Conference Option - CME

[GRANT3779]

How am I able to get the conference button to appear on Cisco phones registered against CME? Is this option only available on certain phone models and do I need any sort of MTP or can the CME router handle the conference?

I've had a look through some documentation but seems to be overloaded. Just want to know the basics to get this up and running.

Thanks

[paolo bevilacqua]

The button appears norrmally.

If you have trouble with the documentation a good option would be to engage a reputable consultant or UC certfied Cisco partner that will set up thing for you easily.

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

Paolo is correct that it appears by default; however, it's possible that you have custom softkey templates built

which neglected to include this button. Once that is fixed you should see the option during a call.

Secondly, you need to enable conferencing. CME can support three-way calls natively in the router's CPU. If you need more than three participants or notice that the CPU impact is getting unacceptably high (consistantly above 70% is a problem) then you can configure hardware-based conferencing using the dspfarm commands.

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[paolo bevilacqua]

Jonathan, a small correction. Three-ways conference is done by the phone itself, in fact one can expand the number by having a joined phone to conference in another participant, and so on.

Router CPU never do conferencing, then as you indicated , for multy-party conferencing, hardware dsp-assisted has to be configured.

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

Hi Paolo-

Happy Friday! The CME Admin Guide seems to disagree with you. I know there is the Built-in Bridge of the phone's DSP but, to my knowledge, that is only capable of copying/streaming out to a recording server or supervisor phone for monitoring, not mixing audio and redistributing.

Conferencing Overview
Conferencing allows you to join three or more parties in a telephone conversation. Two types of conferencing are available in Cisco Unified CME: ad hoc and meet-me.
Ad hoc conferences can be hardware-based or software-based. Software-based conferences use the router CPU to provide audio mixing (G.711) and are limited to 3 parties. Hardware-based multi-party ad hoc conferencing uses digital signal processors (DSPs) to allow more parties than software-based ad hoc conferencing and also provides additional features such as Join and Conference Participant List (ConfList).
Meet-me conferences are created by parties calling a designated conference number. Meet-me conferencing is hardware-based only. If you configure software-based conferencing, you cannot have meet-me conferences. 

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[kaja_2kj3]

Hi Grant,

      As jonathan said, if you couldn't  see the conference button on the phone, while they are connected to some one and want to add the third person, then you can create a ephone template  in the connected state and add the conference button there. And MTP comes into play only if more than 3 parties on the conference which requires hardware conferencing otherwise you can use the software conferencing for 3 person.

Please rate this if it helps

Thanks

[paolo bevilacqua]

Jonathan Schulenberg wrote:
Hi Paolo-
Happy Friday! The CME Admin Guide seems to disagree with you.  I know there is the Built-in Bridge of the phone's DSP but, to my knowledge, that is only capable of copying/streaming out to a recording server or supervisor phone for monitoring, not mixing audio and redistributing.
Conferencing Overview
Conferencing allows you to join three or more parties in a telephone conversation. Two types of conferencing are available in Cisco Unified CME: ad hoc and meet-me.
Ad hoc conferences can be hardware-based or software-based. Software-based conferences use the router CPU to provide audio mixing (G.711) and are limited to 3 parties. Hardware-based multi-party ad hoc conferencing uses digital signal processors (DSPs) to allow more parties than software-based ad hoc conferencing and also provides additional features such as Join and Conference Participant List (ConfList).
Meet-me conferences are created by parties calling a designated conference number. Meet-me conferencing is hardware-based only. If you configure software-based conferencing, you cannot have meet-me conferences. 

That got me curious. I've tried to capture some commands on the router to see how it diverts an existing media stream to itself to  do the mixing, but I haven't got anything conclusive. I could see that when a phone is conferencing, still on single streams shows in the status web page, but the media endpoints are not specified. I'll post again when I'll be able to see better how this happens.

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

If it's anything like CUCM (presumably it is since they use the same SCCP protocol) CME would issue a StationStopMediaTransmission and StationCloseReceiveChannel to tear down the existing RTP stream with the other phone (assuming mtp isn't on the ephone), then a StationOpenReceiveChannel and StationStartMediaTransmission pointing to to CME instead.

I would imagine that 'debug sccp events' would show this though I don't have a CME router nearby to try it firsthand.

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