William Bell

From time to time the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) administrator receives a request to block inbound calls to an organization based on the calling party number (CPN). This is commonly known as "black listing". Historically, admins could use translation profiles on dial-peers to address this need. With CUCM 8.0…

I recently had a conversation about tools that I use that may not be what one would call "common knowledge". Basically, the discussion was around tools that may be handy for an engineer that works with Cisco Unified Communication and Collaboration solutions but that are not part of the standard…

I am a regular face on the Cisco Support Community (CSC) forums and I recently saw a question that is constantly resurfacing on the forum. The question? "Should I use MGCP or H.323 for gateway protocol?" I suppose SIP can be thrown in there as well. I have a canned…

This is a quick blog on configuring Cisco IOS H.323 VoIP dial peers to facility call path (and DTMF relay) between PSTN parties and the Cisco Video Communications Server (VCS). Specifically, when the call is tandem routed by the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM).

I recently fielded a request from a customer to provide guidance on what it would mean to move away from Cisco Wireless IP Phones and adopt Cisco mobile client applications on smart phones. I was a little out of date. I deployed CUMA and Unified Mobile Communicator for a customer…

Overview There are several methods that may be employed to integrate a CUCM cluster and a VCS cluster. These methods include H.323 trunks, SIP trunks, and configuring the CUCM to [...]

Until recently, Cisco customers were required to use the Unified Computing System (UCS) platform when running Unified Communications (UC) applications in a virtual environment. On June 7th Cisco introduced a new support model called "Specification-Based Hardware Support". With this announcement Cisco widens virtualized platform support to include IBM and HP.

A few weeks ago in Cisco VCS Clustering Configuration, I wrote about configuring and initializing a Cisco Video Communication Server (VCS) cluster. When running a VCS cluster, some consideration needs to be given to the endpoint configuration parameters for client registration.

Earlier this week I presented at the Cisco Mid-Atlantic User’s Group (CMUG) with my colleague David Hailey. The focus of my presentation was to cover the basics of the Cisco [...]

The Cisco Video Communication Server (VCS) is a call processing engineer that was added to the Cisco Collaboration and Unified Communications portfolio as part of the Tandberg acquisition. The VCS is a very impressive solution that is able to fulfill the role of a H.323 gatekeeper and SIP registrar. Actually,…

Recently I needed to build out a few CCX scripts for a customer and I had to brush off some old notes on creating and editing prompts. The process of searching through my notes led me to the conclusion that it may be worthwhile to post a quick (hopefully) blog…

My colleague David Hailey and I have been slowly compiling a list of write-ups on SIP endpoints with CUCM and iPhone SIP Clients. I recently added several blogs to the repository that cover SIP clients on the Android OS. For a change of pace I decided to test a SIP…