VCS - Using an External Policy Service

[Paulo Souza]

Hi folks,

About using Policy Server with VCS, recently Cisco released Cisco TelePresence External Policy on Cisco VCS Deployment Guide. I was reading this guide and it seems to be easy to integrate VCS with an external policy service using CPL, however, I think that Cisco does not offer a policy server to be integrated with VCS. I would like to know if Cisco has plans to develop a new police server application to be integrated with VCS or at least indicating some partner who offers a solution like that.

We are deploying a new project and will be extremely necessary to use an external policy server, once VCS's call policy rule page is too simple and creating the script manually is not a good option to operate a great environment.

Is there any policy server we can use?

Note that we don't have a developer team to deploy a server like that.

Thank you!

Paulo Souza

[Martin Koch]

Hi Paulo!

How are you?

A external policy server can be used in very different ways, Cisco itself actually have one, which is

the conductor which is able to generate and distribute conferences.

But my feeling is that this is not what you are looking for.

I have not heard from any other products nor from Cisco nor from 3rd parties.

A policy server might be quite dependent on what you need to archive. You can reprogram

a enhanced call control, you can block, redirect specific calls, do some conference magic and so on.

Its more limited by your imagination and needs.

If you could tell us a bit more what you want to archive?

[Paulo Souza]

Hi Martin, thank your for your reply!

We are deploying a new telepresence environment to a service provider, the topology will be VCS-based. We will have many MCUs, endpoints and jabbers clients registered to VCS. In this scenario, will be extremely important to implement class of restriction to limit the calls, because the structure will be used by many different customers. Only using CUCM, it is an easy task when using CSS/Partition. But using VCS, it is a hard task, because all we have is call policy rules. The page on VCS where the rules are created is too simple, so it is not a good idea for big environments, it is very hard to operate the rules by using this VCS’S page.

That’s why we need to use an external policy server with a better interface. But we don’t have a development team to make an application like that. So we are looking for some policy server from another enterprise.

Thank you!

Paulo Souza