Kirk,
On our current NEC solution the paging is just a built in feature. We do not use any 3rd party application. You simply put phones in a "paging zone" and then assign a function to it. So, a user just presses a key sequence like *36 to do a Sacramento zone page, then speaks. Whatever they say is broadcast through the speaker of all of the phones in that zone. I believe, though I have not used it, that Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express has a very similar capability built in.
Our largest site has about 70 phones in the "all page" zone. It does not have any additional functionality like text to speech paging or scheduled paging. It is pretty simple, but we use it extensively. We put a dummy phone, with external speakers connected to it, to access open areas that do not have many phones, like our warehouses.
We are a relatively small company, with about 150 phones, spread across about 8 locations all together. We started with CUCME about 3 years ago as we opened new branches. We have since replaced a couple of our NEC PBX in existing branches, also with CUCME systems. We are not getting ready to install a CUCM-BE in our Sacramento Headquarters where we have the 70 phones I mentioned earlier. I got a price quote from InformaCast, where a 250 phone license was $9000 plus hardware to run it on. That's more than we paid for the CUCM-BE. I think that for the SMB market where a CUCME is too small, but the CUCM-BE is great, the cost of this functionality is disproportionate with the cost of the system. I also think that the simple functionality that the NEC has is common in the PBX world, and is used extensively.
In my case, I am sure that I will have to delay implementing the CUCM-BE until I find a solution.
Thanks
