the best 3rd party paging solution

[phong.tran]

What are some of the 3rd party paging solutions and the pros and cons of each.

We need to setup paging, and are unable to decide on a solution.

we are running CCM4.0.2a

[ptredway]

One of the more popular products would be InformaCast by Berbee. All in all it's a great product and does much more than paging. One item that I've gotten negative reviews on it for is to page, you have to use a services URL and the berbee server calls you back. A race condition can occur where users answer a call and berbee goes to voicemail...paging their greeting across the building :o).

Another product we've had much success with that doesn't have this limitation is IPCelerate.

Please let me know if you need more details.

[bparker]

I would not recommend Informacast. I was using it, but had several issues with it's use of JTAPI as well as issues related to the phone firmware. I replaced it with SA-Annouce from Syn-Apps. It works flawlessly and uses .net & AXL instead of JTAPI also when doing a page you just call an extension instead of have to fire up a service. (www.syn-apps.net) It is very stable and fixed ALL of the issues that I was having with Informacast.

[thisisshanky]

I have heard a few issues about Syn-Apps too. They seem to use only g711 and not g729 (This behaviour might have changed by now)..but using g711 for pagin across a wan might not seem to be a very good idea as far as bandwidth goes, unless you have a very good CAC mechanism in place.

[bparker]

Actually, the way that Syn-Apps implements their paging, g.729 is not needed. They source the multicast from the requesting phone, so that the multicast does not need to traverse the WAN, which is different than the way Berbee does it, in that they source their multicast from the InformaCast server.

[kseraphine]

have you deployed sa-announce to provide paging to remote sites in a centralized cluster? I'm evaluating paging apps for an upcoming 50+ site deployment and do not want to have to place a paging server at each site.

[bparker]

Yes I have. I have 20+ sites running on a centralized cluster and a central SA-Announce server. SA-Annouce uses "local multicasting" which means the phone initiating the page is the source of the multicast traffic, so as long as you don't do site to site paging, you won't need your wan to be multicast enabled.