-6 simultaneous calls). Cisco Call Manager Pros: Redundancy Centralised phone config Good support Leading edge ( is it ? ) Cons: Windows based Expensive Hard to configure (in our environment) Takes time to solve problems. Asterisk Pros Flexibility Cheap Text based configuration Open source Many protocols Simple debugging (compared to CCM4) variety of softphone solutions license policy support Cons Central configuration is harder than in CCM Redundancy has to be scripted Still hearing that the SIP implementation is not fully complete (is this right). Some of the points above apply to our solution only, so there might be other perspectives to the problem. However I would be very grateful to get some comments, and even if somebody else has a similar setup with Asterisk and Cisco CME working together, or Global company with VOIP (we have 15 offices in 11 countries quite evenly distributed around the globe.) Hoping for a good, fair and interesting discussion. Regards, Maron _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
