Mitel teleworker solution

[borisdecout]

Does Cisco offer something similar to the Mitel teleworker solution where the remote user can just plug in a hard phone into its local network and the phone register itself over the public internet?

What is the cisco recommanded solution for teleworkers

Thanks

[travis-dennis_2]

It is not a very good security practice to allow your phone system to be reached over the public Internet by unsecured means. It is technically possible to do this will CallManager but not advised. Some sort of private line, leased line or VPN would be better. I roll out VPN solutions a lot. You can reach the local LAN and CM over the public Internet but it is secured. If you have a full time VPN connection between the 2 LANs it would get you the results you are looking for.

Hope this helps.

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[Tommer Catlin]

I have never heard one either from Cisco, but the Mitel solution is awesome. Mitel basically takes a phone and has it's own encryption protocol back to a linix server that is bridge into the 3300. IT's amazing how fast it drops right in if you have a Mitel based IPT. I'm surprised Cisco does not have something similar. But I guess if you are cisco, you push IPVPN solutions from their solutions.

[sshareef]

I think Cisco's way SRST.

Hope this helps.

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[Jason Hamlett]

SRST is for routers at sites without Callmanagers to take over basic call function when contact with the cluster is lost.

I used to work at a Mitel shop and saw Teleworker in action. If you trust the encryption provided and don't mind leaving a few ports open directly to your phone system, it does work in an extremely slick fashion. Since I moved to Callmanager, we have been doing 7960's

behind L2L pix 501's or IP Communicator over VPN and a USB headset/handset.

[Tommer Catlin]

So in comparision... for the original question.. you can see that Cisco has not come up with a slick version like Mitel has. With Cisco version of Teleworker, you have to have a VPN tunnel built first with a 501 or something similar... for an IT staff, to support this.. it's another piece of hardware to configure, update, etc for some remote user. In the Mitel world, all you have is the phone. The IP phone can be plugged into a Linksys, netgear, whatever. It does not matter, as long as it gets an IP address. Once it's gets an IP address, it builds its own 128bit encryption tunnel back to the telework series, not relying upon a local firewall to do this. No user intervention is needed.

hopefully Cisco can come up with something like this soon.