Deploying Cisco IP Communicator - extension mobility pros and cons?

[mcreilly]

We have CUCM deployed across most of our offices, and users are familiar with the concept of extension mobility. A number of them use it regularly when travelling between offices etc. So far only a few people (the IT team mostly) use CIPC but we're planning to roll that out quite widely over the next few months.

Obviously we could provide EM on CIPC, but we're wondering whether we actually want to do this. While desk phones are sometimes shared (visitor desks etc), laptops are very much a one-per-user device and get carried around. We haven't used EM for the CIPC users we have so far, but CIPC shares the same DN as their UDP for extension mobility on desk phones so users keep the same number.

My thinking was that this was the obvious way to do things, but the training team (who will be explaining all this to end users) have asked what exactly users will miss out on if we don't deploy with extension mobility. They have suggested one feature - if users set up abbreviated dials for their profile, they won't see those on CIPC will they? Is there anything else users will be missing if we don't set up EM on CIPC?

I've pretty much drawn a blank looking for other people's experiences online, so I'd really like to get some feedback from people who have rolled out CIPC extensively... did you set it up for extension mobility? Why, and would you do it the same way again?

[Jonathan Schulenberg · Accepted solution]

My opinion is that Extension Mobility on CIPC for a laptop assigned to an individual user is just extra burdon to the user. The trainers are correct though: speed dials and abbreviated dials are per-device. The user would have to create a new list on the CIPC device through /ccmuser if you do not use Extension Mobility. The only time that I see EM on CIPC being worth it is if the customer has a hot desk call center where multiple people could be using the same workstation.

We use CIPC for all of our call center agents and have customers that use it. The main obsticles to overcome with CIPC or other soft phones are:

1. Dealing with QoS which you normally do not trust from the data VLAN. You can either write policy maps that do trust the data VLAN (the SRND suggests adding policing to this trust) or use a Trusted Relay Point to proxy and remark your softphone traffic.
2. Making sure their PC doesn't freak out and kill a call quality. CIPC runs as a high priority process in Windows but that's no guarantee. We have had to watch installed software more closely on these users and replace older machines for some who have a heavier load (e.g. VMware Workstation).