Nortel Call Pilot or Cisco Unity?

[uncc03]

Hello,

Our organization has two Option 11C's and one Option 61C and over the next few months we plan to replace the Enterprise Networking Meridian Mail systems with a centralized voice mail solution. Either Call Pilot or Unity. Our Cisco sales rep claims that it is not a problem to centralize the Nortel PBX's with Unity, but of course that is what I expect a sales person to say. I have asked 'let me see a successful implementation' and I am still awaiting a response. We have a culture that is used to Meridian Mail and Nortel phonesets and I have several reservations including the inability to migrate the database from Mermail to Unity. I do know that if we create any sense of 'pain' to our end users that it will become a major issue. Any experiences or opinions would be most helpful. Thanks!

 

[Johnthephoneguy]

I don't know about the Cisco but Call Pilot integrates into the Meridian world very well.

IF you have problems later and are using the Cisco, you are likely to run into the area where Cisco says it is the PBX fault and Nortel says it is Cisco's problem, whereas if you are using Call Pilot, you are dealing with 1 Manufacturer and the support will be much easier to deal with without the finger pointing. Migration from MM has been done a thousand times over to CP also.

Call Pilot has been installed in most any configuration you can come up with as far as networking switches so it is a tried and true system. Maybe not perfect in every aspect but what is?

 

[biv343]

Can't speak for Unity, but if you migrate from Meridian Mail to CallPilot, your users won't know the difference, except for hearing "Callpilot" instead of "Meridian Mail" when logging into their mailboxes. You can even make CallPilot say "Meridian Mail" if you prefer.

All mailboxes migrate over, you'll have to do some manual rebuilding of applications, but I'd imagine it would be a lot less work than building everything from scratch on Unity.

 

[johnpoole]

i do both mails without a problem, you can make it work, fully intergrated but it sales don't even know of one happy customer then you might want to go slow.. i do not see any advantage with the unity.. btw you can take your msutang down to the dodge dealer and have them install a new v-10, but i would perfer to have a single vendor on the tdm side of my voice network.. we use ccm for cordless applications and they work great unless the doctors put them on viberate. unlike nortel voip, we can't give people a wireless copy of there dn... if you haven't see call pilot in service, then you souuld look at one... new menus take 15 to 30 minutes.. drag and drop, very gui... even i can do one.. i hated to get rid of my mermail but never considered unity.. i have installed it with ccm and opt 11 networked and it's not bad.. just not my choice

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc

 

[uncc03]

Thanks for your input everyone. It's a difficult choice since we are considering the jump to VoIP and perhaps even the Cisco flavor. Another concern is that if we make an investment to Call Pilot and do not opt to hybridize our Nortel legacy PBX's for VoIP and forklift the entire solution that the Call Pilot investment is a sunk cost. I plan on posing the question to Cisco to determine if Call Pilot could function with Cisco Call Managers as well. I look forward to asking the question next week. Also, a VERY good point about finger pointing as it's bad enough dealing with the equipment side and carrier side as they both point fingers at each other.

 

[Johnthephoneguy]

The finger pointing happens on all levels when you have 2 different anything. I had a bank branch that could not dial long distance. Verizon is our carrier, but Sprint is the long distance. Each one claimed for a week the problem was the other. Meanwhile the bank could not make calls. Finally Sprint realized the problem was theirs but that was after 1 week.

Why is it a concern that the Call Pilot investment is a possible sunk cost?

 

[uncc03]

If we end up moving toward Cisco VoIP in the future and decide to forklift the Nortel PBX's - The concern is that if we invest $100K on Call Pilot and determine that it will not play well with CCM, then we would need to purchase Unity and therefore no longer have a use for Call Pilot.

 

[Johnthephoneguy]

Nortel supports VOIP also, so why forklift it?

 

[uncc03]

Just a hypothetical if we go Cisco. We are refreshing our internal network and Cisco will pretty much give away the CM's to get their foot in the door. Regardless, we will do our due diligence and may move toward Nortel VoIP.

 

[DigitelD]

If you don't mind what area are you in?