CCM - IP phone speaker paging - scaling limits

[eyeontelecom]

As I understand it, CCM will allow voice paging through the IP telephone speakers (e.g.7960)as a standard feature. I am helping a client with a IP Centrex design. There will be a regional CCM servicing approx. 100 field offices via a wide area network. Can we avoid overhead paging systems in the field offices and page through the IP phone speakers? My concern is scaling to support up to 5,000 users in more than 100 locations. Can each Field Office have 4 paging zones as well? How difficult would this be to manage? I'm also concerned that I will chew-up more WAN bandwidth than the customer can afford.
Thx.

 

[talbotpat]

There is no handset based paging provided at this time with Cisco CallManager. There are a few third party solutions that have been developed to provide this functionality in a CallManager environment. One is the Informacast solution from Berbee and the other is IP ZonePage, which was acquired by Norstan. You can find info at

http://www.berbee.com

and

http://www.norstan.com

for these solutions. It has been rumored that a zoned handset based paging solution will be included in a future CallManager release, but Cisco has not confirmed if or when this will happen.

Pat

 

[eyeontelecom]

Thanks, Pat. For some reason, I have received conflicting answers on this question. I've been told, you can use CCM "route patterns and lists" to accomplish voice paging through Cisco IP sets. Supposedly, a kludge that would not scale well, but doable. I have talked to Berbee, but they have their warts as well: no load balancing, no failover. It would be ugly to have 5,000 people lose paging all at once. Maybe overhead is simplier and cheaper in the long run.
thx,
eyeontelecom

 

[JabbaTheFart]

has anyone used the hoot app that is with the IP SDK? Won't that do the paging?

 

[polharris]

Its woks with the CCM Express 3.0.3 !!!

 

[RSPXL]

Has anyone tried Wave from Twisted Pair?

http://www.twistpair.com/products/wave/default.asp

It is a full fledged conferencing system that incorporates Hoot and Holler services. We are looking for a zone based paging system and although the Berbee product works ok it is limited in defining who to page as it only draws minimal info from call manager. I suppose it does what it says on the tin....

I reckon Wave may be a tad overkill for what we want but just interested if anyone has any experience of it?

 

[commsguy]

you can burn up a line setup as autoanswer to do paging, but many do not want to waste a line.

commsguy

http://www.convetech.com

 

[talbotpat]

You can do *intercom*, but you cannot make an autoanswer line a shared appearance to achieve a broadcast paging solution. A few third party apps support this, such as Berbee's Informacast, and IPZonePage from Norstan.