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Cisco Callmanager

Written by Wendell E. Jaynes    Sunday, 08 March 2009

As with the 3Com NBX 100, the Cisco product uses quality of service settings to ensure voice quality on a busy LAN. Unlike the NBX phones, the Cisco IP phones are NetMeeting enabled. This means that you can perform NetMeeting tasks, such as video conferencing and application sharing, simply by hitting a button on your Cisco phone. The phones are available in 12- and 30-feature button versions for $550 and $650 (list), respectively. Because the system will work with almost any trunk line gateway, it is fairly scalable; you can populate a single LAN with several hundred IP phones. As with the 3Com NBX phones, the Cisco IP phones provide dual 10-Mbps Ethernet ports that can take a phone and a client PC to the same wall jack. The CallManager costs $14,995 list and is sold separately from the IP phones. The software runs on Windows NT and requires Microsoft Internet Information Server to access the menu via a standard browser. We found it easy to install the IP phones and set up the users. Each phone includes a DHCP client that can automatically an address. On the administrator side, all we had to do was provide a range of IP addresses for the phones. We found it easy to assign a phone number and a user name to each phone. The bundled voice mail system was also easy to set up, and the user can perform several tasks using the handset, including recording a message and setting up the voice mailbox. As do all of the products we reviewed except the Mitel system, the CallManager lets you forward any voice mail you receive to an SMTP e-mail address. The message is recorded and saved as a WAV file, which the e-mail recipient can open and listen to. The administration utility is fairly straightforward, mainly because the product lacks detailed user control settings. The CallManager software will integrate with any LDAP-compliant database, so you can import user information into your phone directory.

Last Updated ( Sunday, 08 March 2009 )

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