Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Centrally Refreshing Jabber Contact Photos in MRA Deployments

I have assisted several customers with Jabber deployments lately. Almost all of them driven by the desire to implement Mobile and Remote Access (MRA). Provisioning MRA is not the topic of this article. Instead, I wanted to touch on an operational task that has annoyed me for some time. 

The issue is with caching of Jabber contact photos. Windows and Mac Jabber clients are coded to cache various things. I assume this is an effort to minimize network transactions and optimize client performance. One of the elements cached are contact photos. I have no problem with caching but, in my experience, the issue is that old contact photos tend to be permanently cached and I can't easily (i.e. centrally) force a refresh. 

I played around with some options and found a method that worked in some test environments and my own production environment. Maybe this will work for others. I would be interested in hearing about other options. Please use the comments to enlighten me and others!

Monday, July 20, 2015

Heads Up, Issues with UCM SIP Processing on 10.5(2)SU2 and 11.0

Users that recently downloaded Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) 10.5(2)SU2 [10.5(2.12900-14] or CUCM 11.0 [11.0(1.10000-10)] may have received an email from Cisco alerting them that these versions have been deferred due to some serious defects. If so, then good for you. If you ignored the e-mail then you receive the wag of the finger.

Maybe, you are managing a system affected by the defects we are going to discuss but you weren't the one to download the files. Well, in that case, you wouldn't have been alerted. In all cases, if you have installed 10.5(2)SU2 or 11.0 and are running SIP then you want to heed the warnings and look at applying the appropriate fixes.