sillejo

CME is a good small office option, more features out of the box than full CM, but much much much less scalable. There are a lot of 3rd party hooks to CME, surprisingly, But unless you have some IOS router jocks that want to learn phones, I would be hesitant as well. IF you want to start a CM practice from scratch (i.e. not hiring any experienced guys) then marry an IOS guy and a Server guy as a team. Making one guy learn it all will just be asking for trouble.

On the flip side, we have seen 2 or 3 horrid NEC installs that got scaled way out of their sweet spot where we came in with CM and cleaned house. There was no partner, it was NEC guys in there and the call Quality out of the hybrid was terrible. THey couldn't honor or mark the QoS correctly and it killed them.

Avaya has a good Enterprise product and does really well, but have a harder time in a shop that want's all one vendor for networking and telephony, personally I think it can be done in a blended environment and Avaya does a decent job of it.

My experience is that CME can work great, but setting it up is NOT intuitive and very hard the first few times, especially without training. We had 3 guys with 8 years of Cisco IP Tel and IOS experience and we still went way over hours. The features were killer.

UM - they have a newer Unity Product line that seems to have all the features everyone wants, plus is not Exchange dependant, but we have not put one in yet. The VM that is CUE is actually very good for small office, comes with 2 Auto Attendants and you can redo your own scripts with the scripting tool (very intuitive java beans).

hope this helps, good luck

ps - what size are your typical clients?

__________________
Deus ex machina

fcox3rd

Thanks for your input. Are typical clients are from 10 to 70 on average.

sillejo

In that case you are right in the CME/CUE sweet spot. See if you can get a hold of an older 2800 series unit with the CUE module, then load it up and borrow a couple phones from Cisco. This will show you how the initial set-up works and then what features are Web configurable and which are IOS commands.

good luck.

__________________
Deus ex machina

sillejo

I would also guess then that you are a Cisco partner but mostly do PIX, single router and 2900/3700 series switches at the client sites?

If this is true then consolidating the phone system with CME will allow you to have the client spend their money on redundancy instead of more phone system infrastructure equipment. This might be a good play at several clients looking to upgrade data infrastructure.

Make sure there is plenty of planning in the phone system. Having Avaya NEC experienced guys I'm sure you already know this, but don't let the data guys run the first few projects, they won't take care of the call routing and user handsets carefully enough. It's not their core interest and will get missed.

__________________
Deus ex machina

fcox3rd

Tou are correct on this. Besides the unified messaging, the biggest concern I have with CME is linking other sites together. We have several small customers that have multiple sites linked together and NEC has lots of freature transparancy even on their key systems. I hate to lose that.

sillejo

So the main NEC links out to remote sites, or you have disparate NEC's linked together across sites?

What kind of feature transparency are you seeing, exactly?

__________________
Deus ex machina

fcox3rd

We have units at each site, but they have lots of feature transparancy. This is what their key systems support between sites.
 Call Forwarding – All Calls - K-CCIS
 Call Forwarding – Busy/No Answer - K-CCIS
 Call Transfer – All Calls - K-CCIS
 Calling Name Display - K-CCIS
 Calling Number Display - K-CCIS
 Centralized Billing - K-CCIS
 Centralized BLF (K-CCIS)

 Centralized Day/Night Mode Change (K-CCIS)
 Dial Access to Attendant (K-CCIS)
 Direct Inward Dialing - K-CCIS
 Dual Hold - K-CCIS
 Elapsed Time Display - K-CCIS
 Flexible Numbering of Stations - K-CCIS
 Hands-Free Answerback - K-CCIS
 Hot Line - K-CCIS
 Link Reconnect - K-CCIS
 Multiple Call Forwarding – All Calls - K-CCIS
 Multiple Call Forwarding – Busy/No Answer - K-CCIS
 Paging Access - K-CCIS
 Station-to-Station Calling - K-CCIS
 Uniform Numbering Plan - K-CCIS
 Voice Call - K-CCIS
 Voice Mail Integration - K-CCIS **

Nec's PBX's support alot more. We like Cisco, but want to make sure we are making the correct decision.

sillejo

So how many total phones are there? These features are all pretty basic. Some of them I am not sure how they are site transparent, like Elapsed Time display, and DID. Some of them are more dependant on the type of link and not so much the system like Calling Name display and Calling Number Display.

It also seems like you could put in Full blown CM for multiple sites and then all these features would be inherint without the worry of transparency. You can set up CM to be as partitioned or as inclusive as you need, even to the degree that some sites can or cannot reach others.

CME is a bit different, but once you interlink 3 or 4 CME's then maybe the full CM play would be a better choice.

Billing is 3rd party regardless. CM has a basic package, but for any real features in billing (esp flexibility in reports) then you need a good 3rd party app.

__________________
Deus ex machina

fcox3rd

The problem is that we are not going to go full blown CM certified. Are company is not ready to put up that kind of money with Cisco yet. We don't feel we can get the return yet in our market. This is why we are going to have to go only cme for now. I appreciate all of your input so far.