Having tested the CUEAC product in the wake of the decision to upgrade from CUCM 7.1.5 to 8.5, I couldn't agree more with any of these posters. CUEAC is a not an enterprise product, the old AC built into 7.x and earlier was 10x the AC this piece of work is (and thats saying a lot because the old AC was, well.......rough around the edges).
We have offices in multiple countries, all of which need an AC. Because CUEAC doesn't support multiple timezones the only thing we could do is to choose not to use the 'after-hours' feature and tell the remote offices to put their console into "emergency mode" to forward to VM or alternate number. For an 'enterprise' product it sure seems like they only planned this for use in a small/medium sized company with one location, maybe two, but in the same timezone.
I cannot believe that they didn't build in personal directories! The speed dials option in CUEAC is an absolute JOKE as you cannot serach the speed dials! Serious? Most of our operators have hundreds of speed dials/personal directory entries. Most of these entries are for contacts outside of our company so of course we don't want to add them to our corporate directory. We can add alternate contact numbers in CUEAC for users in our coporate directories, but there is no import option from the old AC so all of this would need to be done manually.
I can speak on the Bridge Communications product as well as I just finished my eval of it. I have to give the creators a small bit of praise as they did build in searchable speed dials and personal directory entries which can be imported fro a .csv format, but their software is buggy and you cannot drag and drop connected calls to your personal directory to transfer or manage the calls. BOC will only import .csv format (standard MS Outlook format) for their speed dials, but the current Cisco AC exports as an XML file. I finally found an XML to .csv converter but the fields were completely off and I had to copy/paste/move columns and rows to match what BOC wanted, needless to say that took me the better part of a day. Since the imported speed dials are only viewable for the user that you created them for, this is something I would have to do for each operator user. I also ran into an issue with shared lines not showing up correctly in the directory even after going through and configuring which phone was the 'primary controlling' phone for the shared line. All the shared extensions in our company (about 100) were listed and "Not Known" for the name fields. I also ran into an issue after adding all of our devices to the BOC user that anytime the BOC TAPI GUI was running our CUCM pub was running at ~70% CPU utilization. At first I hoped it was just because it was populating the DB or something, so I let it run like that for over a week but there was still no change. I tried contacting the BOC support but never heard back from them. I ended up uninstalling the app and moved on to CUEAC.......which was also a mistake.
As of right now I'm stuck at finding an AC that is the right fit for our company and I'm probably going to put off the CUCM upgrade until I find something better.
Just my 2 cents to anyone reading this: don't even consider CUEAC in the state that the application is in right now; I'm tested version 8.6.1.9. As for BOC, I guess it wouldn't be too bad of a product if they could resolve the CPU load spike on the CUCM pub and the drag and drop calls to personal directories.
