William Bell

One feature with CUPS and CUPC is the ability to consume and aggregate presence information from Microsoft Exchange.  CUPS uses this information to (a) present meeting information to the IP Phone Messenger application on CiscoIP phone and (b) to provide status information to presence consumers (like CUPC) based on Calendar…

Recently I have been updating some custom utilities to take advantage of the Cisco SOAP API for gathering real time information about devices configured in a Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) system.  I came across an interesting feature in the response that could lead to pitfalls if one is not…

What's in a name really?  For Cisco Unified Communications Manager the hostname is critical.  When performing an upgrade  to CUCM 6.1 using DMA and changing the host name/IP address of the publisher node, the system services may become unstable and will not stay active.  Issues are also seen where services…

When the OS Install Software web interface appears to hang and not process requests to start an upgrade you may need to execute it from the command shell.  I experienced [...]

I came across an issue working on a script enhancement for a customer where  I needed to  compare two time/date variables and evaluate the seconds that have expired between them.  [...]

Probably the only thing I miss from Call Manager 4.x (and 3.3 for that matter) is devicelistx.asp.  It was a simple tool provided by Cisco that had a lot of [...]

NetCraftsmen provides a UC Optimization service where we will perform, among other things, a general health check on an existing cluster.  Some times this is done as part of a routine optimization task.  As of late, we perform this task as part of upgrade preparations. Anyone who has run CallManager…

As Cisco has moved away from Windows based platforms and to a custom built Linux "appliance" model the tools available to the Cisco UC administrator have changed drastically.  One tool that gives tremendous power to the administrator is the network capture utility on the Cisco UC appliance. The following is…

When deploying Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) and Cisco Unified Presence (CUPS) one of the design objectives should be to architect a solution that adds dynamic fault tolerance.  One can [...]

For those of you who either like to run queries on the Call Manager, have customers who do so, or have tools that customers use for change management and the like, [...]

Back in my day … The folks who worked with CUCM database replication issues remember the days when we were able to use SQL enterprise manager or the dblhelper application [...]

I offer you a handy dandy tool for testing, resetting, validating DSPs on a Cisco voice gateway (tested on ISR models): Hidden Command: test voice driver It will start a [...]