Call Waiting on Cisco 6921, 6941 and 6961 Handsets

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7th October 2011

Call Waiting on Cisco 6900 Series handsets

An additional update to one of our previous posts.

As mentioned previously, the Cisco 6900 series handsets only support one call per line. This means that Call Waiting, which is supported on 99.9% of other handsets does not work on the 6900s out of the box. The only way to configure Call Waiting is to assign a line to another button on the handset (assuming you have one spare) and then configure “call forward busy” on the first line to send calls to this.

Only one word for this. Ugly.

Buyer beware. The 6900s look very attractive because of their price point, however the more we see, the less we like.

6900 Series Handset

Barry Hesk

Cisco Unified Communications Manager Release 8.6(2) Upgrade

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7th October 2011

Cisco Unified Communications Manager Release 8.6(2)

Nice little challenge if you’re upgrading any Cisco MCS7825H3 servers to CUCM 8.6(2) or indeed Unity Connection to the same release.

In a nutshell, the upgrade process converts the RAID on the server from hardware to software based and effectively results in a total reformat of the machine during the process. A few points about this:

  • You need to attach an external USB storage drive with a minimum size of 16GB (CUCM) or 128 GB (CUC) to the physical server. During the upgrade the server will dump off its current config to the USB drive and then import it after the format is complete.
  • The USB drive will be reformatted during the operation so beware!
  • Obviously this means that remote upgrades will not be possible, and physical access to the machine will be required.
  • Finally, as the server is formatted, you cannot switch back to the old version like you can on most other upgrades. The only way to revert the software is to reimage the entire server, and restore from DRS backup. Ouch!

A link the release notes is here which provides more details on the process.

Because of the RAID conversion, the process can take at least a couple of hours longer than previous upgrades.

Not as straight foward as other upgrades it is fair to say.

Barry Hesk

PCI-DSS Made Simple

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October 6th 2010

PCI DSS Compliance Made Simple

Thanks to the folks over at Cisco Systems for this page which provides an easy to understand outline of the PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) and some sensible advice on how businesses should approach it.

PCI DSS Compliance Made Simple

PCI DSS needs to be considered by all businesses that process or store credit card data. The above link is very much an overview, and more in depth information is available at the official PCI Security Council web site

Barry Hesk

Cisco UCM and Unity Connection VMware on non Cisco hardware

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5th October 2011.

Cisco UCM and Unity Connection VMware on non Cisco hardware

Finally. Finally. Finally.

Cisco now officially support deployment of key Unified Communications applications included Communications Manager and Unity Connection on non Cisco hardware when using VMware.

The use of VMware was meant to speed up deployment and provides all of the key business benefits that are brought to the party by virtualization. However, Cisco’s previous insistence that formal support would only be provided when running VMware on Cisco’s own UCS hardware platform was in our minds (a) ridiculous and (b) a massive inhibitor to deployment of new installations.

It’s only a start. It is only selected HP and IBM server configurations that will pass muster with Cisco TAC and the VMs must be built with Cisco’s own OVA templates, however we have to acknowledge that Cisco have finally listened and it’s a step in the right direction. VMware is meant to remove hardware limitations and requirements so we can only hope that Cisco add to their supported platforms list as time moves on.

Barry Hesk.

More Cisco UC Installation Issues

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30th September 2011

Cisco CUCM 8.6 Installation Problems

Yet more severe problems upgrading to the latest version of Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

We’d already reported a problem with the Unity Connection 8.5 installer hanging. Now it seems that other issues are present in the latest 8.6 releases too. As the operating system code base is common across all of the main Cisco UC applications, thes issues will probably impact Communications Manager, Unity Connection and and Contact Centre Express.

Details of the issues are:

1. Upgrading to 8.6(2) seems to work ok. A “switch version” is issued on the Publisher. After the reboot, the publisher comes up for a few minutes and then reboots again on the old version. Cisco TAC need to be involved to fix this issue. The latest code on CCO is still broken.
2. Instaled 8.6(2) on the Publisher; rebooted and all ok (see the previous issue). Attempted to install 8.6(2) on Subscriber. Installation hangs for hours and has to be cancelled. Workaround for this is to run the upgrade with “Automatic switch back to previous version if upgrade is successful” set to “no”.

Being brutally honest, this is all an utter mess. Cisco seem unable, or unwilling to actually test anything before they release it these days and it is starting to have a huge impact with customers.

Barry Hesk

Extreme Altitude 4511 Wireless Access Point Announced

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September 26th 2011

Extreme Altitude 4511

Extreme Networks have announced a new low footprint wireless access point the Altitude 4511. The unit is designed to simplify wireless deployment by being able to install onto existing wall sockets that hold RJ11 or RJ45 sockets. Interestingly, the access point can also act as a controller for up to 24 other units which in our view is a teriffic idea and will simplify deployment.

The unit itself is about the size of an iPhone and is built on an Atheros chip set. All of Extreme’s enterprise wireless management facilities are supported including Dot1X authentication.

Barry Hesk

New releases of Cisco UC Products

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21 September 2011

Cisco Systems have released updates of their main Unified Communications Platforms to address both bug fixes and limited new functionality.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.6(2)

Proxy TFTP Server: Targeted towards large enterprise deployments, it allows TFTP services serving endpoints to be distributed. It allows any CUCM server to act as a TFTP server for local resources, even handsets that belong to a different CUCM cluster.

Cluster Wide Call Park: Again, targeted at larger deployments, Call Park has been reworked to make it simpler in terms of call routing, CSS and Partition definitions. However, CTI monitoring of Call Park slots has been removed (it will be reinstated in CUCM 9.0) meaning that applications such as Attendant Consoles, will not be able to provide real time status displays of them.

Redirecting Number Transformation: Some additional enhancements allow you to manipulate the number associated with a redirect operation. This can be useful for situations where redirects are in place (for example Call Forwarding, or Single Number reach operations) to keep visible the original calling number.

Cisco Unity Connection 8.6(2)

Microsoft Office 365: Support for Unity Connection integrated with externally hosted Microsoft Office 365 environments. Please note that at the current time each integrated is limited to only 19 users. Email delivery, calendar integration and text to speech is supported.

Cisco SpeechView: Cisco SpeechView (Standard and Professional) provides speech to text services allowing you to “read” voicemails. Cisco SpeechView is a subscription service which is not covered by your existing Unity Connection licensing.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express 8.8

Phone Download: Adds HTTP support for downloading of phone firmware and configuration files.

Support for new phones: Adds support for 3905, 6945, 8941 and 8945 IP phones.

Cisco Unity Express 8.6(1)

Additional Hardware Support: Support for SM-SRE-710-K9 and SRM-SRE-910-K9 hardware service modules

Hosted SMTP Providers: Provides secure (SSL) SMTP support to hosted providers including Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Microsoft Exchange and Windows Live.

New IMAP Clients: Support for additional IMAP Clients including iPhone, Cisco Mobile, Outlook 2010, Windows LiveMail 12.0 and IBM Lotus Notes. Support is also added for CSF Clients which includes Cisco Unified Personal Communicator 8.5.

Cisco Unity Contact Centre Express 8.5(1)

Outbound IVR: Allows CUCCX to place outbound calls and present the connected party with a menu / IVR system. Requires CUCCX Premium licensing.

Increased Agents: Up to 400 agents are now supported, depending on the underlying platform.

Additional Platforms: Additional hardware platforms are now supported including MCS 7825 and 7816s and Cisco UCS Servers.

 

Barry Hesk