Contact Center Express - Shared Ext. and VPN

[Nathan Cartwright]

We have three pretty small call centers, pretty small and average 5-10 users each. Our mangers prefer to have desk phones but we're running into a couple complications. The first is all employee's have laptops. The thinking is when the weather gets bad or something of that nature employees have the option to work from home. The problem is our CCX agents are setup on IP Communicator AND a Desk Phone. CCX Will not let them have their ext on more the one device at a time...they have to unplug their desk phone to use CIPC and close CIPC to use their Desk phone.

This was not the case prior to upgrading to 8.0 - how are other people handling this issue?

The second complication is we're using 7965G phones with PhoneVPN (Which is AWESOME). The only problem is CCX does not work with PhoneVPN (or at least is not supported). Does anyone know the plans for PhoneVPN to work with CCX?

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

You need to be using Extension Mobility so that the ACD DN is on the Device Profile only; or, IP Communicator exclusively. We use IP Communicator for our call center as it saves the cost of physical phones. Unplugging the physical phone does not actually solve the problem which is you have more than one line appearance of the ACD DN. This has never been supported; CCX 8 just began enforcing more of the rules to avoid needless TAC cases.

As for the AnyConnect-based phone VPN client, there are a lot of things that the BU doesn't test. Last I asked there was not a specific release comitted to add support for this. You should speak with your Cisco AM to submit this as a feature request; if customers do not ask for it, it will never happen. Similar to your unplugging-the-phone trick, if you're willing to self-support and can make it work, feel free to use the AnyConnect-based phone VPN.