I'm using CUCM 10.5 and I still see no way to *easily* update individual IP phone values via BAT? The Bulk Administration>Phones>Update Phone>Custom File function only allows modifying common fields and not a different value for each phone. I have done it via export/import functionality and I do see the posts to this community where others are asking the same thing, but I find it hard to believe that an update phone function (where I use a custom .csv file) doesn't exist???
My main problem with the export/import is when doing a very large modification it is just a lot of steps and very time consuming to ensure that something doesn't get messed up on the import stage. Excel tends to be "helpful" and correct some fields that I don't want modified (such as a phone number in e.164 format beginning with the "+" symbol). It's all doable I realize, but can be a huge time consuming pain.
Here's my latest example of this issue where I have to add even more steps to complete a modification - SCCP to SIP migration.
I'm migrating phones to SIP protocol, which is easy via the Migrate Phones function in the BAT. This is great because I can use the query function and I don't have to create .csv files for the modification. The problem is that is uses a Phone template that doesn't preserve ANYphone fields that were customized for the individual phones. All new values of the SIP phones are from the single template and not from what the phones had while SCCP. So if an individual phone has something like the Subscribe CSS or display idle timeout, or anything different than the Phone template then it will get modified.
Here's the process I have had to go through to do this:
- Export all phones
- Filter and sort the data to only the phones I want to migrate
- Choose all the columns that will get over-written on the migration that I will need to re-produce in the SIP phone (this is the worst part), verify I have them all, then double check again
- Migrate the phones to SIP
- Export all phones, again
- Filter and sort the data to only the phones that were migrated
- Copy/replace all the columns saved from the pre-SIP migration into the post-SIP migration export/import file. Verify, spot check, double check more. Still very prone to miss-aligning a column or something and having to re-check or re-do a large amount of work. Best to do it in small chunks. Or it requires scripting, or Excel functions such as Vlookup to do accurately in bulk. Either way=very time consuming again.
- Import the phones in small batches to make it easier to debug if there's a problem
The whole process would be considerably easier if I could just update the specific fields from a .csv file, or even better yet have the migration only add/modify SIP specific values from the original phone.
Is there any better way to do this?
