Cisco Unified Communications Manager

Vorteile

The easiest way to manage users from single console. It is very compatible and easy to integrate with all types of other voice softwares.

Nachteile

Its console is user friendly but the relations between user creation and the phone ID assignment is difficult to understand.

Vorteile

The versatility of the tool is what we like the most. It supports all protocols and is easy to integrate with third parties. Policies can be created very easily and user control is simplified with the integration to LDAP.

Nachteile

Being able to upgrade software and IOS is no longer so simple.
The new version 12 and 14 no longer support perpetual licensing.
I think this is something that will affect small clients and will be very limited in the future.

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Gründe für den Wechsel zu Cisco Unified Communications Manager

Vorteile

I will have to admit that as long as you have a service contract with Cisco, they have excellent customer service. They've resolved many issues for us that were mission critical. But this is strictly for the CUCM itself. If you need help with specific physical phones, that requires a separate service contract and they will NOT help you.

Nachteile

I do not like that there is no consistent way in knowing which DID phone numbers have already been used and which ones are available. The biggest issue I have is when I think a phone number is available to assign to staff person, but often times that same number is being used as a voicemail box only for messages. Since the voicemail system is different, I have to constantly check both systems as well as a spreadsheet we have to ensure the phone number I'm assigning is actually available for use. Plus, we have several different call blocks so I never know which prefix goes with which extension. CUCM does not show the full phone number, only the last 4 digits. So unless you have running documentation knowing all the phone numbers in your call blocks, it's not very intuitive.

Vorteile

Very professional/ corporate-oriented portfolio.
Very nice quality (audio) and products evolution on the last years.
Great integrations with Cisco UCCX/ Finesse for contact center/ intelligent call routing and multi-channel support.
Easy to deploy.
Robust solution for business environments.

Nachteile

Licensing tiering is sometimes complex to comprehend.
Support contracts a bit too expensive in some ocassions.

Vorteile

I like most about CUCM are its robust of advanced telephony features including call control, voice and video conferencing, mobility and more can meet the diverse communication needs of large enterprises. And I also love its high reliability and stability ensuring minimal downtime and consistent service quality.

Nachteile

A little bit complexity in configuration and management than other vendors.

Vorteile

I have been administering Unified Communications Manager for almost 10 years . The stability of CUCM is unrivaled. The uptime of our voice environment in the last 4 years has been over 99.99% with the only downtime being due to patch/security updates and maintenance. I sleep well at night knowing that our environment is stable.

Nachteile

The only complaints that I've had about CUCM have all been addressed in newer versions. The complexity of licensing was addressed with Enterprise License Manager. The difficulty of upgrades was addressed with Prime Collaboration Deployment. It's very difficult to find any cons with the current version of CUCM.

Vorteile

The best thing about Cisco Unified Comminication Manager is the possibility of having any type of phone registered even from third parties. It brings many features that help users to move in and out of the company. It also allows you to incorporate collaboration tools, Video Conference, Voice Mail, etc. All integrated

Nachteile

Some traditional functions of telephone exchanges do not have them, however it is possible to incorporate them but with the development of third parties.

Vorteile

It's a good product, high quality, and very robust security-wise, it has all the tools and functionalities for your communication needs, I used it personally for a Call Center and I had little to no downtime.

Nachteile

I really disliked its reporting system, is not user friendly also cisco does not allow you to tamper its software and it makes it really difficult to extract valuable information for analysis.

Vorteile

The aspect I like the most about this software is that I can control every phone in the office. If I want only 3 people's phones to ring when a main line call comes in, I can do that. If I want to group certain phones to roll over certain calls, I can do that as well.

Nachteile

One con about this software is that without instruction, you would never be able to use it. Written instructions are simply too complicated and there are a lot of shortcuts, tips, and tricks you can learn by having a cisco rep come out! However..it is time consuming!

Vorteile

Its stability is impressive, practically without maintenance it is able to work a lot of time.

Nachteile

At present, a state of maturity has been achieved that allows it to be one of the best in the market, although it requires a little more time than other brands.

Vorteile

This Call Manager is the best we have ever had, the voice quality is unbeatable even in remote offices connected by VPN, 100% recommended. It is a very good investment. Allows you to consolidate the telecommunications infrastructure.

With video calls it allows us to place a camera phone in a boardroom and directors make calls to this room for meetings and it's as if they were there saving us travel expenses.

This tool is very complete, we have Cisco Unity Connection (Voice Mail) and Cisco IM and Presence. It allows us to have the phones installed in a PC with a client on windows without losing quality in the calls, and even make video calls from the PC.

Nachteile

The cost of licenses or phones are a little high and sometimes limits you a little to take better advantage of their capabilities.

Vorteile

Cisco Unified Communications Manager and its associated products (Unity Connection voicemail, Contact Center Express, etc.) provide a full suite of unified communications and collaboration capabilities. The solution can scale to from SMB to large enterprise and is highly flexible, allowing it to accommodate a wide range of business needs. The latest versions transition both voice and video communication onto a unified platform to drive the ubiquity of video adoption and impact the speed of business. Support for a wide range of endpoints, including PC, tablet, and mobile devices, allows for the adoption of collaboration tools by remote and mobile workers. The product is powerful and lends itself easily to fulfilling business goals.

Nachteile

One of the primary negatives about Cisco UCM would be the cost, especially at smaller scales and when competing against a legacy TDM solution. Even for businesses that are driven primarily by cost though, the additional benefits such as integrated instant messaging, point to point video, and mobile device integration may prove to be enough of a differentiator to justify the extra expense.

Organizations that are interested in managing their own solution will typically need to hire or have on staff a fairly high level engineer, though most IT people would be capable of learning how to handle at least basic moves, adds, and changes. The importance of solid solution architecture and maintenance can not be overstated enough.

Vorteile

CUCM has very strong redundancy mechanism which enable up to 9 Nodes in one cluster. You can integrate IM and Presence, Unity, Contact Center and Expressway Servers to this cluster without any problem. They work very coordinated together. The CUCM Nodes share and replicate their database continuously so that every change on any Node, replicate to the others. So you are able to manage all in one server's GUI.

Nachteile

It is quite expensive by means of license and support. Also the IP Telephones are also expensive in comparison to market.

Vorteile

maintenance and upgrades are usually not that time consuming. Easy transfer of regular phone services over to voip cisco phones for over 4000 employees. rarely experience any outage problems with the software. offers a wide variety of features to cover all or most communication needs. Bridge conference availability 2- 10 people to communi9cate at one time

Nachteile

Lots of issues with the systems paging feature. Always having to perform maintenance to get paging up and working again. When network is not working the phone is not working. When participate calls in or hangs up the bridge does not provide any warning or alert tone. Not a way to lock conference call to not allow additional people to join. issues with jabber client are often

Vorteile

Easy to manage alot of individual phones. Able to edit a group at a time or individual phones. Easy to make changes remotely and not having to physically go to each phone

Nachteile

Alot of menus and options that can overwhelm users. Process to update firmware on phones is very cumbersome and time consuming. Some things needed to be done via CLI and not the web gui.

Vorteile

The stability of this system is unparalleled. The granularity of management restrictions is incredible. This truly is the gold standard of enterprise voip systems.

Nachteile

The upgrade process and licensing structure is labor intensive. Real time monitoring tool is clunky and difficult to understand.

Vorteile

being able to sign in and change reps skills very easily. I like the Cisco Reskill tool.

Nachteile

When someone signs in with the incorrect extension there is not an easy way to do a search by signed in extension. in our org the extensions go 111-111-1111, 111-111-1112, ect. Sometimes reps will transpose 2 numbers and it will not allow the other rep to sign in when their extensions being used.

Vorteile

It does what I want it to 99% of the time. When it doesn't support makes it work or makes me update.

Nachteile

Supports is a bit to costly year over year and the cost of the system itself is far outside most SMB companies means.

Vorteile

Great software/phone for both inbound and outbound calls. Great for conference calls. Low maintenance.

Nachteile

The software can be costly. Recommend for larger companies. Typically there are no problems unless you are performing an upgrade or making a major configuration change.

Vorteile

So some things of Cisco i think was a pro was the call quality. It was super smooth and did not have lots of delay.

Nachteile

Our phones did not have good support for my bussness. The phones are bulky and hard to program. The screan is not backlit so it is hard to see if the lighting is in a dimmer setting. The wier to the phone had to be replaced three times over the few months i used it.

Vorteile

Cisco Unified Communications Manager is not a bad product. There's a lot of functionality there. Their tech support is good.

Nachteile

The user interface can be confusing to use. Sometimes I find that I have to refer to the instructions when I need to use features that I only use once in a while.

Vorteile

the features and functionality of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) are great for anyone who works remotely from their main office or travels frequently for business

Nachteile

This is an expensive program, it can be cost prohibitive to most small businesses, if there was a lite or small business version available it could be more accessible to other users

Vorteile

Easy web interface, easy configuration. limitation for different user types like administrator or helpdesk personel.

Nachteile

There are a lot of bugs and you should fix them periodically.

Vorteile

Cisco Unified Communications Manager is an okay product but is incredibly not user friendly. It's scalable, but not worth it.

Nachteile

The user interface is not very intuitive for many users. It is overly complex and hard to use for most users. It also require many many clicks to complete simple tasks.

Vorteile

Easy Deployment (Solutions for small and large offices).

Nachteile

Licensing Model for ordering the solution

Vorteile

Scalable solution allowing future expansions

Nachteile

Expensive and complicated setup and commissioning process

Vorteile

1) Its HW Specific , it can be customized either to work on Appliance or in Virtual Environment
2)Main Advantage is that its Converged i.e. Voice and Data One One Single CISCO Network
3) Its Product Portfolio makes you to take immediate Decision either CM on Router or On Server or on VM.
4) SIP integration is Some What Tricky but stable
5)REAL Unified Communication Comes on Track When Presence , MP need to integrates and System Proves its Capability as VALUE FOR MONEY.

Nachteile

1) System Should prompt to next Section and Next Section if to implement Features and Programming.
2) By making this it will be More Easy to implement fast and Compete other Brands

Vorteile

Cisco's unified communication manager is rock solid once set up. You won't have to worry about this system going down. We used it on-prem. While it has a lot of capabilities, we used only fraction of it. They also have APIs you could use to communicate programmatically and change ring groups/hunt groups, round-robin and more. It takes a while to master the features.

Nachteile

The user interface has not been thought through very well. It looks old school. In today's day and age where the user interface design is clean, well-organized and easy to find, Cisco's Unified Communication Manager looks clunky (but it works)! There are lot of opportunities for Cisco to change its look and feel to make features easier to find.

Vorteile

Multi party conference, no distortion in voice, highly reliability, safe

Nachteile

Good software, sometime TEC support is not up to the mark

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Vorteile

The software is completely customizable. Cisco has made every effort to supply a fully feature rich platform that can be configured for any situation or use. Call Manager can be setup for multitenancy. Features and support for new technologies are being added on a regular basis. Cisco technical support is knowledgeable and quick to respond.

Nachteile

Licensing is very expensive. There are multiple licensing options that can be difficult to understand.

Vorteile

- Extremely robust feature set with depth in configuration and customization.
- Diversified technology with a strong security interface.
- Configuration rich interfaces with strong delineation of permission sets and redirects.
- Administrative overhead easily reduced by account permissions sets

Nachteile

- So robust can feel a bit overwhelming (version specific)
- Deployment time frames can be long from purchase to full production implementation (good support though)
- More hardware specific as far as integration than some other agnostic products.

Vorteile

Voice quality is really impressive through the VPN connectivity.
We can also use ip-phone application on desktop/laptop and use as a soft phone.

Nachteile

While using soft phone, application got stuck if we switch headphones.

Vorteile

This product was backed by Cisco, so it did have a major and well respected name behind it.

Nachteile

At the end of the day, this was just overly complicated to operate. It was not intuitive and was behind the times.

Vorteile

Number 1 - Cisco. - Inherited this phone system about 4 years ago. Self taught how to use and configure. Have since installed 4 more systems for other customers - feature rich - must have extensive Cisco knowledge.

Nachteile

Must have extensive Cisco knowledge. Classes, trainings and certifications recommended. This is not an easy system to learn or implement, and there are many many variables

Vorteile

CallManager is a phone system seemingly built by "network guys" - it has all the major features of a call control server and is easy to manage from a network perspective. The software is solid and runs well - programming phones is very easy as well.

Nachteile

Updates can be cumbersome in addition some device support can be problematic. If you stick to an all Cisco ecosystem it works well but when trying to integrate its not the best. Call reporting\details can be a bit harder to dig into without some sort of front end software.

Vorteile

The thing I like most about this software is a combination of the full feature set and the high quality of support from manufacturer.

Nachteile

The thing I like least about this software is the complexity of configuration. Cisco is great about giving many options or nerd knobs to turn, however the UI needs a overhaul to make newer features easier to configure/find.

Nachteile

It takes some training and continuous use to fully master CM as it is not very simple at first. It is helpful to consult with another organization to construct a plan and design prior to implementation. Once you have been using CM for sometime you become more comfortable with the solution and deployment. The licensing model can become costly and upgrade can at times get complicated.

Vorteile

The Unified Communications Manager worked well...with redundant servers we never experienced down time.

Nachteile

The Unified Communications Manager can be difficult to setup and manage. We found it to be too expensive to upgrade.

Vorteile

There's absolutely nothing you can't do with a Cisco phone system. It truly is the best.

Nachteile

If you aren't familiar with the layout of CUCM / unity / UCCX then the initial timeline of learning can be skewed.

Vorteile

There are a ton of features with CUCM that allow for a lot of customization. I like the fact that it is a very stable system and don't have to worry about it having issues.

Nachteile

Because Call Manager is very feature rich, training classes are needed to better understand the product. Also, licencing cost and support are expensive which make it hard to justify for SMB and small K-12 schools.

Vorteile

We used all types of unify access points, routers and Switches in business or private
It is a pleasure to config ad access , vlans or limited bandwidth

Nachteile

Unify controller should have wizards for beginners like smart home Szenario with separate iot network

Vorteile

The Cisco UCM is built for purpose with hardware optimization for voip services. As with most cisco products, the architecture is resilient and applicable for high availability environments. The application is modular and rich in features. Rich CTI features also.

Nachteile

The licensing of the features can be complex to understand. You may not know what is required for the functions you want until you talk to an expert. Not suitable for out of the box implementation. Highly trained personnel required to deploy.

Vorteile

CUCM is very stable and powerfull system. it provides onsite and also multiside redundancy. you can manage whole phone via one screen. backup/restore process is easy to make. management and documentations are very good and you can find anything you need on cisco.com

Nachteile

price is too high. making upgrade takes too much time. Administrative priviliges are limited.

Vorteile

You can do just about anything with a phone system that you would want to do through the software. It is low maintenance. Typically there are no problems unless you are performing an upgrade or making a major configuration change.

Nachteile

The cost is always a bummer. There are other solutions that are a lower cost but don't provide all of the advanced features that you get with Cisco. I also don't like how complicated some parts of the software are seems like the user interface could be much more simplified. The user interface also needs an update... perhaps it's time for it to move to HTML 5 and get rid of all of the popup windows.

Vorteile

We like the ability to monitor different sites when we used this platform. The ability to have separate offices extension dial and setup call centers with ease was much help during our initial call center deployments.

Nachteile

The platform is not as simple to use as other systems but does generally cover all necessities we had for a system. We ultimately decided on an in house system to improve our system.

Vorteile

Updating extensions, mobility profiles, and hardware is instant, so changes can be instantly seen. Everything on Cisco IP devices can be customised through this software, using features like the device template. There is plenty of documentation on forums and the Cisco support pages on how to configure these devices as required.

Nachteile

The UI is a bit dated and isn't scalable to mobile devices.

Vorteile

Really stable product
Cluster mode
Rich in feature
Flexible to meet your needs
As it is popular it is easy to find support
TAC support is normally really good

Nachteile

Miss some feature here and there
Not much monitoring included you have to buy 3rd party tools
As it is not complete with Monitoring or even easy of use platform to create phone the Value for the money spend is OK but surely not good.

Vorteile

This thing's got it all. If you need to do it, you can do it with Cisco UCM. And it's ridiculously reliable.

Nachteile

The complexity. The interface. I wish they'd make a UCM Lite, with 90% of the flexibilty of UCM turned off or hidden or something.

Vorteile

We have used a variety of Cisco products and their communication manager fit well with our organization. We make a ton of calls and this simplified the process and allowed our users to have high quality calls.

Nachteile

We haven't had any major issues. In fact we generally solve all IT issues internally without using customer support so I'm not even sure how they do on the support side. The issues are usually minor.

Vorteile

Very reliable and has lots of features. Well know company with good reputation.

Nachteile

We used this for years before moving to a cloud based phone system. The dashboard is super cumbersome and unless you are well versed in CISCO applications you will be completely lost. On top of that it is very expensive for yearly support and the such. We saved tons by moving away from this setup.