User Count Tool - Early Beta Available Now!

[brehamil]

Folks,

Exciting news to announce in our progression toward FCS of 9.0 licensing enhancements.  Yesterday, we posted an early beta of the User Count Tool in the Collaboration User Group (CUG) community.  It is open for download and use by field, partners and end-customers on labs and production systems.  Users must only be registered with the CUG in order to use the beta.  (simple process if you are not already registered)

Please visit the CUG and download our User Count Tool and let us know what you think (in the community please!).

https://communities.cisco.com/community/technology/collaboration/usergroups/collaboration

Finally, we did an overview and demo of User Count Tool today and this recording will be also be posted there by Monday.

• UC 9.0 licensing team

P.S.  Please also encourage your end-customers to take advantage of the CUG and the User Count Tool!

[brehamil]

Folks,

Just wanted to add that the recording of the demo for the User Count Tool is now posted here…

https://cisco.webex.com/ciscosales/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=TC&rID=57809282&act=pb&rKey=f64f118fb8e8a1cf

Cisco field can directly access.  See how User Count Tool directly answers your customers' questions about license counts and compliance.  Simple!  Free!

- Brett

[marcbutler]

Hi

I have just watched a recording of the Demo that you did for this.  I believe this will be useful for customers and parners alike.  However, I have a couple of questions that were not dealt with during the discussion that I would like to understand better:

1. What versions of CCM/CUCM will this tool support?  I ask as I listened to what was said about how the tool calculates and then assigns certain users with certain phomes to a particular licensing designation and it raised in my mind a query - what about any client on pre CUCM 5.0?  As a partner, I still interact with customers who are still on version 4.x of CCM (even have just sold an upgrade to a client on 3.3(5)).  Can this tool currently support such?  If no, can that be looked into as an option?
2. Offline usage - As I work for a partner, we have both a pre-sales and post sales engineering department.  For pre-sales, we would not actually be able to use this tool as it is, as we are never on a client site.  But pre-sales are the ones interestee in the licensing and telling the customer what they need in order to upgrade and have conversation with them surrounding user counts and types of licensing they might want to deploy.  Can a feature be added that will allow the data to be saved (no need to attach cluster security information with it) and then the saved data can be passed to pre-sales, allowing us to then make the adjustments shown based upon our discussions with the client?  The installation engineer would not be the ones to do that!

I believe that this tool looks very useful.  However, the above points (especially point 2) are the only way that most partners will be able to use it, as engineers are there to install, pre-sales are there to discuss and adjust licensing requirements (amongst other things).

[brehamil]

Marc,

Thanks for the feedback!  Below some thoughts on your questions.

1.  User Count Tool is applicable to versions 5.0 through 8.x.  As you probably know, 4.x and earlier have a sep DB scheme and also don't have enforced endpoint licensing in CUCM.  Those 2 items would've made it exceedingly difficult to provide a useful tool/extension of User Count Tool.  But understand the desire and get the fact we still have customers on those old versions.

2.  Agree for partners this tool is most useful to pre-sales side.  There is nothing, however, preventing remote connection of User Count Tool to CUCM's - indeed, that was a primary requirement we had for the tool.  What is required is obviously IP address and CUCM AXL credentials.  If those can't be obtained - perhaps from a brand new customer with whom you don't have pre-existing relationship - then yes, onsite use may be required so the customer can input his or her credentials to the tool?  And once the data is obtained, the report(s) can be saved and sent to others on the pre-sales team. 

Hope this helps - let me know if you have more comments and feedback.

- Brett

[Steven DiStefano]

Actually #2 was raised during the Webex (one of them anyway) by me ☺

The person leading said he would consider the capability to capture the data from a customer environment and then allow the Partner (us) to operate on the data later (not just having the report) as the tool has adjustment capabilities and that is good to have as the project takes form (it’s never the way you think you initially discovered it) ☺

Anyway, just want to add my support of the previous post.

[brehamil]

Yes, that was me in the demo.  The possible issue is that data which is operated on at some later time (subsequent to connection to the CUCM) may be stale.  Meaning endpoints may have been provisioned or de-provisioned since that time.  And then the report is not good.    Do you have a feeling on this?  Is it not really an issue in your mind?

[Steven DiStefano]

LOL. You did a nice job with the demo!!! Thank you first and foremost.

The data collection that occurs during our discovery can be made with that assumption. That it is a current snapshot. I think it will be pretty certain, and the customer can inform us if there are changes. This is better than not being able to do it.

Steve DiStefano

• Sent from my iPhone. Excuse brevity and typographical errors. **

[wchatcher]

Brett,

This is a great tool!!  I am having a tough time though trying to figure out what licenses that my customer has purchased have actually been used.  My user has already ordered CUWL Public, Standard, and Pro licenses.  Most phones that are tied to a user have an Owner User ID associated with them.  They have a call center that have phones that are not tied to any user, but agents can log in using Extension Mobility.  Would these be considered public space phones, and how would you configure the tool to reflect that?

In listening to the presentation is sounds like the tool automaticly asumes that if the device does not have a user associated with it, it is still tied to a specific user and would utilize a CUWL license, and not a public space license.

The customer really wants to get an acurate count of the licenses that have been used so far, and how many additional licenses they need to order before they complete their deployment.

Thanks,

Bill

[brehamil]

Bill,

You hit on 2 areas that require some level of user direction in the tool.

First, if you know customer has ordered all (or predominantly) CUWL, you

obviously want to select that conversion method (as opposed to UCL). Also,

UCT gives you capability to identify the quantity of Public Space devices

you believe to be in production (+ any growth you want to add in) and that

requires some manual counting. Once you select that method and quantity of

Public Space, think you will be in position to provide solid count of

production license use + growth for their project.

Thx,

Brett

[weness1944]

User Count Tool is applicable to versions 5.0 through 8.x.  As you probably know, 4.x and earlier have a sep DB scheme and also don't have enforced endpoint licensing in CUCM.

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