Jabber CLID on B2B calls

[Oscar Jaime]

Hi,
I’m surprised I can’t find more information on the following issue, given that many people/companies use split DNS on Collab Edge deployments.
I’m also deploying Collab Edge MRA with different internal and external domains, along with B2B.
Of course, the Jabber clients register to CUCM with internal domain (i.e user@internal.local). External domain is external.com.
Issue is that when a Jabber client calls another company’s endpoint (i.e,vts@xcompany.com) the Jabber client provides a CLID or call back address of user@internal.local which the other company's endpoint can not call. Been looking around in CUCM and the Expressways to see if there’s any way to change that, something like the External Number Transformation Mask, but this field in the Jabber device only allows numeric transforms and I'm not being able to come up with the solution. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
 

[Anthony Holloway]

Well, you said "any ideas" so here goes...

Change your IM and Chat domain to your external domain.

I'm curious, how did you get around the services domain being .local and get MRA to work?

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

Anthony,

Long time. Hope you are keeping well..

There are a few steps to get MRA working with dual domains..

1. Implement split dns

2. Provision jabber to use external domain as the voice service domain./discovery domain

3. Point 2 above requires a few things: Your uds record internally must point to the external domain (this is why you need split DNS)

Here is a link that describes this in detail..

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/unified-communications/expressway-series/117811-configure-vcs-00.html

[Oscar Jaime]

Thanks for your response.

Yes I have deployed MRA with split DNS as described and this is working fine. I find hard to believe Cisco has not taken provisions to allow the CLID to be modified as the use of external and internal domains is widely used by companies. If the External Number Transformation Mask in the CSF device or a Translation rule would allow for URI transforms, it would be an easy task. 

At this point in the deployment, changing the presence domain will not be an option for our customer. 

Anyways, I've found the following discussion about Flexible JID and researching now if this feature could help us. Just started reading about it and it might be as intrusive as changing the presence domain but not sure yet.

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/12622416/cisco-jabber-user-id-flexible-jabber-id

Thanks

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

Oscar,

It looks like the only way JID can help is if it allows you to use a different domain to login than your XMPP domain. This looks like a possibility, but it is alsoa huge work as all your JID and contacts will be regenerated.

First of all, a few considerations:

• This is an all or none change, it will affect ALL your users
• You will need IM&P 10.0+, I'd recommend 10.5(2)
• ALL Jabber clients will need to be on 10.6+ release
• ALL JIDs will be re-generated as well as the contact lists for ALL users
• You will need to adjust the jabber-config.xml to reflect the changes and resolution to work.
• If you are working with more than one cluster, you will need to perform this on ALL clusters at the same time
• This will be a flash cut, no way to do it little by little.

[Oscar Jaime]

Yes, I've got that from the Wiki site. I think it looks promising but will need to try it in my lab first.

Thanks for your help

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

Good idea. Keep us updated

[Oscar Jaime]

Wanted to provide an update on this:

I made the change in my Lab (changed mail id to external domain) and used Flexible JID procedures to make the change.

It looks like it helps me to achieve the goal of providing a routable CLID for external users to call back. One must is that you need to regenerate the XMPP certificate with one that includes the external domain as a SAN.

As Cisco documentation does not warns you (at least I can't find any note in the documentation) that there's no way to easily transform the Calling Party id for Jabber devices, you need to think about this in the planning stages. Now I have to go deal with my customer on making this change.

Thanks

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

Oscar

Great stuff, thanks for providing us with an update. I think though that if your presence domain has been set to the global one, then this wouldn't have been an issue. Perhaps there was a reason why you didn't do this.

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

Oscar,

Changing the presence domain might be the only way here as Anthony suggested. However this is a massive change. Your users will need to change the way they login to jabber. You will need to change their URI address either from AD if they are using the mail attributes or manually in CUCM if manually defined. This is massive change..