About: colin
Music On Hold Streaming from an FXO port on CME 8.8
Here’s another CME feature that did not work quite as expected when reading the documentation. As with the conference bridge, I read along and followed the documentation from Cisco for “Configuring Music on Hold from a Live Feed” (the link is below) and the feature was still not working. When placed on hold, all callers heard was the default Cisco MOH audio file. This showed that the fall back portion of the config was working fine but overall something was missing.
“http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucme/admin/configuration/guide/cmemoh.html#wp1010511
According to Cisco all that is required is a cable to connect to your live feed device, a fxo or e&m port, a dial-peer and an ephone-dn.
The cable we made on our own out of a bit of cat5, a RJ11 head and male to mail 3.5mm audio cable. Continue reading →
Configuring a conference bridge in Cisco CME
I recently ran into an issue configuring a conference bridge for a client. What makes this particular problem worth sharing is that I found the documentation provided by Cisco on this issue to be a little confusing and a little unhelpful.
The initial document I used to try to configure this issue can be found here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucme/admin/configuration/guide/cmeconf.html#wp1021179.
In particular what confused me were the differences in step 5 of “Configuring SCCP for Cisco Unified CME” and step 3 of “Associating Cisco Unified CME with a DSP Farm Profile.” I have included the full configuration example of both of these sections below.
MWI with Exchange 2010 and Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7
An exciting feature of Exchange 2010 is its support for message waiting indicators (MWI). While this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, one of the biggest complaints about Exchange 2007 was its lack of MWI support. Even though Exchange Unified Messaging is able to send voicemails to an email address, most users are accustomed to the phone notifying them when they have new voicemail.
Even more exciting were the reports that MWI with Exchange 2010 and Cisco CallManager 7 just worked out of the box without extra configuration. Many articles I read spoke of the ease of configuration at getting this feature enabled. This, however, was not the case in our lab. As it turns out, some of the default settings for SIP trunks in CCM 7 will cause problems with MWI.
Cisco Unified Communications Manager Handset Workaround
One of my favorite things about my job is working with Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). It’s so robust and complex that there always seems to be something new to learn. Last week I ran into a couple of interesting issues that I thought I’d share with you.
The first is an issue for which I’ve been trying to find a solution for several weeks. One of our clients was experiencing issues with external auto-attendants recognizing the DTMF tones their phones were sending. What made this issue particularly strange is that if the user was on speaker phone they were able to get the remote AA to respond to the DTMF tones without issue. Continue reading →