asterisk users - Oct 2007 - Cisco Phones

For those of you running Cisco phones, did you start out with a Cisco
CallManager and move to Asterisk? And if you did switch do you find that
you or your users are missing features they once had? How have you
handle the issue? 

Thanks

 

Roy Anciso 

Director of Technology

Manistee Intermediate School District

1710 Merkey Road

Manistee, MI 49660

Ph: 231-723-4264

Fx: 231-723-1690

roy at manistee.org

 

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Roy,

While there is a difference in the feature set provided by the
SIP and Skinny images for the Cisco phones, the loss is not
appreciable in my view.  There are some differences in interface
aesthetics as well.

The main problem tends to be that CallManager implements various
required services in an integrated manner, while their full-featured
accommodation in Asterisk environments requires the composition and
amalgamation of various disparate services that don't necessarily
talk to each other.  XML directory services are an example of this.

Another is autoprovisioning;  the phones don't really do well with being 
manually provisioned, and expect to be provisioned via TFTP in a 
CallManager environment. CallManager's TFTP server is integrated, so that 
phone settings can be configured from within the management portal; 
indeed, I believe it is even possible to push out settings to the phone 
without rebooting it or having it download a new config via TFTP, although 
I may be wrong.

Using them with Asterisk requires that you connect all of these different
applications together and make them work from one basic configuration set.
That is the primary pain from a business and organisational standpoint.

-- Alex

--
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web    : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel    : +1-678-954-0670
Direct : +1-678-954-0671