Paul: Nobody said that it wasn't straight forward. If you actually take the time to read the "open letter" and the followup comments, you will find that the issues have more to do with overall system stability, the lack of promissed and industry common features, and the fact that upates were slow at best, even in the prime of the product development. Respectfully, your post blindly ignores the context of this thread (hell this entire forum), AND the fact that this product has had almost zero development in over a year.... You are asking for features that are never going to appear, and even if they do, the platform is far from stable or usable in any reasonable deploymnet, compared to any other competing platform. It is a steaming hunk of crap that no amount of Cisco love will ever be able to fix. THe big question is, given the current state of this project and its history (painted all over this forum) who in the world talked you into selling the platform to a customer? Wow.... ... View more

That is the typical mode of operation for Cisco and why the entire SMB product line is such a failure. Cisco's only perspective is through they eyes of big business where the contracted solution almost always fail to deliver the promised feature set. Cisco and the integrator/partner derive their profit delivering endless bug fixes and call back to delivere promised (yet undelivered) features. The expense gets lost in the economy of scale and the big business simply attributes the expendature to the "cost of doing business". The Cisco partner laughs the whole way to the bank, as does Cisco. What Cisco has failed to realize (in 10+ years of trying) is that SMALL business will simply not put up with that crap and the delivered solution has to be the PROMISED solution, or the PARTNER gets tossed out the door. Cisco has cost us money and goodwill with our customers and that is exactly opposite of what a vendor is supposed to do. If you go back a year (maybe 2) you will see that Cisco offered to host a high level call with us to talk about the issues we were experiencing. We declined because we knew it would be filled with nothing but platitudes and promises that would never be delivered and in the end the customer would still be left floundering. Here 2 years later, the state of the UC320 and the other SMB products are living proof that my feelings were spot on. ... View more

Not to put you on the spot, but how could you knowingly sell this crap to 200 customers? It has been a bug riddled heap from day one. I suspect you must spend most of your day hiding from your UC320 customers, or laughing the whole way to the bank. ... View more

Ted, I would run from Cisco SMB products as fast and hard as you can. The problems with UC320 are systemic and run through (riddle) the entire SMB product line. That is, the problems are more than just software bugs.It appears that Cisco from the top down is simply not capable of understanding or managing a product that has to both cost effective and reliable for SMB. There is simply no reasonable excuse for the state of these products. WE have had NOTHING but problems with the SMB lines including  UC, RV and AS and new wirelss crap. To that end the ASA stuff is not bad, but in the same price range, Juniper Astaro and several other vendors build more capable UTM/Firewall devices that encompase reliable unified Wifi, UTM etc. With a straight face I can honestly say that Cisco is the ONLY product we sell that has consistantly caused us irrepariable damage with our customers. We are constantly having to make excuses and/or eat costs related to Cisco's failure to produce a quality SMB product or deliver fixes in a reasonable (if ever) timeframe. We are systematically ripping out any and ALL Cisco SMB products at our client sites and have moved on to more reliable, better supported solutions. My only regret is the fact that I have been lured in by the Cisco nonsense over and over. ... View more

cnscisco, I think you will find that Cisco has tried to play in the SMB market without even begining to understand how true small business operates. They have (over and over) failed to understand that a small business will not pay for call-backs based on poorly delivered promises and never ending bug-fixes. Chris Edgeworth indicated that he understood my frustration, yet another year  has passed and nothing has changed. In fact, in that time CIsco has taken the same "open source" path with several more of its other SMB products. The extremely poor support, buggy firmware and missing features are starting to spread like a disease.  The tiny development teams tasked with implementing what appears to be off the shelf hardware and open source firmware. In that context they are simply not capable of handling the issues they create or that are present in the open source platform to begin with. Seeing that they they are building solutions on open source platforms that they did not engineer they must rely on the open source community and documentation just as we would. If I wanted to go down the open source rabbit hole, I would do it myself. As we don't deal with large enterprise where fortunes can be made delivering missing features, broken promises and bug fixes, we are pretty much done with Cisco. There are simply too many other companues that offer reliable products, support, attention to detail and timely fixes for issues. ... View more

Chris and Nitin, I am sure your intentions are noble, but respectfully I am not sure what else there is to discuss. The concept of the UC-320 is wonderful and I was extremely excited to offer it to our small customers. However, as it stands there are simply far too many issues with this platform to even consider giving it another chance. This adventure has cost the respect of a valued customer and pockets full of money attempting to make that customer whole over the last year. Devoting even more time to this disaster by spending it on a feel-good conference call (regardless of what fixes or work-around are proposed) will not help regain the respect of the customer or mitigate the financial losses that have resulted from the installation of this product. I gave the UC-320 more than a fair chance and would have loved for it to deliver, but the damage is done and a valuable lesson has been learned. The only (rhetorical) questions (at least in my mind) are when will Cisco ever learn that lesson, and how does Cisco manage to make simple things so utterly complicated. William Burnett ... View more

John (and Cisco) The customers system is as basic as it can get. key mode two pots lines three system phones AA DISABLED Unit acts as broadband router and DHCP server Only programmed buttons are line appearances and extensions Both my company and the customer are tired of defaulting the system and tired of having to call us to login and "fix" the basic functionality several times a month. After a power failure, the AA still shows that is not enabled, but ALL calls are DIRECTLY routed to AA anyway. The only way to fix the problem is to log into the GUI, enable the AA and then disable it and save the config. Why are we not using AA? Because it did not route calls properly about 20% of the time. Instead of being forwarded to the proper mailbox or extension, calls were dropped, or the customer heard the wrong prompt, gibberish or a busy signal. Again this AA and setup were as basic as they could get. 1 menu level and 3 mailboxes. I am not going to (again) list the numerous issues we are still having, as it is a waste of time. Daniel, Respectfully, the fact that 85% of your customers are happy would indicate that they are blissfully ignorant to the problems with the system and/or they have never had a real phone system to compare to, or you are blowing smoke up their hind ends and convincing them that the bugs are features or expected behavior (like having to hit 9 before a redial). John, 100% of my customers have an existing network and router with 99% having an on-site server that does DHCP, DNS, etc. This system WILL NOT work in that environment regardless of what the white paper says, it is a disaster any way you configure it. As an IT consultant, I have never worked with ANY device that is this hard to integrate into an existing network. Randy, Christopher, etc, It is over a year later and the product still lacks a large number of fixes for BASIC functionality, things that should have been taken care of before launch. We are not talking about minor usage issues or obscure bugs. Many of these problems are blatant-in-the-face issues that are simply not acceptable.I have NEVER worked with a telephone system (Avaya, Samsung, Nortel, Toshiba) that is this poorly implemented or bug riddled. To be frank, this product more resembles a stereotypical "open source" nightmare run by teenage linux geeks than it does a professional quality small business telephone system produced by a global networking giant. The result is that we will never offer another Cisco voice product to a customer again and will (have already began to) steer customer interest to other platforms. To that end (and maybe not relevant here), we have also abandoned the other Cisco SMB products (like the RV220W) due to similar issues with blatant issues that are never fixed. ... View more