Sprint Protege vs Norstar Modular ICS 2

[Phoenix599]

I am new to our company's IT department, and have to brief our CEO tomorrow (December 14th) about the pros and cons of Sprint Protege vs Norstar. I just stumbled upon this forum today. Thank God!

I have read several forum discussions about Sprint Protege vs other phone systems.

I would greatly appreciate any expert comments (I am certainly no phone expert) that you could append to this thread that I could use to assist in my briefing to the CEO (at least I'll have them in one thread, directly addressing the two phone systems that we are considering).

Basically, we already have some of our 10 offices that are equipped with the Sprint Protege system, and a smaller number equipped with the Norstar system. We want to outfit a new office. It appears that we can get a comparable Sprint system for slightly less money (very slightly less), versus a Norstar system. So, if you were me and had to brief a CEO with "cold hard facts" what would you say to help him decide which system would be best?

TIA for your comments!

 

[skip555]

have you read the thread in this forum regrding the sprint protege ?

 

[bkrike]

It's all said here...
thread461-857570

 

[bkrike]

One other fact I will add. Nortel is the number one or two selling phone system in the world, and as such there are allot more techs / companies who service them. So in certain markets, you may be able to find only one Sprint vendor, and you would be at their mercy. On the other hand with Norstar you would most likely be able to choose from several competent vendors.

 

[Phoenix599]

Yes! I read the other thread! I just want to make sure if I recommend Nortel to the CEO, that I'm not entering another minefield.

What better way to help convince him than to show him comments from experts who were asked the same question?

Thanks again.

 

[paul144]

Some of the benefits of having a Norstar over a Protege:
They are all over the place.
There are many, many, many, techs certified on the systems.
Refurbished equipment is very inexpensive.
With a little bit of training, mush of the basic, day-to-day programming can be done by your own in-house people.
I have not looked seriously at a Protege in about 4-5 years. The programming was overly complicated. It had a horrible user interface. The number of different software versions, and their mutual incompatibility, made it very difficult to just call in a vendor to program for you. Even if they were Sprint certified, they had to have the correct version of software on hand.
I now work for a comopany that repairs and refurbishes business telephones. We wrok on the Protege. The phones themselves seem to be overly sensitive to power issues.
A downside of the Norstar product is that the displays tend to fail frequently on the M series phones and I have heard of some software glitches in the latest release, although it is my understanding that this issue is being resolved.
If you have other Protege systems, unless they are the exact same software level as the one you might purchase, then you will need differrent programing software for each and it is unlikely that you will want to do even basic adds/moves without calling in a vendor.