I have been in pbx's for 20 years. It is embarrassing that the callmanager cannot insert a pause in a dialing string. My home portable phone can. Don't get me started on the number of speed dials available. Also an embarrassment.

The "my speed dials" has 99 available speed dials accessed and assigned via the Cisc IP phone. We are using 3.1(2C) and these are working well. The customer does not have to hit the web page to assign the speed dials, nor are they assigned in blocks of 5.

John,

I have no doubt that you have been in PBXs for 20 years. But unless you really flew into AVVID with your eyes shut i doubt seriously that you thought *Cisco* had been in PBXs for 20 years. Are some of the missing features fairly obvious? Yes, especially to those who have used them for 20 years - some of the CM programmers are only just over 20 years old John! Cut them some slack - I'm sure Cisco is doing everything they can to surround those people with folks that have actually been around as long as you have - it will make a difference :-).

Are these feature absences enough to outweigh the huge benefits? Not in my experience. I'm not saying you shouldn't complain - just remember that for every engineer Cisco assigns to fix the smaller missing features, however useful they may be - there is one less to work on the issues that need to be hammered out more quickly (IMHO) such as integration and interoperability issues that actually make a large buying decision for those of us who can't throw our PBX's out the door. Again - if you have a client on your back about the dial string issue - I'm not saying you're wrong to be upset at it's ommision - I'm just saying it's a stretch to call CM on the whole "embarassing".

If you had had the short time period that Cisco has had to basically completely develop a PBX from scratch and then have people say that it's embarassing because even though it 99% emulates a $1,000,000 PBX it can't insert a pause in a speed dial - that would be a little discouraging wouldn't you say? Let's congratulate cisco where it is due - and absolutely pressure them where necessary - including on this issue - but calling the CM prduct embarassing is not only untrue in nearly every sense of the word, but also pretty much 100%unproductive.

Since we've implemeneted AVVID we've seen a trickle of the features we missed from our PBX come onboard - that's about the right pace for me unless they have folks around there twiddling their thumbs... The day I stop seeing 2 or three little PBX features come on board for every one or two massive functionality fixes or improvements, then i'll worry they've dropped their PBX-catchup efforts - I see no evidence of that...

Just my $0.02 - not intending it to be flamebait :-)

- Ken