This topic is a chance to discuss more about the new features in Unified Contact Centre Express 11.0 and what to expect in 11.5. The discussion will be focused around the new features and functionality such as Finesse IPPA, Remote Expert Mobile integration and so on. This is also a chance to discuss about upgrade mechanisms and planning for the 11.0 upgrading, while also positioning your customers for the 11.5 release coming in the next few months.
To participate in this event, please use the 
button below to ask your questions
Ask questions from Monday, July 25 to August 5th, 2016
Featured Expert
Abhiram Kramadhati is a Technical Solutions Manager with the Contact Centre business unit. He has been working with Cisco Contact Centre since he joined Cisco. During his five years at Cisco, he has built his expertise around Cisco UCCX telephony applications, Java Telephony API (JTAPI) integration, Cisco UCCX system behavior, LDAP components, and Cisco UCCX as IP interactive voice response in Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) environments. He also works on other technologies, including Unified Communications Manager and UCCE. He has been involved in many technical escalations in the Asia Pacific region. Abhiram also holds a CCIE in collaboration (40065).
Abhiram might not be able to answer each question due to the volume expected during this event. Remember that you can continue the conversation on the Contact Center Community
Find other https://supportforums.cisco.com/expert-corner/knowledge-sharing.
**Ratings Encourage Participation! **
Please be sure to rate the Answers to Questions
Hi Anthony,
Thank you for the first question and I am glad its from you! We really do appreciate the work you do on the forums and all the help you provide, so thank you for that.
1) Currently, we have had a number of successful use cases of PCD being used with UCCX for upgrade and administrative purposes; we recently had a customer who upgraded 30+ clusters of theirs using PCD. The current supported tasks are:
Single Node and High Availability Installations • Linux to Linux and Refresh Upgrades • Switch Versions • IP Address and Hostname Changes • Sever Restarts
However, some of the others such as migration are not supported on UCCX and Unity Connection mainly because of the multiple instances of databases that we have as part of the design and also the schema used by different applications made it very difficult to have a compatible path. For now, 11.0 does not support it like you have pointed out but let me have a chat with the right team to understand how this gap is going to be (if) addressed.
2) I would not like to set a wrong expectation by saying that there might be something for this, but unfortunately there is nothing in the foreseeable roadmap where this design will be changed. One of the fundamental reasons is that the phone line is needed for some of the most basic features - monitoring, barge and intercept. Although one approach would be to let a supervisor login to just utilize the LD and the reporting capabilities, since some of the more basic functionalities are missing - it will continue to remain as a requirement. But I fully understand the challenge and this is not new, let me see if I can provide more technical details because many of the subsystems already have 'extension' as one the fields that is used for the role 'supervisor', so it will be a massive change to do so and that is very unlikely. For now, the answer is that this design will continue.
3) There have been a couple of announcements around licensing for 11.5, the same can be viewed here: https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-66937
But for the specific question around seat to port ratio, I will check with the product manager and get back to you on how they advise customers with such scenarios.
4) This is something we have requested for 12.0 - based on bandwidth reasons, not sure if this will be added in 12.0 but this is something definitely already on our list. Thanks for reinforcing it!
5) The Finesse Administration link is currently there as part of the drop-down for administrators:
The rationale is that the Finesse Administration page is used by a UCCX Administrator so it is provided after you enter the UCCX Admin section in the welcome page, but the CUIC can be accessed by just a report administrator who does not bother about the UCCX configurations. Adding that should not be too much of trouble, but that is the rationale but the UI/UX will change and continue to evolve from 11.5 and through to the next release. So hopefully that will be make it better!
As far as the ports are concerned, the challenge is that these applications are developed as individual applications and then baked into one product - so they will come with their sets of back-end doors and windows. And also because each of the UI/UX changes happen independently and then get ported into the UCCX (for quicker development), the webpages and the web server instances remain independent. But certainly good feedback from a UX perspective.
6) I really like this and I can also see why partners and customers would like this! Leave this with me, and I will see if we can do something on these lines. It might probably be beyond the scope and timelines of this event but I will certainly keep in touch with any updates on this.
I will get back with the pending questions, but please feel free to let me know if you have more questions. Thanks again!
Regards,
Abhiram Kramadhati
Technical Solutions Manager, CCBU
CCIE Collaboration # 40065
Hi Amer,
That is certainly good feedback. Are you referring to the adding a datasource connection on CUIC? If so, there is an option to test the connection where you can check the connectivity to the datasource before and adding it:
If you are referring to the option of adding a datasource on the UCCX Admin page which allows the UCCX script to access external databases, we do have an option to test the connection:
The moment you add a datasource, the UCCX will save it and automatically make a test to show you the result as well:
One thing we could do is automatically display the status of a datasource when it goes offline so that you can monitor it from the webpage and you don't have to rely on the logs for that. I have filed an enhancement request for that: CSCva62783
Hope that helps! Do let me know if you have more questions, thank you.
Regards,
Abhiram Kramadhati
Technical Solutions Manager, CCBU
CCIE Collaboration # 40065
Hi David,
Thank you for your questions.
Are there any significant improvements within CUIC and displaying more customized real time data on the Finesse desktop?
There has been quite a lot of work done on the CUIC real time reports and the way they have been displayed on Finesse. For starters, the UCCX 11.0 has a completely new architecture for real time reports based on SocketIO and this is real real time with the data directly received from the engine and the reports computed on the browser side (reducing load on the server to create a report and then dish it out to the clients). You can read about the live data reports available on the CUIC here: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cust_contact/contact_center/crs/express_11_0/design/guide/UCCX_BK_U3AF2742_00_unified-ccx-design-guide-11.pdf
You cannot create a custom live data report, but you can customize the current ones to an extent. You can hide columns, add thresholds and display those reports on Finesse.
Now, on Finesse side there are enhancements too on the live data gadget. The gadget toolbar has been provided that can accommodate 5 reports views at the same time, thus saving a lot of real estate on Finesse. You can sort columns, display only thresholds and also pause a live data report. A quick snapshot of how that would look:
The sample callback script which a lot of people use as a poor man's CCB has a lot to be desired (reporting, long queue times without calls timing out, use with multiple queues), are there any plans to build a more native system into UCCX to handle this better?
The sample callback script is a custom script created, so there are no out of the box reporting options. However, a custom report can be created. With 11.0, a standalone CUIC can now be setup to work with the UCCX and if you have a premium CUIC license, you can create your own report that reports on this. That being said, there are proposals to make this out of the box but nothing concrete as of now.
Double clicking on a script editor step to bring up it properties, any plans of implementing this?
I will create an enhancement request for this, so that we can look at it in one of the future releases. It is currently not in the immediate roadmap.
*Update* - enhancement request filed: CSCva61063 (will take a few days to be visible on the Cisco Bug toolkit).
Do let me know if you have any other questions! Thanks.
Regards,
Abhiram Kramadhati
Technical Solutions Manager, CCBU
CCIE Collaboration # 40065
