Cisco Attendant Console Options

[ampm_25]

We will so be looking to upgrade our CUCM v7.1(5) environment to the 8.x or 9.x platform and will, by unwanted necessity, have to upgrade our Attendant Console use from the built in/free option to a paid for and extra hardware option.

In reviewing the Cisco options offered on their website of business/department/enterprise/premium versions, they are all built on a Windows OS.  I find this wierd and unacceptable considering that Cisco itself has migrated just about all their products off the Windows OS platform (need to move them all).

I am wondering if others have used an alternative solution by a different vendor that uses a different OS than Windows, possibly appliance based.  This is wanted to avoid "Patch Tuesdays" and cut down on the amount of care and feeding of the functionality.  Oh, how I will miss the built-in/free AC days!

Some of the third party vendors that I've heard about but have no experience with are:

www.bridgeoc.com

www.fidelus.com

www.iqnetsolutions.com

If you have had experience with any of these or can suggest others, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Arras

[skilambi]

We have had customers deploy Vista point the last one in your list and are happy with it. They have accommodated customer requests like reporting. It is also based on con current licensing and not number of machines like Cisco or Fidelus

There is also another company http://www.midasolutions.com/soluzioni/by-type/operator-console/?lang=en that has developed console using Jabber SDK.

Thanks

Srini

[jamgale]

Srini,

FYI, CUAC also works on concurrent licensing and always has. It is not based on the amount of machines the software is installed on.

Jamie

[skilambi]

Jamie

Thanks for the clarification. That information I got from Dave Bentsen at Arc. When I had asked for shift based opeators if every machine has to be licensed he mentioned it had to be. I don't have the email handy since it was more than a yr back and I deleted it.

That was just one of my concerns. I have several others but since this thread is not on the partner side I won't post them here. If you want me to send them to you direct let me know your email and I can share them

Srini

[jamgale]

Srini,

I will be sure to bring this up with Dave

Absollutly send them on to me, jamgale@cisco.com and I will be glad to address them for you.

Jamie

[skilambi]

Thanks Jamie I sent you a long email ☺ look forward to your thoughts.

Thanks

Srini

[ampm_25]

I just realized that I haven't thanked all the responders to this post as of yet.  So thank you to all who have posted so far, and any future posts as the Cisco Community is great for these types of inquiries. 

Thanks,

Arras

[Christian Bongiovanni]

Please have a look at Imagicle console:
http://www.imagicle.com/go/BluesAttendant

It provides advanced queuing with welcome and hold custom messages, historical and realtime reports, integration with external directories, presence integration with CUPS, camp on, virtualization for both clients/servers and enterprise class features like high availability.

Imagicle is a Cisco Preferred Solution Developer, with a suite of apps including accounting and billing, ip fax server, xml directories with jabber integration (all these available on Cisco GPL) and attendant console.

So with a single server instance you can run multiple essential services for your Cisco Unified Communications environment.

Regards.

Christian Bongiovanni

CTO @ Imagicle

[ronnytittoto]

Mida OperatorConsole is a module of eFramework, a linux based virtual appliance distributed as preinstalled OVA, therefore I think this is what you are looking for!

I thank Srini for mentioning the product.

The cool thing about Mida OperatorConsole is that it is based on Jabber SDK, therefore fully web based, supports CUP if you have one or it can handle BLF using CTI, supports soft phone and desk phone modes, supports video calls as well and the web cliet runs on Windows and on Mac as well.

See details here.

Mida Solution is a Cisco Preferred Solution Developer and the eFramework suite offers a large set of applications on the same virtual appliance, including queue manager, billing, fax server, recorder, directory xml service, etc.

I totally agree with You that having to run an application server on Windows is totally unacceptable

eFramework can be placed in co-residency with CUCM on UCS or any vmware platform and the vApp requirements are by far lower than any windows server machine.

Feel free to contact us at info@midasolutions.com for further info.

Regards,

Ronny Tittoto

[Steve Snodgrass]

Arras,

Thank you for this very timely post!  I was just looking at the Cisco Attendant Console today and had exactly the same negative reaction as you about having to manage a Windows box.  Thanks also to the responders, I will check out these other options.

[nmirashi]

Hello Arras,

                I am the Cisco BU contact for CUAC. Your comments are well taken and I appreciate your feedback. I would like to set up a follow up meeting with you to further discuss your environment and share CUAC roadmap/product direction. Please feel free to contact me directly (nmirashi@cisco.com) and let me know what dates/timeslots would work best for you.

Regards,

Nihal