AMA Forum- Design deployment and troubleshooting Cisco finesse in UCCX

[Community Moderator]

Ask Me Anything Forum

Architecture, design deployment and troubleshooting of Cisco finesse in Unified Contact Center Express

Cisco Finesse is a next-generation agent and supervisor desktop designed to provide a collaborative experience for the various communities that interact with your customer service organization. It also helps improve the customer experience while offering a user-centric design to enhance customer care representative satisfaction. Join our experts in the Ask Me Anything session to help you to unfold the secrets of Cisco Finesse functionalities, customizations and troubleshooting tips.

To participate in this event, please use the  button below to ask your questions

Ask questions from Wednesday, April 27 to Wednesday, May 11, 2022

Our experts

Sabiya Tabasum is a Technical Consulting Engineer with the Contact Center Backbone team in the Asia Pacific time zone. She has been associated with UCCX TAC and worked Finesse Deployments, BOSH and XMPP connectivity and Cisco Finesse Gadgets & Finesse JavaScript Library API its association with UCCX and troubleshooting and remediating finesse issues for customers. She is deeply involved in working on the Frontend development and works on JavaScript and CSS. She holds a Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology. She holds the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) and DevNet certifications.

Anupam Dewedi is a Technical Consulting Engineer with the Contact Center Backbone team in the Asia Pacific time zone. He has around 5 years of Cisco Unified Collaboration experience. He is currently associated with UCCX TAC and has previously been part of Multiservice TAC Team. His skills include vast understanding of Cisco Collaboration Suite. He is working closely on Cisco Finesse with the design, integrations, and customizations. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications

For more information please visit; Collaboration / Contact Center sub-category.

* This event is free and open to all audiences, including business partners, network and telecommunications engineers, students, and Cisco customers.

[bill.king1]

Will you be doing a similar forum for Finesse with CCE?

[Anupam_Dewedi]

Hi Bill,  Thanks for showing your interest with Cisco UCCE. We have no calendars setup for Cisco UCCE Finesse as of yet, however the same will be published on the community page once rolled out. I have taken a note of this interest and will ensure is communicated to correct channels. 

[Sabiya Tabasum]

Finesse Architecture in Unified Contact Center Express Deployments.

Cisco Finesse is a next-generation agent and supervisor desktop designed to provide a collaborative experience for the various communities that interact with your customer service organization. It also helps improve the customer experience while offering a user-centric design to enhance customer care representative satisfaction.

For IT professionals, Cisco Finesse offers transparent integration with the Cisco Collaboration portfolio. It is standards compliant and offers low cost customization of the agent and supervisor desktops.

Cisco Finesse provides:

• An agent and supervisor desktop that integrates traditional contact center functions into a thin-client desktop.
• A 100 percent browser-based desktop implemented through a web 2.0 interface; no client-side installations required.
• A single, customizable "cockpit", or interface, that gives customer care providers quick and easy access to multiple assets and information sources.
• Open web 2.0 APIs that simplify the development and integration of value-added applications and minimize the need for detailed desktop development expertise.

The Cisco Finesse Tomcat service hosts all of the web applications delivering Finesse functionality, runs as a co-resident service on the UCCX VM. The Finesse web application still functions as a CTI client to the CTI server that is now hosted on the UCCX engine in the same VM. The OpenFire server that is used to dispatch events to the browser is renamed as the Cisco Unified CCX Notification Service, but provides the same functionality as in Enterprise deployments from the Finesse perspective. However, it is shared with other applications hosted on UCCX.

In Express deployments, user authentication is done via the AXL interface provided by Unified Communications Manager, as user identity and profile information are managed by the UCM. UCM, in turn, may interface with a Microsoft Active Directory server for user management. Therefore, the caching realm for user identity information in this case is a different implementation as compared to Enterprise deployments.

Finesse Deployment:

A Finesse desktop client can be instantiated off either one of the Finesse servers. Clients obtain information about both the servers in the Finesse cluster, and monitor the status of the servers throughout the lifetime of the client session. Clients can dynamically initiate failover to the other server and recover their state if they detect connectivity or server issues with the server they are currently connected to. Finesse mirrors the UCCX active-inactive deployment model. Finesse is active only on the node where CCX engine is Master, and follows the engine mastership. Users can log in only to the Finesse server that is currently active. If they attempt to log in to the inactive Finesse server, they will be automatically redirected back to the active Finesse server. Each Finesse server in this model connects only to its own local CTI server instance. UCCX ensures that CTI server is active and allows client connections only on the node where CCX engine is the master.

Please check the Finesse Architecture and deployment images attached to this knowledge share

[jim-j]

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@Sabiya Tabasum wrote:

...

Finesse mirrors the UCCX active-inactive deployment model. Finesse is active only on the node where CCX engine is Master, and follows the engine mastership. Users can log in only to the Finesse server that is currently active. If they attempt to log in to the inactive Finesse server, they will be automatically redirected back to the active Finesse server

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Thanks for the detailed write up, but starting with UCCX 11.6.1 users can log into either Finesse server.  I.e. both Finesse servers are active and you'll stay connected to whichever Finesse server you log into.

[Sabiya Tabasum]

Hi Jim-j,

The behaviour has changed in 11.6,now both Finesse Services can be in service and will be able to handle agents on both servers. if they both are in Service.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-express/211582-Tech-Note-on-UCCX-11-6-Pre-Release-Commu.html#anc14

If the user is having an HA(high availability) setup the user can choose to login into either of the finesse servers according to their business requirements. In order to understand if they are using the primary finesse or the secondary one, one can utilize the following URL: 

https://fqdn:8445/finesse/api/SystemInfo

Please check the output attached to this reply for understanding the output of the URL.

[jim-j]

Will UCCX ever get any Webex Control Hub CCUC love?  The integration with CUCM and Webex is great, wish I could have some UCCX visibility in Cloud Connected UC as well.

[Sabiya Tabasum]

Hi Jim-j,

We are glad to share with you the all-new, next-generation cloud contact center-> Webex CC(contact Center).

Please do visit this page for more information:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/contact-center/webex-contact-center/index.html

[jim-j]

Webex CC (contact Center) looks nice, but that's a completely different solution.  Does this reply mean that UCCX will never get CCUC?

[Anupam_Dewedi]

@jim-j Thank You so much for highlighting this interest here. Just like CCUC, we have a solid customer base on UCCX solutions and hence we want to take slow steps depending on the mass requirements. While, WebEx Contact Center is a SAAS model hosted over cloud which is powered by WebEx. The administration of which can be taken care of by WebEx Control Hub easily. WbxCC has its innate Agent Desktop present where agents can login just like Finesse. 

UCCX has been a leading prominent on-premises contact center solution however as of now can be called an in-transitioning solution towards cloud. UCCX can now integrate with WebEx Experience Management for providing elevated customer experience journey and thus helping agents with insights to provide best services on per call basis. This is a small example of why we can refer this to a transitioning model. The easy to use API's over Finesse allows you to create your own applications or gadgets. We have lot more close to open integrations available now for Finesse over UCCX. UCCX 12.5SU2 which was recently released allows you to login to finesse bypassing VPN connectivity (VPN-Less Finesse).

[Sabiya Tabasum]

Understand Finesse BOSH Implementation 

1. The Finesse web client has a stale HTTP connection (http-bind) set up to the Finesse server via TCP port 7443. This is known as a BOSH long poll.
   
   
2. The Finesse Notification Service is a presence service that posts updates regarding the state of an agent, call, etc.
   
   
3. If the Notification service has an update, it replies to the http-bind request with the state update as an XMPP message in the HTTP response body.
   
   
4. If there are no state updates 30 seconds after receiving the http-bind request, the Notification Service replies without any state updates to allow the Finesse web client to send another http-bind request. This serves as a way for the Notification service to know that the Finesse web client is still able to connect to the Notification Service and that the agent didn't close their browser or put their computer to sleep, etc.

Understanding Finesse XMPP Messages and XMPP Nodes

Finesse also implements XMPP specification XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe. The purpose of this specification is to allow the XMPP server (Notification service) to get information published to XMPP nodes (topics) and then to send XMPP events to entities subscribed to the node. In the case of Finesse, the Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) server sends CTI messages to the Finesse web service to tell Finesse about configuration updates such as, but not limited to, agent or Contact Service Queue (CSQ) creation or information about a call. This information is then converted into an XMPP message that the Finesse web service publishes to the Finesse Notification service. The Finesse Notification service then sends XMPP over BOSH messages to agents that are subscribed to certain XMPP nodes.

Some of Finesse API objects that are defined in the Finesse Web Services Developer Guide are XMPP nodes. Agent and supervisor Finesse web clients may subscribe to event updates for some of these XMPP Nodes in order to have up-to-date information about real-time events (such as call events, state events, and so on). This table shows the XMPP nodes that are pubsub enabled.

[Filip.Olsen]

Hi Sabiya & Anupam

12.5 Finesse no longer display enterprise data when call is ringing - only when the call is answered.

Is this a 12.5 Feature  - compared to 11.6  -  any option to change this ?

[Anupam_Dewedi]

@Filip.Olsen Can you please elaborate more on this issue ? 

1. Do you have a UCCX or a UCCE setup ? 
2. Are you referring to Enterprise Call Info popping up when a call arrives ? 

Can you please share the screenshot of your finesse call variable layout setup for the affected teams ?

[Filip.Olsen]

Hi Anupam

1 - Yes UCCX 12.5.1 SU2

2 -  Yes i am.

We upgraded from 11.6 to 12.5 , so it seems the popup in browser calling notification in bottom contains the option selected under layout - and then all is shown in the top of finesse when the call is answered -  i was not aware of this. ( might have been a new feature in 12.0 hence i did not read this )

Thanks.

[Anupam_Dewedi]

@Filip.Olsen Your understanding is correct. The layouts changed since finesse 12.X versions and hence the pop up behavior has changed.

When a call arrives at the desktop, your state automatically changes to Reserved. A popover notification with configured customer details is displayed with the Answer button.

Once call is answered, Your state changes to Talking. You are connected to the caller. The configured call variables are displayed in the call control area and can be maximized or minimized, if required. This can be done by toggling the maximize/minimize arrow or clicking on call control. If a second call arrives on the desktop, the original call's call variables display is minimized.

Along with the layout you also can use workflows to manipulate how the call variables pop-up.