The Nortel OPTera Metro comes with a copious supply of documentation, on CD and in print. Nortel includes a master table of contents and index in a separately bound booklet. The documentation is also available on a CD-ROM in PDF format. Alcatel provided a CD-ROM tutorial on the operation of the Optinex 1690. The documentation we received was sparse compared to Cisco, but contained sufficient technical information to understand the operation of the shelves.
Documentation is a thin, but informative printed manual.
The documentation contains a listing of all the command and helpful information for installing and configuring the shelf. And the winner is . . . Nortel has been providing carrier-based WDM and DWDM gear for some time now, and the OPTera Metro 5200 reflects this experience. It is sophisticated in design and management. It has all the bells and whistles you could want and really shines at what it does.