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
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