William Bell

Over the past year we have been helping customers upgrade or migrate from their old CallManager 4.1 system to one of the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) appliance models.  Clearly there are various options available to people who are doing this upgrade.  For some folks, one approach is to stand…

If you have recently migrated to a Cisco UC appliance model or plan on migrating, you may have asked yourself this question.  Cisco provides some recommendations in their various installation guides.  I happen to like copSSH myself and I thought I would provide some information on the application and how…

Recently I have had a few customers that needed to have a basic queuing function but did not want to have a Contact Center/ACD application in their environment.  In one instance, the customer was led to believe that they would need a UCCX server to do basic queuing.  This is…

David Hailey recently posted a blog on the differences between Integrated Message and Unified Messaging.  After reading Hailey's blog I was reminded of a design discussion with a customer over messaging options on Unity Connection.  With Unity Connection you have multiple options on how you handle voice messaging for a…

Most people don't bother with modifying the Unity SAWeb administrative account (unityadmin).  They are content with just letting everyone log on using the unityadmin (or unityinstall) account.  The NetCraftsmen UC team prefers to avoid this method as it violates some best practices on security.  Specifically, accountability.

With CUCM 4.2, Cisco introduced a feature called "Call Forward Unregistered" or CFUR.  The point of this feature was to allow administrators to specify special call handling rules when a device was unregistered.  The intended purpose is for "temporarily unregistered" device line forwarding.  Essentially, supporting SRST call path continuity.

Recently I had the opportunity to look at methods to integrate a Cisco Unity system with multiple Cisco CallManager (Communications Manager) clusters.  There is a method that leverages UTIM to create/manage multiple integrations.  This is OK, but requires more administrative involvement than is necessary for our needs.  So, I opted…

There are several methods that one can leverage to allow one Contact Center Express (UCCX) CRS script to control another script  or pass data to another script.  I happen to prefer using XML document types.  The following is an example on how to use XML to control script behavior.

Recently I was working with a customer that wanted to ensure that remote sites that used SRST enabled routers had access to the same corporate Music On Hold (MoH) audio [...]

In a previous article I discussed how I like to use Microsoft's LogParser utility to, well, parse Windows event logs on a Call Manager server.  For those that no longer run CM on a Windows server that article may not be incredibly useful.  Recently, I have had to update some…

Creating custom alerts using Cisco's Real Time Monitoring Tool (RTMT) is not really straight forward.  At least not in the documentation.  However, it is actually quite simple.

Class of Restriction (COR) is the concept where a station or line is restricted from calling certain called destinations based on business rules.  For instance, restricting common area phones from calling long distance or international locations.  There are several tiers to a properly designed COR enabled dial plan.  One such…