[Asterisk-Users] replacing cisco callmanager with asterisk?

[Chad Whitten]

ive had enough of cisco unity and microsoft exchange and im looking for 
alternatives to our voip system.  right now, we have 3 cisco callmanagers, 1 
cisco ip icd system, and 1 cisco unity voicemail system.  all phones are 
cisco 7940/7960's and some ata186/188's.  voice gateways are cisco vg200's 
with pri cards (5 total).  im running h323 on the gateways and phones are of 
course using the cisco skinny protocol.  there are about 300 phones on this 
system scattered across 12 different locations.  i have some xml services 
configured on the phones (rss newsfeeds, phonebook, etc).

getting sip images for the phones will be no problem.  i have 4 good machines 
i could use for the asterisk pbx (dell's with 512 meg of ram, p3 900 mhz 
procs) and ive got a good bit of linux experience (all our other servers are 
linux, only the cisco callmanagers run win2k here).

the feature list for asterisk is pretty much in line with what we get with 
callmanager - call waiting, transfer, park, conference, hold, pickup, DID, 
etc.  

my main questions are the gateways - will those work with asterisk?  the vg200 
supports h323 and mgcp.  i would rather use mgcp even though im not using it 
now.

also, what about the acd functionality of asterisk?  we have two acd groups 
now with at most 5 members in each logged in at a given time.  call 
distribution is round robin and cisco does have some nice call reporting 
features with the icd software.




-- 
Chad Whitten
Network/Systems Administrator
cwhitten at nexband.com
601-944-4801 Phone