Accepted Solutions
I evaluated SMACS and Akkadian about 2.5 years ago. At the time, we liked the UI of SMACs, but it was lacking in some backend functions. If I recall correctly, I needed to have softphone devices in a separate device pool than hardware devices for the same user, and they could not do this. I believe they've since corrected this. We ended up going with Akkadian, but honestly I think you'll be fairly happy with either, as they both appear to be committed to their product development.
We use SMACS for our 3 cluster environment with about 165 sites and 25K devices since soon 18 months. It works really well and has saved us a ton on the time needed to provision new or changes to our user community and it also provides savings for less troubleshooting for mis-configuration as the creation of devices are template driven. We estimated that the time savings for a complete setup of all devices and services for a standard user went from ~40 minutes to between 3-4.
Our service desk loves the ease of use interface, with the 360 degree pane that shows all devices and services for a user in one easy to digest view. We also use the site admin function to grant access to our On Site Support personnel to administer “their” users devices for the site(s) they support. This was not possible before with just the CM admin UI. They as well are very happy with this functionality.
The setup of the system is very straightforward and we managed to have it setup for all our sites in about 40-60 hours of total work. After this there are literally not that much work needed to maintain the system. The odd updates on occasion when new releases are made available and these takes about 10-15 minutes to implement. Upgrades are made in a similar manner as on CVOS systems, as SMACS run in dual partition, so you upgrade the inactive side of the system and then switch over the traffic to it once you’re happy with the result, with minimal disruption to the service.
The interaction with the support organisation at Stack8 is second to none in ease. Their very responsive and easy to work with.
If you should want to have a call to go into specific details please PM me.
If there would be a short coming it would be that not all settings, many but not all are possible to define, are made available to either set a standard for the site or modify it at creation of the device/service from the 360 view. Otherwise we have not actually encountered any downfalls.
I evaluated SMACS and Akkadian about 2.5 years ago. At the time, we liked the UI of SMACs, but it was lacking in some backend functions. If I recall correctly, I needed to have softphone devices in a separate device pool than hardware devices for the same user, and they could not do this. I believe they've since corrected this. We ended up going with Akkadian, but honestly I think you'll be fairly happy with either, as they both appear to be committed to their product development.
