EM & Owner User ID?? Why?

[carlnewton]

Guys,

Im struggling with Owner User ID and Extension mobility.

It seems to me that unless we set Owner user ID on every single hardware phone, it uses an extra license.  Why would you set owner user ID when you are using extension mobility? The whole point of extension mobility is that a phone has no owner, they can use any phone.

The problem is, if you set owner user ID on every phone, users get an EXTRA phone appear in their UCM user options (https://callamanger/ucmuser) that has nothing to do with them.

So for example, john smith may have an iPhone jabber, a CSF jabber, and an EM user device profile.  If you set a desk phone to be owner by him, he sees four devices under his UCMUser, even though he only ever uses three.

This causes complaints and confusion for users.  The only option I see is just to not set owner user ID for the physical desk phones, but this results in using twice as many licenses as we should.

Am I missing something here?

Thanks

[Richard McLoughlin]

Thanks for the information - I will follow this up with our Cisco account manager/technical solutions architect/systems engineer.

Best

Richard

[Benjamin Krueger]

Hello Ayodeji!

I just want to ask, is the behavior of owner user id for an extension mobility phone still the same?

We have a customer with the latest 10.5 CUCM version (10.5(2)SU4a), and it looks like (after nearly 1 year of your post) that still end user can see the logout device with owner user id, when we associate end user with phones.

Did that behavior changed in the latest 11.5 version of CUCM? Or maybe will it be changed in CUCM version 12?

Otherwise I will follow your instructions and talk to licensing team and create a default-license user which owns all logout-phones.

Thanks and best regards

Benjamin

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

Benjamin,

The behavior has not changed as far as I know, especially in CUCM10.5.

What I did in my previous project is to ensure that each phone is assigned an owner user id, even if EM is going to be used. You do have to remember that the field owner user id is used only for licensing and does not necessarily mean that the user owns the phone and this becomes very important when using EM. This way you dont run into licensing issues. But if that was not done previously then contact Cisco license team

[Benjamin Krueger]

Hi Ayodeji!

I understand the necessary of the owner user field and the matching between phone and user, when you will have a correct license count. And that is not the point for my question, even when customer didn’t configured the owner field in the past I see no problem to fill that field with specific users or information.

The big really unlucky impact is, that phones with an owner user id will show in SelfCare-Portal of the end user. I don’t understand the necessary for that. They see a device, configure speed dial and other things and ask the support why they don’t see the changes in there device profile (EM). User don’t see the different between a device and a device profile and I can understand that. Hell, I don’t see a different between device and device profile in SelfCare-Portal if I wouldn’t know the issue we are running into.

Of course I can tell them, sorry please configure the correct device or enable synchronization between all devices when configuring something.
But I think that behavior is the real problem. And like I said, I don’t understand the necessary for that.

It would be good, when in later releases that behavior is changed.

The option to contact license team and get additional license for workaround is also unlucky.  

The license overview and the count of license between different systems (like CUCM or Unity Connection) is hard enough to manage, when you deal with additional temporary license you lost complete the overview in my opinion.

Sorry Ayodeji for my words. But I totally not understand why we have an issue (in my opinion) since over 3 years and must still work with more than unlucky workarounds…

Nevertheless thank you for your quick answer.

Best regards
Benjamin

[carlnewton]

Strangely, I'm working on a version 9.1 call manager at the moment and have just been through this process to sort out the licensing estate:

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/13247186/owner-user-id-clearing-licensing

I just signed into my user options page and I do NOT see an SEP device in there, despite being the "owner" of one via owner user ID.  If I set it as a "controlled device" under my end user, it appears.

It seems Cisco must have added this "feature" to make owned devices show up in your user options in later versions of CUCM.

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

Carl, this is working as designed.

The owner user id is only for licensing.

To enable a user to manage a device from the self care portal or user page you need to associate the device to the user.

They are two different things and often people mixed them up

[carlnewton]

Hi Ayodeji,

I Don't agree.  The entire reason that I started this thread was because Cisco gave us a choice:

1)associate owner user ID to SEP, and have a nonsensical device show up in end user options

2)Dont associate owner user ID to SEP and buy 2x licenses.

I'm pretty sure I have seen this across multiple systems (I worked for a Cisco gold partner for ten years doing nothing but setting up call manager systems)

I recently did a set up on version 11 and I remember the customer being unhappy with these devices showing up. I had to go through and unassociate over 2000 SEP devices from the end users. This is always a pain since I've never found an easy way to REMOVE a controlled device from users using bulk admin.  I ended up having to do it direct with an SQL tool.

Ben Krueger also seems to agree with me below.

However, I don't have a version 11 system to test with at the moment. Only version 9.1 - where this is NOT the case, hence me thinking it had changed.

In any case, if anyone needs to sort out licensing, I did this recently.

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/13247186/owner-user-id-clearing-licensing

I hope it helps someone.

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

Carl,

I am glad you disagreed. :)

It does look like the behaviour has changed from version 9.

in CUCM ver 9.1 owner userid is used strictly for licensing. To control a device, that device has to be associated with the end user. Setting the owner user will not associate the device to the end user ( I just confirmed now on my CUCM 9 cluster)

on CUCM 11.0 setting the owner userid on a device automatically associates the device to the user. ( I confirmed this now too)

[cvelaga01]

Hi Ayodeji,

We had similar situation, where I had to upgrade a 8.0 cucm to 11.5. The customer was using cucm only for making basic telephony, no jabber with EM. Doing a back conversion we got 200 cuwl licenses.  I assigned all devices to one local user and used up only 20 cuwl licenses.  Our account manager from cisco said,, it may not be legal and make the cucm non compliant. When I asked for documentaion proof, he is not reponding to that. 

Cisco Licensing team says, as long as PLM says Compliant, the cucm is Compliant ... I could not find any documentation related to this.

Can you please share your knowlege on this .

[Ayodeji Okanlawon]

I do not know why the account manager said that. How you use your licenses is totally up to you. So I do not see any issues there 

[m.batts]

Hi Carl, I feel your pain :-)

I noticed this in 10.5 , when lots of users started seeing devices appear in enduser.

I have used AXL to "clean this up" ......  but to me it's a fundamental flaw.( that we have to live with )

[Juan Lopez Hernandez]

Hi m.batts,

could you please explain me how you used AXL to clean up the user pages (ie: remove the physical phone from being displayed)?

many thanks,

Juan

[Juan Lopez Hernandez]

Hi m.batts,



could you please explain me how you used AXL to clean up the user pages (ie: remove the physical phone from being displayed)?



many thanks,

Juan

[r.rung]

@m.batts it would be really interesting how you could clear this with AXL requests, can you give us a hint what you did?