Is Shoretel Green and Easy to Manage?

I was on a call today and heard a couple of things that were of interest with Shoretel. The shoretel system cannot span resources across switches. One situation is a phone cannot have a shared line so if you want to have x2000 in site a and also have that ring in site b, you cannot do it.



The solution also requires a lot of power cords and costs a lot in power and cooling. their Enterprise Manager also does not have IDS and requires DoubleTake for redundancy. This is expensive. If EM goes down, you lose auto attendant, shoretel desktop and other functionality.

On teh phones, they dont have LLDP today so each phone will draw much more power than required. LLDP allows a device (phone) to "talk" to the switch and request only the power needed by the device. If you cant do that you get all 15.4 watts per the 802.3af specification. Can you say "not green!"



Let's take a look at the network and firewall and switch and Host IDS and WAN connections and wireless and WAN optimization and... Lots of support numbers to call here in this model.






The other area is that they need to partner with Alcatel for conferencing/collaboration and EasyRun for Call Center. They have to work with Microsoft for IM and Presence without any other options. They OEM their wireless phone from Hitachi, the access point from someone else. They dont make the switch, the router. How will one support this model? Video- no go... They dont even support H.323. WoW!!!! H.323 is what Netmeeting ran back in 1997 on the Microsoft Desktop. Wow!!! Wow!!! I have to verify that comment. Let me know if you know they they do or do not have H.323 support.

They finally announced support for Active Directory in 9.0 and LLDP on phones. Their integration to AD and MOC is lightly engineered and brand new. It requires a license to enable the features also at $165 per user list.

Another main point to consider is redundancy. UCME is a very robust failover scenario. You can do CME as SRST which provides full redundancy to Business Edition installations. Support for all this is primarily channel partner based. It will cost extra to get direct Shoretel support and it their support is not follow the sun or weekend based. You will have an on call engineer. Not a problem for us as we do have 24x7 SLA's but with the quality installation we do, we rarely get a call after hours or on the weekend.

When the ST system is priced, it never has the network infrastructure included. It is imperitave that the network upgrades are included in the cost of the phone system. It is not on the ST Bill of Materials.

Very interesting discussion. I only have a few of the points brought up. There are many more. feel free to ask me if you are interested in having discussions on Shortel versus Cisco. I also have a friend at Altigen and that conversation can be interesting also.

Cheers!

Doug
http://www.peakipsolutions.com/
http://www.peakip.net/
http://www.ebcug.org/
http://www.summitsol.com/
http://www.securitywheel.com/

Incredibly important information to pass on

This is a must view. It is 3 sections of 10 minutes each. It seems to me that we need to spend our own money now (while it still has some value) on conservative campaigns and get someone with a clue elected. I don’t mean republican or democrat, I mean fiscally conservative!

http://www.lebed.biz/hyperinflationnation.html


You can find your congressman to lodge a complaint by changing the zip code at the end of this url and entering it into a browser;
http://whoismyrepresentative.com/search.php?zip=94551

We must lodge complaints on this mess we are into. California is only a visionary in the sense that it can be the first state to go bankrupt! The nation is, as usual, following California’s lead.

Good luck and God Bless to each of you!

Sincerely,

Doug

A true Welcome Home to a HERO

If this doesnt make the hair on your arms and legs stand up at some point through it, you should check your pulse or your passport...

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Killed in action the week before, the body of Staff Sergeant First Class John C. Beale was returned to Falcon Field in Peachtree City, Georgia, just south of Atlanta, on June 11, 2009. The Henry County Police Department escorted the procession to the funeral home in McDonough, Georgia. A simple notice in local papers indicated the road route to be taken and the approximate time.

Nowadays one can be led to believe that America no longer respects honor and no longerhonors sacrifice outside the military. Be it known that there are many places in this land where people still recognize the courage and impact of total self-sacrifice. Georgia remains one of those graceful places.

The link below is a short travelogue of that day's remarkableand painful journey. But only watch this if you wish to have some of your faith in people restored. Please share widely.

Click below for the video. Turn up your speakers !!!http://blip.tv/play/AYGJ5h6YgmE

Consentry Networks makes Layer 2 exciting!

Just reading about how Consentry Networks has a new network control system that will examine every flow on the network and provide device and user based access for every application. It looks very interesting. Layer 2 is generally fairly simple and boring but this moves layer seven to the edge L2 switch. Check out the company at www.consentry.com.

Co founded by Jeff Prince (Foundry Networks) and Mario Nemirovsky (the godfather of symmetric multiprocessing), this look interesting. I see an acquisition in sight... Their ASIC has juice in it...

Cheers!

Doug
www.peakipsolutions.com

A Test of Socialism

A test of socialism

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that Obama's socialism would work and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great. But when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. Could it not be any simpler?

(Please pass this on)