atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX Cisco Telephones and Systems Cisco UC560 install after action report

I have started and deleted this thread about 50 times over the last couple of weeks. I did not want it to turn into a Cisco bash fest or anything like that, but it seemed as I was writing it always turned negative.

Our setup:
Main location -
UC560 on a PRI
Cisco ASA5510 connected to the Internet through a 10 mb fiber connection.
SF300 POE switch for the phones.

9 remote locations
Cisco 891W w/hardware VPN to the 5510.
Average phones at remote locations is 5.
Phones consist of 71 - SPA504G and 1 SPA508G and 4 ATA186's.

Overall thoughts:

Its a decent system for the money - it does have some nice features we use, such as the single number reach, voicemail to email and extension mobility. Of course other systems probably have the same features, but not at the same price point.


Pros:

- Decent feature set came standard with features that would have cost us extra with other systems.

- User training is simple.

- The Cisco support is outstanding, I was a little skeptical about calling them, thinking that they would be much like all the other phone in tech support, boy was I wrong. I was extremely impressed with the folks I have dealt with!

- Call quality for the most part is excellent, with some hiccups due to QOS setup, and bad equipment.

Cons:

- Very "clunky" GUI administration tool. Being told the GUI does not support a good portion of the features and you must learn the CLI to configure them.
- I ran into more than one issue with the GUI not being able to do what we needed. Biggest being the CLID setup. The GUI will only allow 14 rules plus a default, while if you configure it with the CLI you can add 100 rules. Makes no sense at all. Though again pretty sure its geared to a much simpler installation then we are using it for.
- Configuring blast groups was much the same, you would try in the GUI, get an error, with no explanation to what the error was. You then went to the GUI and set it up without issue.
- Buggy handsets, more then one complaint of the callers being to quiet, or the caller not being able to hear the person talking, swap out the handset and it fixes the issue. I was told there was a bad batch of phones, but no way to check to see if we have any of them as there is no sn range to look at??
- Finding that the UC560 really is not setup to support our install type really irk'd me.

Lessons learned:

- There is a reason we pay you the phone techs so much to set these systems up! I learned real quick that I was way way out of my element with this system. Of course that did not stop me from learning, but again, it was a shock.
- If your installer shows up and says "I have never done a setup like this before" - calmly boot them out the door and request a new installer. Out of all the issues, this was the biggest headache. I feel if we have had a properly trained installer show up 90% of my issues would not have happened.
- Get more then 2 references and make sure they match your installation type. The references I called both had nothing but praise for the system/setup/installer. Only to find out they were single site installs.
- If the person you are talking to trying to get an issue sorted out does not listen, go around/over them until you find someone that will, we spent 3 weeks fighting with our CLID issues due to folks not listening to what was happening.
- Find a SINGLE point of contact for issues. Toward the end of our install I had a list of 11 email addresses for people working on different issues. What a PITA.
- Make sure the system actually does what you were told it can do. We still have an issue with call trace that is not functioning, we were told repeatedly "Yup it will allow that feature" to find out after the install that its not supported.......
- Read this forum more and ask questions. I had flipped through here while doing our research for the install, and instead of posting and asking all I did was read what was here. Not really seeing anything negative led me to think this was a good product for what we were needing. (This is the reason I started my install post)

Conclusion:

All in all it was a very trying experience we started the install on June 18th. Our cut over date was Aug 28th. Last issue was resolved Sep 28th. It was a 4 month stress fest for me, luckily we had existing systems in place so there was no disruption to the workings of the agency. This was part of the reason why things took so long as I did not push as hard as I could have.

I got some very good training on the inner workings of this system and it has helped me troubleshoot any issues we have had pop up.

Now that things are up and running we are happy, it was a long crappy journey getting here but now that its done we are satisfied with the results.

For a single location install this thing would have been great. I did not really run into issues until we started tying in the remote locations.

If I had to do it all over again would we have purchased this system, probably not. The Allworx system we were proposed would have likely been my choice.

Thanks for all the help and guidance you all have given me over this install!

Brian

Look at it this way ...... your value / earning potential just increased dramatically

Well done!

Funny you mention that, at the last meeting I had with the Sales rep he offered me a job!

I've been lurking here for months, mostly reading your initial excitement turn into frustration. I too had a very similar experience last year.

I'm a sole IT guy at an org of about 50 people and walked into the place with some old early 90s PBX connected to some ancient PC. My boss (the COO basically) worked with our local telco, and they pushed a UC560 along with their private IP over T1 service. I was looking into a number of hosted PBX solutions, but this is what he went with. The vendor promised us a simple install and their experts would handle everything.

So when the time came it turned out the install and support was sub-contracted to a firm out of NYC. The equipment was shipped to them, they then did config and shipped to us and came down to rack it all.

Of course I wanted to learn all I could about it, having never had any Cisco experience, I was respectful of not doing something to trip them up, but it came quickly clear they had no idea what they were doing. Each problem resulted in them calling Cisco and working through it.

The box ended up so horribly broken (most features didn't work) a Cisco tech said it should be wiped and reinstalled and this time don't touch the CLI. I ended up insisting they do that and find out that since the major phone company didn't have a template for their SIP service, it had to be tweaked in the CLI anyway.

We again suffered problems. Some of the rookie mistakes they made were:

* Couldn't get the SIP service to register. They changed the default route to the private T1 and it worked but then our remote phones couldn't connect. Changed the default route back to public internet and SIP wouldn't register. I kept saying "just put in a routing rule for the registrar IP in" but their tech couldn't grok that, so I finally just did it myself.

* One way audio. After them working for days trying to figure it out I just did trial and error and found out that the QOS settings they used weren't supported by the SIP provider.

* They set my WAN IP to my local LAN IP, which I still need to fix.

In short, in a period of a few weeks I ended up knowing more than the techs assigned to our account. I'd know the answer to a problem and then just sit and wait and see how long it would take for them to figure it out.

It's been running for over a year now OK but has some issues. I can't get a backup from it. I've tried via CLI, CCA, and the web interface. It fails when backing up voice mail data. Something I'll need to call Cisco for when I get a chance.

Honestly, these "experts" just called Cisco support for just about everything. It was clear the company only had one person who knew what he was doing but he was stretched thin and our tech had issues getting any time with him.

Basically I have *no* idea how one of these systems is put into a small business that doesn't have a competent person on staff to manage it. Just something simple like letting the receptionist toggle a night message on and off as needed instead of being on a schedule required me to do a lot of research to end up with some hybrid between night service and scheduled business hours.

Brian,

Thanks for the thoughtful recap of your experiences. I think your story reinforces the need for competent installers. The Cisco product is a good product, but like any, can be dragged through the mud to the point of being ripped out, if installed by an incompetent or poorly trained technician.

Justin

Just wanted to highlight that point. If we would have had one of those at the beginning, things would have been much much smoother.

Just wanted to comment on this post, as I feel that me and another technician was "poorly trained" by cisco on this system. As we work on many different systems we decided to add the cisco brand to our inventory. So a cisco rep came down to our office, pitched the product to us and sold us on installing the cisco uc series. A couple of weeks later we sent two technicians to the "cisco certification" 2 day event.

We took down our little uc540 demo system that cisco sent us. Set it up on the table and waited for the instructor to come in and start the "intense training" we were about to get.

Boy was I wrong. This 2 day "certification" consisted of about 14 pdf files that we had to open and go through step by step. Very vague, and we both felt as telecom technicians that this certification was nothing more than to have a warm body on site that could just call cisco support. Every question that was asked by all of us in the training room for the most part could not be answered by the instructor. We kept getting the response "I'll check with engineering and I'll get back to you"

So after the training was done, we went back to our office and setup the 540 and tried everything within our power (and knowledge) to learn this thing. As we started installing these systems, we knew very quickly that we were not properly trained and as a telecom professional it irked me that some things I could not figure out. You would be amazed how the customers infrastructure would be different from install to install.

I would also like to ask some other dealers out there how their training was on this product. Ours was sub par, and unfortunately we had to learn some things at the customers expense, which by the way is not how it should be.

Having worked with this the UC500 series since it's inception, and Call Manager Express before that, there is no way anyone could be adequately trained to install this system in 2 days unless you have already been speaking Cisco for years, and even then it is a stretch.

Really the only situation where it comes close to the "easy" deployment that Cisco tries to sell is when it is a green field deployment. Outside of that, it's something different every time.

It also doesn't help that the overall solution is a hodge podge of hardware from the Cisco and Linksys product lines. This is where there is disparity in management support and feature support.

All that being said, once it is installed and dialed-in (pun), it's a solid and versatile system. These little boxes can do ALOT if you want them too. The phones are just one piece of the pie.

Feel free to contact me if you hit any bumps in the road.

Mike

https://www.ketchumits.com