Emergency Message to Cisco Phones/Devices

[Stuart McGrath]

Does anyone know if it is possible to send an emergency message that will display on the screens of phones without the need for a third party application. Can it be done from an XML file?

For example I would like our IT Desk to broadcast a message to all users that a service is down, and if possible that email send message to the phone screens

[Terry Cheema]

There is nothing in CUCM that can do that. You can have Cisco unity Connection send a broadcast voicemail to everyone, but they may not trigger a MWI indicator, so not that useful. but have a look through:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/8x/administration/guide/8xcucsagx/8xcucsag220.pdf

Other than that there a couple of third party apps that can let you do this:

Variphy: http://www.variphy.com/products/enterprises/cisco-text-broadcast

Singlewire: http://www.singlewire.com/informacast.html

-Terry

Please rate all helpful posts and mark the thread as answered if you have no other queries.

[Stuart McGrath]

Thanks Terry,

I did see the Unity option but as you say its not that useful and given a pocket of our users tend not to pick up any of their voicemails anyway its not really an option :S

I want to avoid third party's if possible

Rgds

[Terry Cheema]

Stuart unfortunately this functionality is not built-in CUCM natively. From CUCM 9.1 onwards Singlewire Informacast provides 50 free basic licenses. You can have 50 phones that can use this basic functionaly for free but still you would need to install and use the informacast app. Refer here:

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/singlewire/InformaCastBasicPaging.pdf

-Terry

Please rate all helpful posts and mark the thread as answered if you have no other query

[abdel-moniem]

Hi Stuart

As Terry mentioned, Cisco Paging Server an OEM from SingleWire INFORMACAST Server release 9.0 (Linux based appliance) can be obtained from cisco CCO with default supported number of phones. Paging can be Text based (XML) (Web Service need to be enabled on the phone) or Audio broadcast (IP multicast enablement on the network is needed). Advanced feature of the product includes public speaking paging as well. 

I believe it is available on CCO for partner for trials.as Terry proposed. 

[Stuart McGrath]

For those interested I have managed to find a way to achieve this by pushing xml to the phone using the web interface on the phones - http://<ipaddressofphone>/cgi/Execute

 Here is a good post:

https://buildbreaker.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/pushing-xml-cisco-ip-phone/

From this you can create an .exe that will push the notification and play a chosen sound from the cisco defaults, alerting the user to the message. If you wanted an emergency sound you could justy add to call manager and edit the ringlist.xml (?).

To get around the authentication issue per user (As our users are linked to LDAP) I created an application user and added the devices (Not UDP unfortunately) to the application user. This way you can Auth to all phones using the one username and password.

[abdel-moniem]

Thank you Stuart for the valuable tip and link referral. A good hack to have a customised broadcast system.

thank you and best regard

[Terry Cheema]

Stuart thanks for sharing this little hack, its going to be beneficial for the community.

I will try to test this tomorrow and see how it goes.

-Terry

[Alexander Anoshin]

Hi Stuart,

I think the only Cisco app that can send message to IP phones is JTAPI Test Tool.

For better UI turn to 3rd party solution from Cisco partners, like this one.

[Stuart McGrath]

Hi Alexander,

Thanks, Ill take a look.

Stuart