William Bell

As a departure away from my standard "how to" blog style, I wanted to touch on a topic that I think many of IT professionals take for granted.  I am talking about the need for operational discipline, particularly in large enterprises where being unprepared could impact a large amount of…

PushPhoneXML This is one of those blogs where I am wondering if I should open this can of worms.  Despite my reservations I am going to post it anyway.  I see a lot of folks in various forums asking the question:  "How can I push a background image to a…

Around a week ago I posted a blog about setting up 3rd Party SIP phones in Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CallManager).  I received a comment about whether it was possible to use X-Lite with the UC-520.  Well, I haven't used the UC-520 myself but I believe it is basically Cisco…

So, this blog started with me looking for something to break up the heavy design documentation I have been doing for what seems like forever.  Like all tangents I undertake I find that I want to touch every button and turn every dial.  Some would say I am a glutton…

Starting in October I began writing a series of articles about the AXL SQL Toolkit that Cisco provides with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM).  I started the series because a friend of mine wanted to know more about how to get more granular "views" on the CUCM database.  In…

Every once in a while I get asked if there is a better way to distribute firmware to phones across the WAN. The obvious driver is the general performance (or lack thereof) for the standard TFTP approach when handling a large number of requests. This is one of those questions that usually…

A few months ago I had the opportunity of integrating multiple Cisco UC applications with a corporate LDAP solution.  Now that the UC appliances have a "nicer" integration path we see more and more customers going this route.  I wanted to do a quick write up on how some of…

In October I started a series on the AXL SOAP toolkit and database in Cisco Unified Communication Manager (CUCM).  You can check out part 1 here.  Continuing the discussion, we will go into how to obtain and use the actual tool kit that Cisco provides.

In September I discussed a feature called "Call Forward Unregistered" or CFUR.  The point of this feature is to allow administrators to specify special call handling rules when an SRST enabled device was unregistered.  I wanted to use CFUR as an example to illustrate how Local Route Groups and other…

A colleague of mine asked if I would do a blog on using the AXL/SOAP interface to execute custom queries for administrative purposes.  I thought that this would be an interesting topic to cover.  Though, it isn't something that can be fully addressed in one blog.  So, I think this…

Recently I fielded a request from a customer to explain how they could restrict access to the Corporate Directory and Personal Directory from an IP phone.  I checked into it and found that CUCM 7.x introduces a few changes that actually allows administrators to properly address requests like this one.

Have you ever wondered how to create background images on IP phones.  It is pretty well documented in the Cisco lore, but you have to jump around a little to pull the data together.  Here is a quick write up on the procedure with the file specifications on current phone…