When to choose SRST over CME

[dehghan]

Hi

I wanted to know in a location that is populated with less then 15 people, is it recommended to go for the SRST feature with central regional site CM deployment or use CME in each site.

Which one would be the best option.

There is around 1000 branches with the size specified. Also what would cisco call a telecomuters and a small site.

Thanks

[Erick Bergquist]

SRST is fallback for when the main call manager is not available for the phones, and provides real basic phone functions during the time that call manager is not available.

CME doesn't need call manager and is more feature rich then SRST but doesn't have all the features of full blown call manager neither, and has some of it's own differences. Phones can't fallback to CME if call manager fails.

It depends on what features the users need at the site, if you go with CME then the site and phones don't use the call manager. You can route calls between the CME site and Central call manager by using voip dial-peers and defining a gateway and route-patterns on the call manager to route calls to the CME site.

[thisisshanky]

If you want to start deploying phone systems at each of your branch and your HQ has not yet moved to IP Telephony (using Callmanager) you can start using CME at each branch. Voice mails are stored locally on the HDD of CUE module local to each branch and each system is administered locally. Once the HQ moves to IPT, you can convert the configs on each CME router to SRST and make all the phones in each branch local to the Callmanager at HQ. YOu can still run a combination of CME and SRST. Just that each CME system will be running on its own and sending calls to other branches using H323 trunk to the Callmanager.

[dehghan]

Thanks for the reply

I was looking at deploying 1800 series routers on these sites but they dont support CME, however they do support SRST, if I go for the 2800 series there would be a big price jump for these many sites. Thats why I was thinking if I could use SRST.

I realy dont know

What do you think

Thanks

[Aaron Harrison · Accepted solution]

As the other chaps here say - CME makes a good proposition as it allows you to get the handsets (a big chunk of your spend) out of the way and reuse your routers as SRST.

If spending on 2800s is too much then you should maybe get CM in at the main/regional site prior to your WAN equipment rollout and use SRST if that's the most cost effective way.

[dehghan]

Thanks every one