Cisco has made no secret of its desire to dominate the enterprise telephony market, with VoIP Call Manager replacing the legacy PBX. Enterprise VoIP doesn't get the level of hype it once did, which may be an indication that it is maturing. Yes, there continue to be obstacles to deployment and costs are sometimes higher than expected, but many organizations seeking to provide tighter integration between voice and data view Cisco's offering as a solid solution. Adding wireless capabilities via the 7920 rounds out an already strong product offering. Still, the system is expensive, relies on the proprietary Cisco SCCP protocol and requires Cisco Aironet WLAN infrastructure. In the past, Cisco cooperated closely with wireless vendors like SpectraLink and Symbol, which both provide SCCP-based VoWLAN products, but it appears that Cisco is de-emphasizing those partnerships now that it has its own wireless solution. That's part of the price of buying into proprietary solutions.
The 7920 phones were without doubt the most elegantly designed and most sophisticated phones we reviewed. Cisco took a no-compromise approach on features, appropriate for the enterprise market, but its handsets aren't as rugged as offerings from SpectraLink and Symbol. The 7920's display provided a much cleaner, high-resolution, pixel-based interface than those found on other handsets. They were also the easiest handsets to configure. An excellent configuration menu is built into the phone, but most administrators likely will choose to perform the task via a USB connection to a PC running Cisco's Windows-based management utility, which can store configuration profiles and replicate them to multiple phones. For instance, you could use this to change WEP keys easily.
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Excellent handset design
Tightly integrated with Cisco VoIP infrastructure |
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