Grandstream presents the UCM series of IP PBX appliances as powerful yet easy to manage voice, video, data, and mobility communications platform, whichoffer an extensive set of unified communication features in an easy to manage on premise solution with no licensing fees, upgrade fees or costs per features. The Grandstream UCMs range from small and medium business deployments to small and medium enterprise solutions.
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Sangoma Asterisk
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Asterisk is an open source toolkit for building communications applications, now owned and supported by Sangoma (acquired with Digium in 2018). Most Asterisk-based systems and solutions require additional components (e.g. IP-phones, VoIP gateways or telephony interface cards, and other hardware), and expertise.
As a PBX the UCM PBX can be cover the needs of all companies without exception. We think it is really a great and flexible solution that covers all the IP telephone needs a company may have. When we were researching the market to buy our pair of UCM 6308, we had also hoped to use it as a replacement for our Skype for Business installation, so to say to use it as our main solution for video conferencing. After trying to do this for a couple of years we would say that you can use Wave for video conferencing and I personally like it, but it is not well suited for bigger companies for using it as the main video conferencing solution. On the other hand, there are very few PBXs even offering a video conferencing solution and their solutions are not better that the UCM's solution!
Digium Asterisk is well suited for a city government as a communications solution for internal and external use. Other options like PBX are more expensive and hard to escalate. VoIP makes it easier to use the communications infrastructure instead that already exists rather than having to wire every phone when the solution is a digital or analog phone. In my city, government offices are not in the same place, which makes it harder to communicate everything together.
The cluster implementation does not work on all network modes. Would be great if this was improved.
Wave on mobile phones works in a different way than on desktops and this makes it hard to set it up for use on the firewalls, as it requires different and more permissions than the desktop app. For example is one receives an invitation per email on the mobile phone and wants to participate in a Wave meeting as a guest, the still need access to the network ports needed to login the extension (while they only need / want to join the meeting as anonymous users). On the desktop app this is not needed.
There is a limit on the number of 1 device per connection type. We have an extension used in the maintenance department and is shared by 6 users. We were able to install it on 1 PC, 1 Wi-Fi phone and 1 Android shared mobile phone. We would like to install it on a second shared mobile phone, but this is not allowed by the UCM policy. We could use anther extension to do this, but the maintenance department does not want this. They want to accept calls with problem reports only on one extension. Would be great to be able to install the same extension on more than 1 Android devices.
I have had trouble having my favorites list from Digium connect to my phone and save my preferences there. I have only managed to do this once, but now we have an added person in our Dept. I can add them on Digium, but my phone does not update.
We are very happy with our UCB 6308 pair. We have some issues that we would like to see improved, but the UCM 6308 does more than cover the main functionality it is intended for and has given us the needed solution for our remote workers.
Although we are very happy with our pair of UCM 6308, we still think there are some things that can be improved to make this a prefect product! Have mentioned the main points we think that should be improved on other parts of the review.
Grandstream almost always have a first response on any ticket within 24 hours, which is impressive. They do care to listen about customer problems and needs and are open suggestions / feature reuests, as long as there is a potential for the suggested change to benefit a big enough number of customers.
We were considering a solution from Alcatel at first. Very stable implementation for sure, as there are no frequent updates and no new features. Also no conferencing solution was included. A separate solution was offered for extra cost. So the choice was between a very stable PBX which would be pretty much unchanged for ever and a dynamic solution that would constantly grow. Without any doubt we opted for the ever growing / changing solution, knowing this would cost us in minor problems / instabilities. We did NOT regret this decision. So having opted for a growing and constantly developed solution we also look into the solution provided by Yeastar. By comparing the 2 solutions it was obvious that the Grandstream UCM 6308 was the best solution for us.
Recently I've been using Vonage Business, and while it is far more expensive and a lot less configurable than Digium, the mobility is essential for my new role. Digium is ideal for a business with both a very technical staff and a user base that is not remote. Digium was selected due to price and ability to create custom applications.
