Cisco Unified Communications Manager Reviews

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Avaya Cloud Office

Reasons for Switching to Cisco Unified Communications Manager

In itself it is much more versatile and allows a simpler growth. It is very easy to add new nodes with the same licenses and maintain a diversified high availability scheme across multiple remote offices. Other vendors do not offer this versatility.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

- 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

Cons

- 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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

Alternatives Considered

Avaya Cloud Office

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

The product is very stable, especially since CUCM started running on Linux. It doesn't require constant updates. It is very feature rich, more so with every new version. It's web interfaces are well laid out and intuitive. Tech support from the Cisco TAC CallManager team is usually very good. CUCM interfaces with so many other VoIP products out there, including Microsoft.

Cons

Tech support from the Cisco Global Licensing team has not been very good in my experiences. They usually take days to reply, often issue the wrong licenses, and the licensing process seems to be convoluted and constantly changing. Cisco promised that with their new licensing strategy starting with version 9 would be more cost efficient and easier to understand. It has not turned out to be more cost efficient at all. Also, Cisco yearly maintenance is very costly, as well as all their endpoints, much more costly than the average competitor.

Pros

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.

Cons

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!

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

Very powerful phone system. Can handle a lot of traffic and lots of functionality. Can do hunt groups and call centers

Cons

Very hard to configure unless your a cisco engineer. Confusing on the different areas to configure thins and why. Also Make sure to purchase support. We are charged each time I submit a ticket with Cisco.