Acano MCU - TMS Network Integration Key and Third Party MCU

[William Hunnewell]

We're looking at Acano to do bridging since we have a Lync enviornment as well.  However, in some instances we'd like to use TMS to schedule calls on the Acano bridge.  During booking a multisite call you can go under connection settings, and select main which is the MCU.  Ideally we'd like to be able to select the Acano MCU like we do our Codian. It sounds like this can be accomplished using the TMS Network Integration Key, and third party MCU feature.  Can anyone provide any insight to this?  There's very limited info I could even find on the Network Integration Key.

[Nick Halbert-Lillyman]

This is from the TMS 14.5 release notes, where they added the "unamanaged bridge" feature:

Added support for Unmanaged Bridges

Unsupported legacy and third party bridges (including Cisco TelePresence Multipoint Switch) can now be added into Cisco TMS and scheduled in conferences.

These bridges are added from Systems > Navigator > Add Systems > Add Unmanaged Bridge. Once added, they are displayed in Systems > Navigator, where you can view and edit a limited number of settings, including limiting capacity by IP bandwidth and maximum number of concurrent calls.

You can also specify the number of audio and video ports as follows:

If 0 is entered in Max Number of Audio Calls, the value set as the Max Number of Video Calls will be the number of generic ports that can be used to book either video or audio participants.

If anything higher than 0 is entered in Max Number of Audio Calls, video and audio calls are counted separately and can not be used interchangeably.

n

It is only possible to schedule participants to dial in to the unmanaged bridge. Both SIP and H.323 are supported.

If the conference includes participants that are direct-managed by Cisco TMS or registered to a Unified CM, some limited monitoring of scheduled conferences hosted on unmanaged bridges is available in Conference Control Center. You can send participants messages, view basic details for each participant and add participants to the conference.

Unmanaged bridge conferences are listed in Booking > List Conferences. Note that ending the conference will result in the conference appearing as finished, but endpoints will stay connected.

A Network Integration license key must be purchased for each unmanaged bridge before adding it into Cisco TMS. Up to 25 meeting addresses can be configured for each bridge, reflecting conference addresses already created on the bridge itself.

An unmanaged bridge can be configured as Immersive, if it supports hosting conferences including multiscreen systems. Unmanaged bridges that are configured as immersive are preferred in routing if multiscreen systems are added to a conference.

The following features are not supported for unmanaged bridges in Cisco TMS:

• Cascading
• Reporting
• CMR Hybrid
• ISDN
• Resource guarantees
• Native API support for Cisco TelePresence Multipoint Switch
• Guaranteed encryption
• Participant templates
• Ad Hoc calls
• Meeting extension
• Meeting end notifications
• Automatic disconnection of conferences at scheduled end time

[Patrick Sparkman]

What Nick posts is pretty much the only information you'll find regarding the Network Integration Key, either in the TMS release notes and the admin guides.  Simply it's just allowing TMS to schedule and book the unmanaged conference bridge, without any type of advanced control or monitoring unlike the supported managed bridges.

If you ask me, and this is just my opinion, the Network Integration Key is just a way to try and keep customers from attempting to use unsupported or third party conference bridges, getting customers to use Cisco MCUs and TelePresence Servers which is supported without the need of any type of paid option key added into TMS.

[Nick Halbert-Lillyman]

Yep - it's ridiculously expensive, the option should be free in the interests of ineroperability between vendors.

You can always use the "externally hosted" option to get a conference hosted on a 3rd party MCU, but it means manually entering a SIP URI every time you book a conference.

[Idan zoran]

To schedule Acano with TMS, you will need TMS 14.1 and Conductor x1.2 or higher. It is possible to use both in Free Evaluation mode. Check out the attached PDF for more details.

[Jens Didriksen]

That's very interesting, makes me think this could possibly work with Pexip too, and since this does not appear to require the Network Integration Key, it makes it a bit more affordable. :)

Only downside I can see is "Auto-connect" not working as this is a feature we rely very heavily upon.

/jens

Please rate replies and mark question(s) as "answered" if applicable.

[pvanvalin]

This looks great, but I get this message after creating the aliases, 

One or more aliases do not have matching conference aliases on TelePresence Conductor, or their associated service preference is not usable on TelePresence Conductor.