nightwolf91;
... a novel.
Yes, I am familiar with Nortel and only somewhat familiar with Panasonic, for the same reason you mentioned.
The one facet of Panasonic and its voice mail which I like a lot is the ability to download the entire set of system data as a text file. This allows quick inspection and a grasp of many details in a short time. But the command line interface may also attests to its age, I guess. As I understand it, the base Panasonic system was born in the early or mid-90's.
I am certified in Cisco and one can learn to love the command line interface!
True enough, those who know a system intimately can do most anything thru the tiny phone screen, but they, I think, are demonstrating the product of years of experience. These days things change too much and too often to have years to learn something.
What would be cool in any system, however, is a clean, powerful interface, to allow viewing screen-fuls of data at once. Viewing thru a two-line, 10-15 character display is nuts unless you are a veteran and know all the options.
The Nortel Call Pilot voice mail is an example of a new browser-based interface and I like it a lot. The Nortel phone system, however, requires that one have a FastRAD2 to use their latest version of software. And it's still a lot less than perfect.
The one thing I would benefit from regarding Panasonic or any other system is a conceptual overview. Such an overview would discuss the system parts, the concepts, the behavior, the logic and then the interface and the details to accomplish various things.
As it is--for Nortel or Panasonic--one must read all the material,-- the new Toshiba CTX docs amount to over 1200 pages! -- which is usually just a series of hundreds of short notes on which keys to push to perform a task. But many such small tasks are needed to accomplish anything meaningful, and the relationship of all these parts is left to intuition, experience, etc.
This is the sort of thing that is a real hurdle to entry into a new system. Sometmes the difference between systems is merely nomeclature, but this difference can mask subtle and crucial distinctions.
And how often have we puzzled over some aspect of the programming, only to have an expert tell us the simple method to get there, but that answer is not stated explicitely in the docs. You could never get there without help.
And no one one wants to learn all this at the expense of the customer or our own egos, which is, unfortunately, usually the way it is done, I believe.
--That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!
Yours,
mwm
