Cisco Unified Communications Reviews

It is basically a contact center solution. In contact centers, it acts as a bridge connecting the customer and the product company and the end customer. For example, if we are running a bank, the customer needs information, they will use different mediums to communicate with the bank, like via call, email, chat, or video. The contact center helps facilitate better communication through these channels.

We have mostly banking customers. In banking, they use inbound and outbound calls. The contact center defines scripts for valuable customers so they can be answered quickly. We offer call, chat, and video chat communication options through the contact center.

The list of features the system provides is massive, and the XML used by the end devices allows for custom features to be designed.

That being said, currently I find the ability to block incoming calls based on the originating number to be the best feature to come along.

The ability to block the numbers of problem callers has helped the stress level of the end users as well as reduced wasted time. When we have a caller, human or machine, that dials into the system simply to harass our employees I can block it quickly & simply without interrupting service to the system.

Our primary use is communication between users as well as inbound and outbound calls for the organization. Also included is IM & Presence for the users.

Having a single system including the routers and switches all from the same system gives ease of use. Using the phones was seamless and provided several features the previous system did not have.

We have a Communication Manager cluster with almost 200 phones and 150 softphones (Jabber). All call handling is done with this solution. We have it integrated with Active Directory. This solution was added to the Unity solution for voice mail integrated with Office 365. The Expressway C & E solution was also incorporated for the registration of softphones (Jabber) from the Internet in a very simple way for end users. Finally, we have the connection to the PSTN through a gateway with SIP trunk.

Using the Communication Manager, it gave us the possibility to move around the office, and even outside the office, keeping our phone number always accessible using Jabber. This is essential to be able to apply it from the home office without problems and without having to always have a connected VPN.

Additionally, it improved communication between collaborators a lot when using video calls with Jabber, since body language greatly improves communication, making it richer and shortening the time necessary for a call.

Cisco Unified Communications can be used to connect all your offices using VPNs between them. With SIP enabled you can make voice or video calls in Unicast and multicast sessions. Call routing can be performed very easily on this device. The URI dialing feature allows you to make any to any dialing. It also has powerful speech recognition which is better than any other speech recognition software. The single digit dialing works like magic. You can reach important people of your organization by just pressing one button. It also works with the soft communicator where you don't need to differentiate VLANs. You can create partitions in CM Dial plans. You can control who calls you or who you call. Also adds a lot of security to your organization's voice and video infrastructure. Also includes centralized management.

A few of the important features are available only Cisco Unified Call Manager 4.0 or above. To have 2 call management server configured as failover would be expensive.

• More reliable than other unified communication devices. • Lower cost of ownership. • It extends the video capability to your workers during a single, unified communications infrastructure from the desktop to teleprocessing rooms. • Interoperability and standards support. • It is scalable for up to 40,000 users. • It can be extensible to 80,000 users.

• One of the major flaws in the unified CM is handling the configuration of the Voice mail port. • Failure of higher call-control utilities such as transmit recall. • Failure of higher directory searching and call on utilities.