Review of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM)
June 06, 2018
Review of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM)
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Call Manager)
We use CUCM to manage our Cisco phone environment of roughly 1200 phones. This includes roughly 100 emergency phones of various types. We integrate directly with Exchange 2016 for Unified Communication, which allows voicemail to go directly to the user's inbox. (We do not use Unity.) We have around half dozen IP phone models (7941/42, 6921, etc.).
- It is good at allowing for specific phone configurations. If you want to get granular, this is the tool for you.
- The single number reach feature works well, allowing simultaneous ringing to outside devices, such as a mobile phone or home phone.
- The Cisco IP Communicator application is great. I use it every day to emulate my physical phone from my laptop. I have used it extensively when working from home or at our co-location where cell service is not available. I just connect to the company VPN, launch the application, and use the phone just like it was on my desk. It even looks the same.
- The user interface is not intuitive; if you don't know what you are doing, a single, small change can become a major problem.
- Provisioning a single device requires lots of clicks and manual input of data; easy to misspell something by accident.
- I find the provisioning process to be rather time consuming, but that may be because unified communications is not my primary role.
- CUCM is not particularly friendly to non-Cisco hardware; you can configure other makes (we use Polycom for conference phones), but the configuration process is pretty involved, and requires time and experience.
- It has successfully provided us with a solid UC platform to host our VoIP phones. I consider that a net positive.
- It is rather time consuming to manager on a daily basis, which I would consider either neutral or negative, depending on how you look at it.