I'll start by saying that we're in a pilot, and thus, I don't have the 'privilege' of funnelling these through TAC.
We're evaluating Prime Collaboration Provisioning as an option to offload the extremely tedious process of new user adds/changes to CUCM and Unity. We've hit numerous show-stoppers for utilizing the tool, and I'll note them here for Cisco to address. All this feedback applies to usage under IE10.
When provisioning an Extension Mobility Line, the Line Description field is passed over in plain text. Using ${FIRSTNAME} ${LASTNAME} will result in that value being passed directly to CUCM, not transformed into the actual values.
Extension Mobility Line cannot have the fields contain wildcards like ${FIRSTNAME} if the full characters would exceed the CUCM-side limits. So if you wanted a Line Description of ${FIRSTNAME} ${LASTNAME} ${EXTENSION}, that is not possible.
Provisioning does not add an Extension Mobility profile to the user's list of Controlled Device Profiles, so applications like Jabber cannot control them without manual editing in CUCM itself. This means a new user profile/end user record has to be touched after Provisioning is done creating it, which defeats the purpose of using it.
When you try to modify the User Services using a template for a user to anything but "Use Default", the page refreshes and basically ignores that change. You instead have to click to expand the Advanced Order Configuration, and manually choose that. This whole section is a bit ridiculous in itself, when you're really only talking about two checkboxes and a picklist in the first place...
You have to delete directory numbers in CUCM in order for Provisioning to recreate them. For us, we don't delete the DN's, only the Line Appearance, so that DN settings don't have to be manually redone every time we reuse an extension. Prime would force us to delete all of those, in order for it to reuse them.
General feedback
You can't create your own packages of services a typical user would want. For instance, our standard user offering is
- EM Profile
- Line
- Jabber CSF device
- Line
- UC Service template for CTI and visual voicemail
- Any variety of Jabber devices for mobile
In this scenario, a new user add via provisioning would be 3 separate service orders, minimum, and nearly the same number of clicks it would take to roll the new user in CUCM/Unity directly. There's no value add there, other than enforcing standards compliance on the device creation.
In the User Provisioning interface, you can't change a User Role anywhere but the Edit option from the main list. The problem is that this list doesn't load the entire directory at once (nor should it), but searching for the user circumvents the only UI location where this Edit option is available. You HAVE to use the Quick Find option (off by default) to access this user's Edit screen, adding extra clicks. All the options for interacting with a single user in the User Provisioning list should be accessible from that user's detail screen (the one that shows when you click their name).
All in all, it's a decent offering for companies that are looking to enforce standards, and provide more fine-grained workflow to the existing tedium, but I found that the solution is too laggy (we built VM to 10x existing capacity requirements), too click-happy (reducing clicks is my main goal), and too prone to unrecoverable provisioning errors (1 in 5 require manual intervention on top of what I noted above, in CUCM or Unity).
Hopefully Cisco can use the above to make 10.5 or 11 more streamlined for folks actually looking to save time.
