William Bell

Cisco Systems has several Android applications either in circulation or in the hopper. One I have been waiting for is Cisco Mobile for Android OS. Cisco recently announced the future release of Cisco Mobile for Android in the Collaboration Community blog and the data sheet has been released on CCO.…

This year was the first year that Chesapeake NetCraftsmen attended the HIMSS conference. Renee Wagner and myself attended the first couple of days and we were very impressed with the turn out. HIMSS is an exciting environment and the sheer number of participants and exhibitors was awesome to say the…

Cisco launched the Designated VIP Program today (11/10/2010). This program recognizes the top individual contributors in Cisco's online communities, including the Cisco Support Community (CSC) and the Cisco Learning Network. This is great news. Even better news is that Chesapeake NetCraftsmen claims 3 of the 26 spots in the inaugural…

Many moons ago, my colleague David Hailey and I put together a few quick write ups on SIP endpoints with CUCM and iPhone SIP Clients. I recently bought an Android phone (Droid Incredible) and one of the items on my list of "things to do" is testing out SIP clients…

Many moons ago, my colleague David Hailey and I put together a few quick write ups on SIP endpoints with CUCM and iPhone SIP Clients. I recently bought an Android phone (Droid Incredible) and one of the items on my list of "things to do" is testing out SIP clients…

Recently I fielded a question on managing prompts in Cisco's Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) using CRS scripts.  The person posing the question knew that they needed to use the Upload prompt script step but wasn't sure how to authenticate a user to the system.  This process is pretty straight…

In April I wrote a blog: Audit Logs on Cisco Unified Communications Manager.  This blog focused on new audit features available with Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) 7.1(2) and later.  Recent Netpro discussions around a similar topic provided a reminder that there were other aspects of the CUCM system that…

NetCraftsmen has recently been focusing efforts on aligning our UC practice with Cisco's "UC on UCS" vision.  We aren't doing this simply because Cisco is taking a step in the direction of virtualization.  We are doing this because it makes sense. Running Unified Communications (UC) applications in a virtual environment…

A few weeks ago Dr. Welcher brought up some interesting points around QoS for Microsoft UC environments.  One of the topics discussed was the need to facilitate traffic classification at the access layer for applications requiring QoS running on PCs.  The problem being how to ensure that the right application…

Ever since I started working with Cisco Call Manager (circa 1999 - yikes) I have always wanted a way to implement an Authentication/Authorization/Accounting model.  Now,  I finally got everything I wanted.   The Authentication/Authorization need was addressed somewhere around CM 3.1.4b with a web application add-on called Multi-Level Access (MLA).  Since…

The number of issues that could arise in your VoIP deployment involving voice gateways are too numerous to capture in one blog.  The issues and variants are probably too numerous to capture in one blog series.  So, my intention with this series is to simply touch on methods I use…

In the recent past I was helping one of our customers with some special SRST configuration requirements.  The customer had several key DIDs that were associated to a site that were not assigned to IP Phones on the site.  For example, a hunt pilot that would ring a group of…