Hello,
For the last 25 years I've been a Nortel PBX (and some Norstar, BCM, etc.) tech. (And for the last four years, Avaya IP Office.)
The company I'm working for has about a 130 offices and around 4,000 employees and someone at the top decided that they wanted to convert everything to Cisco. That started converting at the beginning of June.
We are a CLEC and we're using eSIP trunks we developed ourselves. We have a pretty sharp IT department that has a couple dozen, or so, experienced Cisco techs. Since our main business is wholesaling bandwidth, and a lot of that works on Cisco equipment, they can handle the router side of things.
I work in the internal voice department. There's five of us and we will be administering all but three of the 130 Cisco sites remotely. We had a one week crash course on CUCM and whatever the Cisco voicemail is called, taught by CDW techs (engineers) and are currently "attempting" to take care of the 2000 employees who have already been cut over, with the other 2000 to be completed by about the beginning of October. (We're not completely on our our own yet, the CDW engineer has been answering questions for us.) But that's set to end in October.
Now our managers have come to us with Cisco training credits and gave us a week to come up with what Cisco courses we would like/need to take.
Sorry for the long introduction, but I have no idea how to come up with what training I need.
When I went to Cisco's site, they seem to be driven toward getting people certified and not necessarily taking courses designed to keep a system running. I could be wrong on that -- I'm just not sure what I'm looking for. (Certification is fine in the long run, but I really don't see that happening before October.)
The IT department is keeping the routers and switches servers running and patched and we're doing the rest.
Any suggestions on what training to go with would be appreciated.
Thank you.
Dale
For the last 25 years I've been a Nortel PBX (and some Norstar, BCM, etc.) tech. (And for the last four years, Avaya IP Office.)
The company I'm working for has about a 130 offices and around 4,000 employees and someone at the top decided that they wanted to convert everything to Cisco. That started converting at the beginning of June.
We are a CLEC and we're using eSIP trunks we developed ourselves. We have a pretty sharp IT department that has a couple dozen, or so, experienced Cisco techs. Since our main business is wholesaling bandwidth, and a lot of that works on Cisco equipment, they can handle the router side of things.
I work in the internal voice department. There's five of us and we will be administering all but three of the 130 Cisco sites remotely. We had a one week crash course on CUCM and whatever the Cisco voicemail is called, taught by CDW techs (engineers) and are currently "attempting" to take care of the 2000 employees who have already been cut over, with the other 2000 to be completed by about the beginning of October. (We're not completely on our our own yet, the CDW engineer has been answering questions for us.) But that's set to end in October.
Now our managers have come to us with Cisco training credits and gave us a week to come up with what Cisco courses we would like/need to take.
Sorry for the long introduction, but I have no idea how to come up with what training I need.
When I went to Cisco's site, they seem to be driven toward getting people certified and not necessarily taking courses designed to keep a system running. I could be wrong on that -- I'm just not sure what I'm looking for. (Certification is fine in the long run, but I really don't see that happening before October.)
The IT department is keeping the routers and switches servers running and patched and we're doing the rest.
Any suggestions on what training to go with would be appreciated.
Thank you.
Dale