VCS-E B2B to another customer with VCS-E

[John Shur]

Hello everyone– got a question – if we a VCS-E and a customer has a VCS-E configured properly for firewall traversal and URI dialing– is there any benefit in linking  the two with a neighbor or traversal zone? What would be the point? And who would be the client and who the server? Thanksin advance!

[Jens Didriksen]

You can neigbour the two, and perhaps use a prefix, pointing anything starting with that prefix to the relevant neighbouring zone. This would cut down on searches etc and you wouldn't have to dial the full address, but only prefix + alias, i.e. prefix 1, address 2345678@domain.com, you dial 12345678.

(That will pretty much work with H.323 out of the box, but you will have play around with additional search rules etc to allow for SIP calls though.)

I do this with a couple of organisations which we have a lot of conferences with as it's a bit faster, and easier for the users to dial just the numbers without the suffixes from the end-points themselves, particulary when the suffixes are something like @video.teleconfdomain.com or longer.

/jens

[Nick Halbert-Lillyman]

In addition to what Jens said, you also gain the ability to see if your peer is "up" or not as they will poll each other.  You will also more easily be able to identify inbound and outbound calls with the other organisation via the search history as you can see the inbound/outbound zone.

As far as who would would be the client and server if you were using traversal, that would really just be a stylistic preference.  Whoever has more stringent security and change management could be the client, that way they can initiate the connection from inside their firewall.

[John Shur]

Those are great points - I'll make our other company the client - so his VCS-E will have two traversal zones - one for us and one for everyone else. So his VCS when it ses our alias should send to their Traversal zonealong  with everything else outside their FW, then their VCS-E will have a search rule to send it to the correct Traversal Client- pointed to us. Right?

[Nick Halbert-Lillyman]

That's right.  You will also need a search rule on your VCS-E pointing back to them via the traversal server.  Even if you are using prefix's, you should probably set up search rules for the URI/domain also - that way callback from caller ID, calls from existing phone book entries or click to dial from email signatures etc will still go via the traversal zones.

Where '10' is the prefix, this is how I would do it on the VCS-E:

Transform:

10(internal-dial-plan-regex)(@their-domain.com)?

replace with:

\1@their-domain.com

Then a search rule:

Suffix: @their-domain.com send to the traversal zone.

That way you pick up calls via either prefix, URI/domain suffix or both.

.

[John Shur]

Thank you all - this was very helpful!