This post is in response questions & google searches I get on whether the 3CX IP PBX and OCS 2007 R2 integrate. I'll answer the question in two pieces: #1-Does 3CX support integration? and #2-Can it be done.
#1-Does 3CX Support OCS 2007 R2 Integration? The answer is no, according to 3CX support. 3CX comments as of Nov 2008 are that it doesn't work and there are no plans to make it work since the products are essentially competing products. 3CX noted that it would make most sense to decide between either 3CX or OCS. 3CX does plan to add messaging features sometime in 2009.
#2- Can it be done? I've read posts here and there of people making it work and with OCS r2 SIP trunking it likely can be done but I have not personally tried it. And if it's not supported it would be easy to get in a corner. Can it be done? Likely. Should I? Probably not.
I need to admit I can see some companies may want a full featured phone system and full featured instant messaging server. I did a bit of research and did find a company, http://www.pbxnsip.com/, that makes a PC/Windows IP PBX that does integrate to OCS. They have a wiki page detailing the steps at:
http://wiki.pbxnsip.com/index.php/Office_Communications_Server
I haven't tried the integration but I discussed the integration briefly with the VAR that wrote the wiki page and he said the integration works very good. He said they did it for Microsoft for a show and it worked so well they now use it in house.
I certainly do believe that Microsoft OCS has the black box and software based IP PBX squarely in their sights so I can see why 3CX feels uninclined to court OCS. On the other side 3CX is based on being open and interoperable.
3cx ocs 2007 R2 pbxnsip
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
5 comments:
We have many live installations of pbxnsip and Microsoft OCS around the world. pbxnsip software has supported TCP connections for years now, so integrating with Microsoft products was very easy. As we are a B2BUA, we can handle calls from a device on UDP and communicate with Microsoft Exchange and OCS using TCP.
pbxnsip is also fully certified and supports Microsoft Exchange 2007.
Please see our wiki page...
http://wiki.pbxnsip.com/index.php/Microsoft_Exchange
Hi JAG,
Thanks for that input.
matt
Hi Matt, Hi Jonathan,
if you take a look at the infrastructure graphic you can see a real world OCS & pbxnsip deployment. This is not a demo, it run the whole Microsoft booth at the CeBIT productive(the world's largest computer expo!). And we will repeat this also this year with OCS R2. The wiki article about OCS & pbxnsip was my present to pbxnsip, for their great support & great partnership. If you follow the steps in the article, you will successfully integrate OCS with pbxnsip in less than 29 minutes. And thats the big pro with pbxnsip, especially for SMB costumers! With it's unmatched easy setup,feature-set,customize, support and the interop capabilities, it should be the SMB first choice, not only if you consider OCS/Exchange. From my point of view (I am not an VoIP expert) if you try to compare pbxnsip with all the alternative softswitch solutions for SMB, you will recognize that no other can compete. If you are sceptic Jonathan and I will have fun to prov it. :) Or first check out what MIERCOM and TMC are telling about it, if you like a more independant statement.
Please note: pbxnsip is a spinoff from Snom. The OCS edition of Snom is available for all Snom phones, starting low entry 300 up to the 820 + the upcoming first Snom conference phone MeetingPoint. All of the OCS edition phones can do a failover from OCS to pbxnsip, asterisk, cisco, nortel, etc. & even to voip-gateways like audiocodes, in case of any connectivity or maintainence issue at the OCS side. If you like to find more info about real life experience about this great solutions, please check out the forum @ http://forum.pbxnsip.com/index.php?showforum=37
btw: we (ITaCS) are not reselling Snom or pbxnsip. We are a Berlin-based Microsoft Gold Partner, who was looking for the best solution with OCS/R1&2 and Exchange for our 15 people team. Thanks for your patience reading this completly ;)
Best regards,
Jan Boguslawski
Consultant IT Infrastructure
MCSE, MCTS OCS2007
Jan,
I am already a big fan of SNOM, so you don't need to do any convincing there. ;-) Also, we are doing very in-depth testing of PBXnSIP and are very impressed by our findings. Incredibly stable product with an amazing array of features all in a tiny footprint. (takes about 50MB running 15 phones)
thanks,
matt
...also Jan, no worries on your post length, i'm pretty verbose myself...;-)
Post a Comment