[asterisk-users] Whcih phones are better for mass deployment

[Tim St. Pierre]

I'll speak on the Aastra, since that is what I know, although most of this 
applies to Polycom as well.

There is no windows software needed at all.  Personally, I haven't been a 
Microsoft customer in more than half a decade.  Their operating systems are 
not appropriate for telecom applications.  You can do all your configuration 
with a text editor.  This is good for several reasons:

1) You can administer the phone config directly on the server over an ssh 
connection.

2) A shell script can create phone config files.  I have a shell script that 
appends to extensions.conf, sip.conf, voicemail.conf, and creates a phone 
config file.  You can automate things very easily this way.

3) Since there is only one setting to put into the phone to use the remote 
config, a customer can be talked through a factory reset and reset the server 
address over the phone if they really screw things up.  You can have an 
inventory of phones with your config server address already set.  All you 
need is the phone MAC address, and you can build a config file.  This means 
that you could send phones to customers without them having decided what to 
do with them yet.  

4) These phones are reliable and well constructed.  They will require less 
maintenance, and will last longer.

5) They have features that are appropriate to a business environment.

6) They will usually find their way around a NAT firewall, so they are 
essential plug-and-play at the customer site.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

-Tim


On September 9, 2006 23:01, Zeeshan Zakaria wrote:
> Can you explain a little bit what make them better for mass deployment. Do
> they have Windows based software to communicate with all the installed
> phones and upgrade them and also to remotely monitor them. Is there a
> separate cost for these software tools or are they free?

-- 
Tim St. Pierre

IP telephony specialist
sip://5101@communicatefreely.net
Toronto: 647 722 6930
Toll-Free 1 888 488 6940
tim at communicatefreely.net
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