Cisco IP Phone Services

[tsgcisco]

We currently have a few hundred Cisco 7940/7960 phones rolled out. I am curious as to what more do you do with your phones aside from voice. Do you happen to have any info, white papers, case studies anything that shows ideas for what all can or has been done to utilize the IP phones services other then simply for voice?

I know that sounds vague, but I am interested in applications and things that can run on the phones. I know they have those berbee services, but we are looking for more ideas. For example, one thing we would love to be able to do is send text messages out to all the phones. Say email server is down, it would be great if we could send a message out to the display on all the phones saying "We are currently experiencing an email outage, more information to follow" or something.

I am looking to use the phones for more then simply voice, in an effort to add more value to them rather then just being phones you know. We want to add some "ewww and ahhh" value to the phones so everyone feels better about the decision to move to an all VoIP solution.

[aaronw.ca]

IP Telephony opens the telephony infrastructure to many new applications and innovations, and it's still gaining momentum. Goodbye old telephony, hello flexibility!

For example, conferencing solutions allow you to see (on your phone display) who is connected to your conference, who was scheduled to attend but has not yet joined, who is currently talking, etc. View a list of scheduled conferences at the press of a button.

Here's the link to Cisco seminars and events (for the US):

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/learning/index.html

Many of Cisco's partners display their products at these events, and it can give you some ideas for what is available.

A number of cases studies are available from Cisco:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps556/prod_case_studies_list.html

Productivity Applications from Cisco

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Here are some links to Cisco-related solutions that you may not yet be aware of:

VOICE AND IP COMMUNICATIONS

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/index.html

Have you looked into Unified Messaging?

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns340/ns394/ns165/ns152/ns153/networking_solutions_sub_solution_home.html

Personal Assistant:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns340/ns394/ns165/ns152/ns281/networking_solutions_sub_solution_home.html

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps5015/index.html

Cisco Conference Connection:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps752/index.html

Cisco Meetingplace

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/ps5664/ps5669/

Cisco Web Attendant

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps2351/index.html

Dial from outlook:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps556/products_configuration_example09186a008017902d.shtml

Other XML Applications for the IP Phones

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For applications, there are a number of places to look. Many companies have built applications to work in the Cisco environment and operate on the phone display, such as Berbee.

There is a video showing the use of some of these applications on Cisco's site:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns340/ns394/ns165/networking_solutions_customer_profile0900aecd8007e60c.html

Check out CIPTUG (Cisco IP Telephony Users Group). Among other things, they have run a number of "bake-offs" for these phone applications, and many interesting applications have participated in these events.

http://www.ciptug.org/

HotDispatch was created around 2001 to provide a place to find applications such as this.

http://hotdispatch.com/cisco-ip-telephony

CCMStuff also has a few things:

http://www.ccmstuff.org/

[tsgcisco]

Thanks for the great list of resources, I have already been able to accomplish what I wanted through some of the ideas I learned from the various resources you have listed.

Regards,

Dane

[aaronw.ca]

Additional IP Phone applications are available as part of the IP Phone SDK for developers. The SDK includes quite a few sample applications for the IP Phones, such as a calendar, stockticker, weather forecast, currency converter, world clock (time in any city), white page/yellow pages search, caller info (shows caller name and picture if available in an LDAP directory), a hoot-n-holler application, and others.

For information on this SDK to obtain these sample applications, see the developer support page:

http://www.cisco.com/pcgi-bin/dev_support/access_level/product_support

[caroline_parks]

An IP telephone system uses packet-switched Voice over IP (VoIP), or Internet telephony, to transmit telephone calls over the Internet as opposed to the circuit-switched telephony used by the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).