The Gold Cisco IP Phone

Several years ago I was in a Cisco office in Herndon, VA and I was cruising the hallway looking for someone (paging Dr. Ta). During my wondering, I came across the unicorn of Cisco phones - a gold plated 7971. At least, I think it was a 7971. I thought it was kind of odd and found out later that it was a "trophy" given to AMs who hit certain thresholds. Cute. 

Well, I all but forgot about that phone until recently. One of the engineers on our Collaboration team is Bruce Enders. Bruce has been in the industry for a long time and has recently retired. Well, of course I want to send Bruce off in style. What do you get someone when they retire? A gold watch? A plaque? A night out on the town? Well, NetCraftsmen was doing the plaque, company gift, and night out on the town. So, that left me with the watch. Bruce recently bought a new watch and really likes it. So, I decided to give him the next best thing: a Gold Cisco IP Phone. This blog is about the process used to turn an old gray piece of telephony plastic to a shiny new gold show piece (insert bling sound >here<).

Updating Speed Dials Using SQL Queries on CUCM

In this week's installment of my Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) SQL Queries series I wanted to build on last week's query with a special treat: Using the update SQL query to make changes to database entries.

This type of query is handy whenever you are looking to make system wide dial plan changes. For instance, you are going to move from a 4-digit dialing solution to a 5-digit solution or you are going to change your off-net dialing prefix for some reason. Yeah, this actually happens. In fact, it is a recent query from a colleague concerning off-net dialing prefix changes that inspired this week's installment.

Upgrading Cisco VCS from X6.1 to X7.1

This is just a quick blog on a recent upgrade I did for a VCS X6.1 system to X7.1. The upgrade was pretty painless but I wanted to highlight two points of interest. Well, interesting to me anyway...

Upgrading from Factory Built X6.1

The first is a RTFM item that I almost missed. Fortunately, I caught this on a second read through. From the X7.1 release notes, if you have a VCS unit that was shipped with X6.1 pre-installed, you will need to do some CLI tinkering for the backup process to work correctly. I suppose something was missed in the build. Anyway, in summary:

1. SSH to the Cisco VCS 
2. Login as root
3. Create the /tandberg/persistent/oti and /tandberg/persistent/management folders
4. Logout 

Example:

wolverine:~wjb$ssh root@10.3.9.20

root@10.3.9.20's password:

~ # mkdir /tandberg/persistent/oti
~ # mkdir /tandberg/persistent/management
~ # exit

Getting an Upgrade License

This was a new one on me. I am used to upgrading other Cisco Collaboration applications but have only applied an upgrade to the VCS under the Tandberg regime. The process is pretty simple. First, go to http://www.cisco.com/go/license and log in using your CCO account. From here, you should scroll down to the section under Product Authorization Key (PAK) and RMA License Transfer. You will see a "tab" option called Tandberg Software Upgrade & Look up.

After clicking the Tandberg Software Upgrade & Look up select the "Register for a Tandberg Software Upgrade License" link. You will need the Serial Number and MAC address from your VCS unit. Enter that data, click on the GetVersion button and then the rest is self-explanatory. 


NOTE: You may not see X7.1 listed in your entitlement drop down [I saw X7.0(y)] versions only). Just pick the latest X7.0, the license key will work fine and dandy.


Read More
There is a good discussion on the Cisco Support Community where Martin provides a good jump point for looking at X7.1. Of particular interest, Cisco provides an OVA for VCS. Yes, that's right vVCS! More on that later.

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Thanks for reading. If you have time, post a comment!

Querying Speed Dials Using SQL Queries on CUCM

In this week's installment of my Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) SQL Queries series I wanted to cover querying for speed dial configurations.

This type of query is handy whenever you are looking to make system wide dial plan changes. For instance, you are going to move from a 4-digit dialing solution to a 5-digit solution or you are going to change your off-net dialing prefix for some reason. Yeah, this actually happens. In fact, it is a recent query from a colleague about change off-net dialing prefixes that inspired this week's installment.

Cisco Expands Base UC to Include Presence and IM

I came across a Network World article on how Cisco is adding IM software as a basic feature of their UC offering. I think this is interesting news. Basically, Cisco is going to include Jabber and their Unified Presence Server (CUPS) at no extra charge to customers that have Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). 

Customers who have CUCM 7.1 and above will get Jabber IM client and CUPS. It sounds like this won't be limited to users with IP phones. So, if you have a telephony solution that has a mix of call processing solutions (CUCM and Avaya, for example) you will be able to offer presence and IM features to all enterprise users. IOW, you don't need to have an IP phone or CUWL user license to make the IM and Presence capabilities available to your enterprise users.

My understanding is that we are talking IM and presence here - not voice and video services. These will likely be optional features that customers can add where and when it makes sense. 

I think this is a good play and a necessary move to competitively position CUPS/Jabber against MS Lync. Also, I have had this sneaking suspicion that presence capabilities may one day be built into the CUCM application (does anyone remember the Unified Mobility server?). I am just speculating here but it isn't what one could call completely unfounded.

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Thanks for reading. If you have time, post a comment!

Troubleshooting FindMe Alias Forbidden Error on Cisco VCS

I just wanted to dump a quick blog on using FindMe configurations on the Cisco Video Communications Server (VCS) Express Starter Kit. I was doing some testing with FindMe and realized pretty quickly that I may want to RTFM a little more. I thought the quick troubleshooting exercise may be of interest to someone out there in bitLand! 

ATA 2012 Conference

I will be attending the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) 2012 annual conference in San Jose, CA. This will be the first time I am attending this conference. ATA is an organization that advocates promoting the use of advanced remote medical technologies in healthcare delivery. 

The annual international meeting and exposition (now going on its 17th anniversary) is a gathering of the best and brightest in the healthcare industry. It provides an opportunity for healthcare professionals to network and get in tune with the latest trends in policy, process, technology, etc. 

To be honest, I'll be a little out of my element. I am a pure techie. I am participating in this event because I believe that to build a sustainable solution in any environment you must first understand the use case, the needs of the people who directly interface with or rely on the solution you are building. It does not start with technology, that is secondary. I believe that if you try to engineer the use case around your technology, you have already failed.

If only it were that simple. Whenever I talk to professionals in the healthcare industry about what they need and what they are looking into, the ideas are endless. These are exceptional people with exceptional ideas and I look forward to taking part in the event, even if it is a bit role! 

If you are planning on attending the conference let me know via comments or email.

CUCM SQL Queries: Listing Call Forward All Settings

In this week's installment of my Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) SQL Queries series I wanted to dive into the call forward all (CFA) configurations in a production environment. This seems to be a "favorite" for folks who follow my NetCraftsmen blog.

I have found that being able to see where phones are forwarded is a common need. I have seen the question come up often in the Cisco support forums and I need to query CFA status on a pretty regular basis in my own job.

Content Sharing and Video Communications

I was recently pondering my first opportunity to design and deploy video communication solutions [back when it was known as Videoteleconferencing (VTC)]. I was thinking about what people wanted from the technology. How they wanted to interface with the technology and the other video users out there over their ISDN (H.320) or IP (H.323) networks. Lots of things about the technology have changed, but the use case has not. People use video for the promise of interacting with people visually over a great distance. Moreover, people want to collaborate over video. 

In this blog, I wanted to go on a tour down memory lane with the collaboration aspect of good ol' VTC IPVC telepresence(?). Whatever you want to call it, here we'll call it video. We are going to discuss the ITU-T's T.120 and H.239 Recommendations as well as the IETF's Binary Floor Control Protocol (BFCP) and associated proposals.

CUCM SQL Query Series: List Calling Search Spaces

In last week's installment of my series on CUCM SQL queries we did a quick dip in the CDR pool. This week we are going to meander our way back to some basic configuration gathering. Specifically, we are going to run a basic query that dumps a list of calling search spaces with associated partitions.