I have encountered a Shoretel and what I saw was slicker than snot on a glass doorknob. I have a customer in DM Iowa who is a distrbutor of a product made in California. They wanted to link their phone systems together, so that support calls could be transferred from IA to CA. My customer in DM has a Norstar 4.1 and the CA customer has a Shoretel.
They wanted high quality voice between the two sites, so VoIP through the internet was out of the question. The CA company bought a shoretel device that will communicate with a nortel via T1 emmulation(we could have done PRI, but caller info was not needed for this application). Then the Shoretel box is hooked up to a point to point data circuit back to the main Shoretel in CA. They get 24 tie lines from a Nortel MICS to a Shortel device.
I set up a routing table where DM customer dials the a 4 digit extension and the routing table routes these calls to the Shoretel in CA, Like wise, I set up target lines to hit the extensions in DM from the Shoretel in CA. Both customers have seemless 4 digit extension dialing and call transferring across the sites. They split the pricey cost of the point to point, so far as I know everyone is happy.
I didn't have to program the Shoretel at all, but when it came to programming the Nortel side, it was a snap. I went to the Shortel website and downloaded the documents from their website on how they liked the T1 on the Nortel side to be programmed so it would work with the Shoretel device. It also looked like this Shoretel would interface with just about anything and easy too. I liked their website and most of what I saw. I am pretty Nortel biased, too.
