Tag Archive: call manager

Unified Communications Manager 8.5

Written on January 2, 2011 in Unified Communications

Why CUCM 8.5?

Everywhere we travel, we often are asked “What’s the big deal with Cisco Unified Communications Manager?”, formerly known as Cisco Call Manager.

Well “the deal” is very big! CUCM is Cisco’s IP based PBX. It has achieved several industry leading certifications and is certified for PBX1 deployment by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC).

CUCM provides agencies with a scalable, distributable, and highly available communications platform, giving users the power to manage their communications quickly and conveniently, so they have more time to manage their work and focus on mission-critical tasks.

CUCM Architecture

CUCM 8.5 is at the very heart of the modern Cisco Unified Communications platform. CUCM provides several key features and functions to the UC environment including; call signaling, setup and tear down, billing, CDR or call detail records, native presence capabilities, rich media conferencing, robust third party application integration and a highly scalable and available platform providing 3rd party API access for custom application development.

With Cisco Unified Communications Manager, you get an enterprise-class IP telephony call-processing system for up to 30,000 users. It provides a centralized or distributed dial plan and architecture, multiple features, a built in back and restore agent, and directory integration into many modern LDAP structures.

Key Benefits:

  • Simplify voice systems with unified communications to cut costs and dramatically streamline provisioning and maintenance.
  • Extend video capabilities to your employees through a single, unified communications infrastructure.
  • Build productivity with comprehensive unified communications to help workers communicate and work more effectively.
  • Enable mobility with embedded unified mobility software capabilities to keep workers productive wherever they are.
  • Improve collaboration: click to begin an IM session, initiate a phone call, or easily start a videoconferencing call.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager creates a unified workspace that supports a full range of communications features and applications with a solution that is highly:

  1. Scalable: Support up to 30,000 users with each Cisco Unified Communications Manager cluster.
  2. Distributable: Get scalability, redundancy, and load balancing.
  3. Available: Maintain business continuity and collaboration with a high-availability foundation for server redundancy.

CUCM Additional Reading and Case Studies

Case Study 1: CUCM 8.5 Multi-site Deployment Case Study

Tech Specs: CUCM 8.0 Data Sheets

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Dial Plan Overlap Woe’s

Written on July 27, 2010 in Opinions
DialPlan.jpg

Every good Voice Engineer I know has seen them, however, very few notice or even pay attention to it, until… it’s a problem for the customer.  Today I had just such an event pop up in a handy little trouble ticket from one of our customers.  The ticket went a little something like this “When I dial 9, I hear silence until I dial a second digit.”

Any thoughts?

This is a very common problem for a lot of people when they have dial plan overlap.  What I mean by this is after examining the customers dial plan for several minutes I noticed that their route patterns were all 9.@ and were assigned route filters.  This wasn’t so bad, actually when I can do so, I prefer route filters to traditional patterns as it creates more room for flexibility in your dial plan.  As I was scrolling down the route plan report I noticed something that caught my eye, someone had configured a phone with extension 9001 on it.  Not a problem you say, I beg to differ!

Call Manager or Cisco Unified Communications Manager has a very strict set of rules for digit interpretation and call routing.  Each time you dial a digit Communications Manager will evaluate that digit against all possible route patterns, DN’s, CTI RP’s, etc until it finds a possible match or an exact match.  The kicker is when there is a tie, so in our example above the 9.@ and 90 would match, and it wasn’t until the user would dial a second or third character that CUCM could rule out the 9001 extension for the remaining patterns would it present outside dial tone to the user.

This is a very common mistake in a lot of deployments, one that won’t really affect any system functions, but is more of a nuisance to the end user.  This very problem is one of the items we look for while performing our UC Assessment and Health Checkups.  Contact us today for more information this service if you feel your organization could benefit from a UC Health Check!

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Contact Center Analysis

Written on July 26, 2010 in Consulting
Contact Center

Contact Center’s or Call Centers are often the lifeblood of many corporations.  Often times they are the “first line of defense” so to speak in customer support and service.  How many times have you called into an organization for support only to “stuck in queue” for seemingly forever?

Hannah Technologies specializes in Cisco Unified Contact Center Express ( UCCX ).  Our engineers hold the highest certifications possible in Contact Center design, scripting, installation, and support.  In fact our engineers have taught Cisco authorized Contact Center Express courses all around the country teaching many Cisco engineers and end users what “not to do” when they install these systems.

Is your contact center drowning?  Are your agents not presented with any information about the caller or “screen pops”?  Do you experience unreadable Contact Center reports?  Are your Contact Center supervisors frustrated in how best to allocate resources, queue’s, and skills?

In addition to performing out analysis, our talented team of engineers can often recommend additional features your organization may not even know exist in their product portfolio.  Did you know that if you upgrade to Cisco Contact Center Express version 8.0 that you can scale to 400 agents?  Did you know that you could integrate with Presence for increased caller satisfaction through improved agent performance and knowledge worker expertise?

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UC Remediation’s

Written on June 23, 2009 in Consulting
UC Remediations

Were you sold a UC Solutions by one of those “other guys” only to be left with a steep bill and a solution that doesn’t quite work the way it was promised?  No worries, we have extensive experience in performing Unified Communications remediations for our clientele.  Part of our white glove service is to show customers what was improperly designed or implemented and “to make it right”, whatever that may take!

Let Hannah Technologies perform our magic on your existing Cisco Unified Communications infrastructure.  We perform all aspects of Unified Communications remediation from basic moves adds and changes, all the way through major upgrades.  Best of all, your environment will be handled by a CCIE Voice who will have access to the latest methods and techniques.

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