Thursday, May 6, 2010

Cisco UC540 Phone System


So at work I've just begun/Finished the roleout of our new UC540 phone system by Cisco. So far VERY impressed. The installation and configuration was quite simple. By default the phone system would ring to ALL phones. But a simple configuration with the auto attendant and you can have your own digital secretary.
I can honestly say that Cisco Support (SBCS) has been VERY helpful. I've been on the phone with them pretty much every day for the past 4 days. They've helped me with configuring the advanced features of the system along configuring some of the standard features to work along with the Auto Attendant (Helpdesk Voicemail box).
The system itself is designed nicely. Built upon Cisco's IOS operating system (ya know, the one that runs $1.4 Million Routers?) along with running Cisco's Callmanager express. Call manager from what I understand is they're "Full out Phone system" but the express is whats running the UC series of devices.
The way we've got it setup here is the 4 outside phone lines from the CO get connected to the FXO ports and those lines are used whenever a call is made inbound or outbound. The 8 port switch thats builtin is used for connecting the phone system to the rest of the office network (Connected to layer 2 Netgear Gigabit switch) and also connected to phones running PoE. With the builtin PoE switch, we're able to power the phones and not have a power adaptor dangling off the side of the phone.
I've setup all the phones to act as the "switch" for the PC's on the network. Each phone is connected to the wall which is inturn patched into the Netgear or directly into the Cisco. Each phone is also connected to the PC, making the phone act as a "middle man" or switch for that PC. The PC's get full duplex 100M connection, which could be a downside to this solution since our Netgear switch is 1000Mb. For now, it works out very well...
More to come as I discover the greatness of this new system from Cisco...

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