We are replacing a phone system..corporate and 32 remote small offices..corporate is our primary focus..the remote sites would come on-line when we can ensure qos.. We are down to three cisco, asterisk, shoretel. I am interested in hearing about the asterisk soltuion. I like it but we have a looming call center possibility makes the open source a ? .. we do ahve a asterisk solutions providor we are working with..
150 phone corporate, 150 across 36 sites..
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I have been running an asterisk system for our company comprising of 40 phones for about 16 months without any problems.
Cisco is very good. They are probably the most expensive but you get probably the nicest phones and a dedicated system.
With Asterisk you get a system where you have a much finer control on how it works. The benefit of this is that you can get it to do practically everything that you would want but you do need more expertise to configure it.
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by: benhansonPosted on 2007-06-24 at 20:51:16ID: 19353311
Cisco system is damn expensive, but works damn well. So for me it would really come down to cost. Can you afford to outlay for a Cisco setup, and afford yearly service contract costs? Service contract is optional, but it sure is nice to be able to roll out new versions with new features without having to justify another big purchase. Having Cisco tech support for a fallback is a nice perk too. That said, I haven't had much need for tech support since Unity(voicemail) version 3.1(5).
I have about 300 users, with 200 at our core site, and 100 spread across about 10 sites. Before we moved to Cisco Callmanager(Unified Communications Manger) we had an assembly of aging PBX's. We migrated the 2 biggest sites the first year, and the rest slowly over the next 3 years as PBX's were obsoleted. After the initial setup of call processing servers, individual site rollouts were very easy. The biggest difficulty is hammering down a call plan from the users. Excluding rollout time, taking on the phone system (PBX was "managed" by someone in the purchasing department), we've added no personnel and support probably takes less than an hour or two a month(including averaged in time for system upgrades).
From what I can see, the best part of the Cisco setup is being able to use MGCP for gateway config. In my experience, it is way easier to setup MGCP gateways than H.323 gateways. With MGCP there is almost nothing to config on the router.
On the flip side, with 36 remotes, you could guinea pig one as an asterisk site. Just pick the site with the oldest PBX.