[Asterisk-Users] Call Manager or Asterisk

[Dan Austin]

We are a CCM4 shop similar to your (dozen offices, central
management), and I play with * to be familiar with the options
available.

Your pros/cons are pretty accurate.  A few points though-

CCM5 will run on a unix-like platform.  SIP support is initital
and for trunking only.  While the web management is not
optimal, it does permit us to allow our helpdesk staff to perform
moves/adds/changes with no fear that they'll screw up the critical
gateway/dialplan configuration.  I suspect that as RealTime
matures this will change.

Good support is relative.  I've found excellent engineers and
less than excellent.  Troubleshooting is a major pain, as is the
fact that the different components of the Cisco platform are on
different development cycles.  To get support for one new feature
might mean upgrading half a dozen unrelated components, then
chasing the bugs through half a dozen different support orginizations.

So it comes down to what you company can afford and the experience
of the staff assigned to support it.  I can manage either, but the
bulk of my coworkers could not manage * and I have much better things
to do with my time to manage day to day phone operations.

Before anyone takes this as an * flame, it is not.  If I had the
development skills, or could convince the powers to be to assign
a couple web developers to me, I'd contribute the changes I think
would help simplify day to day operations.

Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Asterisk
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2005 9:37 AM
To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Call Manager or Asterisk

Hello list.

  No intention to start a flamewar here but I would really like opinions

from those who know both the Cisco and Asterisk system.  I'm working for

a company with 15 offices in 11 countries, offices are relatively small 
(3-20 people each) and most of them have a Cisco 1760 Router installed 
with Call manager express (CME) and 1-3 ISDN lines (2-6 simultaneous
calls).

   Cisco Call Manager
   Pros:
   Redundancy
   Centralised phone config
   Good support
   Leading edge ( is it ? )

   Cons:
   Windows based
   Expensive
   Hard to configure (in our environment)
   Takes time to solve problems.

   Asterisk
   Pros
   Flexibility
   Cheap
   Text based configuration
   Open source
   Many protocols
   Simple debugging (compared to CCM4)
   variety of softphone solutions
   license policy
   support

   Cons
   Central configuration is harder than in CCM
   Redundancy has to be scripted
   Still hearing that the SIP implementation is not fully complete (is 
this right).


   Some of the points above apply to our solution only, so there might
be
   other perspectives to the problem.  However I would be very grateful 
to get some comments, and even if somebody else has a similar setup with

Asterisk and Cisco CME working together, or Global company with VOIP (we

have 15 offices in 11 countries quite evenly distributed around the
globe.)

Hoping for a good, fair and interesting discussion.

Regards,

Maron
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