Unified Provisioning Manager

[ajenks]

I've got a fairly small deployment (approx 450 phones). Currently using CM4.0 Unity4.0, but moving to UCM6.1 Unity5.0. (single cluster, single Unity, single Exchange message store).

All users are configured with extension mobility and Active Directory is being used as the global directory.

User admin is a fairly complicated process and therefore can't be completed by 1st line support. Is UPM the only way to potentially reduce the complexity of user admin ? and how effective is it ? I guess this is aimed more a service providers, so I am worried about the complexity of any UPM implementation - also, whether there are any obvious "can't do this.." type issues that rule it out as an option.

I know this is a fairly broad question, but are there any reasons to rule this out quickly ? Is anyone using this, not on a large scale customer/server provider but as an internal tool to simplify admin ?

I believe 1.3 is the latest release ?

[Tommer Catlin]

UPM is a great tool. You basically setup the templates with your device, line, subscriber settings. The Admin simply logins, applies the template to the correct device or line or whatever and the phone/vm/line is built. They do not have to know about device pools, MRG, CSS, etc. Just show them the correct templates and it's done. You have to of course setup the Templates and spend a little time getting it dialed in to work how you want it to work.

For 450 users, it's a little bit of an overkill, but if it will help out the "junior" admins save some admin time setting up UC equipment, then go for it.