Gary,
So you've purchased an SFE or SGE Small Business Switch. To answer your questions in order:
1. The SFE or SGE series is a Small Business Switch supported by the Small Business Support Center (SBSC) not traditional Cisco TAC. Communications Manager on the other hand is a TAC supported product, so as you can see the first issue is with two separate support teams. Also the SFE/SGE switches are not configured or managed with the same tools as traditional Cisco gear and are not IOS or CLI based. The SFE/SGE switches are not designed to fully integrate with Communications Manager; however you could very well likely get it working (they are 802.3af standards based PoE); but the other broader issues identified above should help you understand that's not a best practice.
2. As far as automatically backing up the configuration, there's not a built-in feature to do that if that's what you're asking about. You can run dual images on those switches however.
Hope this helps!
Glenn
