Tag Archive: CUCM

Unified Communication Design

Written on January 3, 2011 in Design
UC Design

Do you have a Unified Communications project on the horizon and need consulting and design services?

Let our award winning staff of CCIE Voice engineers design, document, and plan your next project.

We specialize in advanced Cisco Unified Communications such as Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Communications Manager Express, Unity Connection, Unity, Unified Presence Server, and Unified Contact Center Express.  We offer high level and technical deep dive sessions with CXO’s, Directors, and staff.

Allow us to talk to you today about your UC Experience!

Why do you need a UC design?

Let’s face it, a modern UC infrastructure is only as solid as the design it was built upon.  We believe strongly in the presales and planning portion of any project.  What does that mean?  Well, have you ever felt “rushed” to a sale?  Like the sales guy just wanted your ink on the dotted line?  We are not like the “other guys”, we want to educate and inform during the design phases of any project.

We believe that if you spend more time up front in the planning and design phase and combined that with the right architect and architecture that you the customer will be more happy and experience a high return on your investment.

UC vs Collaboration?

For a long time Unified Communications simply meant putting together a Call Manager cluster and deploying phones, maybe if you were lucky the consultant would talk about SRST…well now days the game has changed.  Video anyone?  Unified Communications is rapidly turning into a collaboration technology in which you can rapidly connect people, places, and information.  Wouldn’t it be a good idea if your “architect” had mentioned this before you went down the wrong path?

Differentiators Anyone?

In Addition to providing top notch design sessions, we can also speak to the differences in Unified Communications product lines…

For example, have you ever wondered if Cisco Unified Communications would work with your existing Microsoft infrastructure?

Are you using Microsoft Office Communicator?

Are you using Microsoft Office Live Communications Server and want to compare and contrast a Cisco Unified Communications environment?

Are you currently using Nortel or Avaya solutions and need a comparison of features and supported deployment options?

Let us talk to you about your options today!


Unified Communications Whitepaper

White Paper: Evaluating Unified Communication Solutions

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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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VIC3-FXS/DID SCCP Registration

Written on October 10, 2010 in Opinions
Cisco VIC3-FXS/DID Card

Ever wondered how to configure a FXS card on an ISR router to register to CUCM using SCCP protocol?  It’s actually easier than you might think.  The benefits of this type of configuration over a traditional H.323 configuration using dial-peers is that you the customer can manage the device and the extensions assigned to a device without needing to know any IOS commands and change any dial-peers or router configurations, it’s all done through the CUCM interface.

In CUCM it appears just like any other SCCP controlled phone.  If you would like to know more information about this type of configuration, it’s benefits, or you just plain need help setting it up, feel free to drop me a line at alex@hannahtechnologies.com and we can set it up for you in a matter of minutes!

Check out the commands below:

On your Cisco IOS Router you will need to configure the following:

!  Following Syntax sets up the STCAPP ( SCCP Telephone Control Application ) on the router.
stcapp register capability 0/2/0 both
stcapp register capability 0/2/1 both
stcapp register capability 0/2/2 both
stcapp register capability 0/2/3 both
stcapp ccm-group 1
stcapp

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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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