Cisco Unified Communications Manager

Call Manager - Good for medium and large companies

Kommentare: In general I liked it.
I stayed in version 11.5 and it works very well, it still has support and I can upgrade phone firmwares without problem.
I think I will stick with this version for a bit longer before migrating to a subscription scheme with the new licensing.

Vorteile:

The versatility of the tool is what we like the most. It supports all protocols and is easy to integrate with third parties. Policies can be created very easily and user control is simplified with the integration to LDAP.

Nachteile:

Being able to upgrade software and IOS is no longer so simple. The new version 12 and 14 no longer support perpetual licensing. I think this is something that will affect small clients and will be very limited in the future.

Awesome platform for communication

Kommentare: Wonderful IPT plaform for corporate/ business requirements that must ensure a reliable and secure communication platform. It matches the standard/ typical use cases for phone communications, and it can be scaled up to meet more complex requirements such as intelligent call routing/ multi-channel interaction (advanced contact center us cases). The implementation of the on-prem Cisco gateway and physical phones is easy. You may also just select the cloud-based service (Cisco Webex app on your PC) in case you are not interested in increasing the 'physical footprint/ hardware'.

Vorteile:

Very professional/ corporate-oriented portfolio. Very nice quality (audio) and products evolution on the last years. Great integrations with Cisco UCCX/ Finesse for contact center/ intelligent call routing and multi-channel support. Easy to deploy. Robust solution for business environments.

Nachteile:

Licensing tiering is sometimes complex to comprehend. Support contracts a bit too expensive in some ocassions.

Robust product set with strong functionality but a lot to learn

Kommentare: Great way to monitor and manage on-premise phone systems without paying a substantial fee to a consultant/product provider for management. Allows for a very robust amount of phone service management and integrate with several other third-party products for additional tools (have their own quirks and requirements for management and account permissions). All around great, and very matured, product for voice systems management.

Vorteile:

- Extremely robust feature set with depth in configuration and customization. - Diversified technology with a strong security interface. - Configuration rich interfaces with strong delineation of permission sets and redirects. - Administrative overhead easily reduced by account permissions sets

Nachteile:

- So robust can feel a bit overwhelming (version specific) - Deployment time frames can be long from purchase to full production implementation (good support though) - More hardware specific as far as integration than some other agnostic products.

More than just VoIP - A Powerful UC and Collaboration Suite

Vorteile:

Cisco Unified Communications Manager and its associated products (Unity Connection voicemail, Contact Center Express, etc.) provide a full suite of unified communications and collaboration capabilities. The solution can scale to from SMB to large enterprise and is highly flexible, allowing it to accommodate a wide range of business needs. The latest versions transition both voice and video communication onto a unified platform to drive the ubiquity of video adoption and impact the speed of business. Support for a wide range of endpoints, including PC, tablet, and mobile devices, allows for the adoption of collaboration tools by remote and mobile workers. The product is powerful and lends itself easily to fulfilling business goals.

Nachteile:

One of the primary negatives about Cisco UCM would be the cost, especially at smaller scales and when competing against a legacy TDM solution. Even for businesses that are driven primarily by cost though, the additional benefits such as integrated instant messaging, point to point video, and mobile device integration may prove to be enough of a differentiator to justify the extra expense. Organizations that are interested in managing their own solution will typically need to hire or have on staff a fairly high level engineer, though most IT people would be capable of learning how to handle at least basic moves, adds, and changes. The importance of solid solution architecture and maintenance can not be overstated enough.

Enterprise Banking VoIP Solution

Kommentare: We have a very complex design of 4 clusters implementing 10 digit dialing scheme for everything nationwide. We were able to accomplish this with CUCM and it's extremely granular configuration ability.

Vorteile:

I have been administering Unified Communications Manager for almost 10 years . The stability of CUCM is unrivaled. The uptime of our voice environment in the last 4 years has been over 99.99% with the only downtime being due to patch/security updates and maintenance. I sleep well at night knowing that our environment is stable.

Nachteile:

The only complaints that I've had about CUCM have all been addressed in newer versions. The complexity of licensing was addressed with Enterprise License Manager. The difficulty of upgrades was addressed with Prime Collaboration Deployment. It's very difficult to find any cons with the current version of CUCM.