ASK THE EXPERTS - UC 500 SYSTEM VOICE TECHNOLOGIES

[ciscomoderator]

Welcome to the Cisco Networking Professionals Ask the Expert conversation. This is an opportunity to learn about the voice capabilities of the UC 500 system with Marcos Hernandez.  Marcos is a Technical Marketing Engineer with the Small Business Technology Group at Cisco. He has more than 14 years of experience with voice-over-packet technologies, with focus on VoIP, SIP, QoS, Cisco Unified CallManager Express, and managed services.

Remember to use the rating system to let Marcos know if you have received an adequate response.

Marcos might not be able to answer each question due to the volume expected during this event. Our moderators will post many of the unanswered questions in other discussion forums shortly after the event. This event lasts through July 30, 2010. Visit this forum often to view responses to your questions and the questions of other community members.

[JOHN NIKOLATOS]

Hi Marcos -

Another question about support of UC520, 540 and 560.  I have come to really like the UC500 products.  These devices are very customizable and are helping my business grow in many ways.  For one I am an owner of a uc520 for my business.  I am also a Integrator and Reseller of the UC500 product line.  Here are my frustrations with UC540 and UC560 support vs. UC520 support.

1) Cisco is requiring use of CCA to configure UC540 and UC560 to get any support.

2) Cisco allows TAC support of UC520 and CLI support of UC520 but not on the UC540 and UC560.

The Cisco CCA software has come a long way but still can not completely configure almost any of my phone system installs.  I have installed dozens of UC500's.   On only one of them has CCA completely worked for me to the point where I can give the CCA software to my client without worrying that it is going to ruin the configuration.  This like Whisper, OCTO lines and FAX ONRAMP are not supported and these are things being demanded by my clients.  If I configure them, I can not get support from Cisco on the UC540 and UC560 because of the lack of CLI support.

Cisco really should give a SKU for TAC support of the UC540 and UC560.  The other day I had to wait 30 minutes to get someone of the line for UC540 support and they could not help me...  because I was remote to the client site 11pm with a system down... and could not get CCA to run remotely.  I had only telnet capabilities to the unit at the time.  It was very frustrating.

I called in once and had CCA access but the issue was that CCA kept crashing and not working properly.  I had a Priority support call with a system down.  Small Business Support said I could get a TAC engineer as the next level...  after two weeks I received a call from someone.

The CCA doesnt work for SPA525 and PVC2300 camera integration.  The wizard run and show all devices and you apply it and nothing.  This has happened with every install I worked on.  I have to set the phones to SIP configure from the webpage and then place the phones back on SCCP for the configurations to work.

The CCA doesnt work so well for IOS upgrades..  I have done this dozen of times and it just doesnt work well.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not, IOS upgrades are successful and CUE upgrades fail..

I added licenses to a UC560 with 16 base licences.  I added 3x 8 user licenses to bring me to 40 licenses and the CCA erased all the base system licenses and I had a total of 24 licenses.

The CCA just doesnt work.  it can not configure everything and it is really the wrong way to go with the UC540 and UC560.  I Think it is a good tool to do preliminary configurations but how can CIsco force us to use this tool when it does not work.  Or how can you not give us the option for CLI support?  This small business support is really going to have me stop selling support contracts or the UC540 and UC560 products altogether.  

Small Business Support for the UC540 and UC560 is really poor as well.  I have invested in Cisco and TAC service because of a certain level of support and response and knoweldge base which I am not getting on the UC540 and UC560.  Cisco really needs to bring service back to the TAC and stop with Small Business Support.

[herts2201]

HI! Marcos

I am new member of

Cisco community. I have been given a task to setup UC

540 as demo kit as our company has just started on CISCO

products for small bussiness. I have 5 phones s

pa 525g 2 spa509g. I have done everything i am stuc

k where i have to label atleast one bu

tton as an AUTOATTENDENT. so when we show our customers we do not need

dial 398. just press one button on any of the phone and it should go to auto attendent.

another question is when i connect spa500 expension modules with spa 509g phone and run CCA 2.2.4 it does not show up any expension module.

do i need to add any extra files for that or i am missing something. when i pluged the phone spa509g all the lights come up on expension module so i think it is working fine. just not showing up in the CCA 2.2.4 as expension module. so i can not programme any button.

i will be highly thankfull to you if you will point me in right direction.

thanks

hafiz

[Marcos Hernandez]

Hi Hafiz,

Welcome to the Support Forums. Hopefully you will find them useful.

For your first question, a personal speed dial on the phones would do the trick. Please check page 338 of the CCA 2.2.4 Administration Guide for instructions on how to configure:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/net_mgmt/cisco_configuration_assistant/version2_2_4/administration_guide/cca_224_sbcs_admin_guide.pdf

On the SPA500S question, please confirm which Software Pack version (IOS, CUE, Phone loads, etc,) is installed on the system. You need to be using one  the latest 8.0.X packs in order for this to work.

Thanks,

Marcos

[Marcos Hernandez]

John,

Thanks for your feedback. I forwarded it to the CCA Product Manager and the SBCS Product Line Manager, the owners of the tool. They would like to get on the phone with you to discuss roadmap plans and help Engineering do a post-mortem on the issues you have had. The offer is on the table and I would really advise you to use this opportunity to vent, and help us at the same time.

Now, let's talk about the future of CCA and UC500, but first let me state some facts. It is true that we have had an incredibly hard time creating a GUI for a device that was not designed to be "GUI-fied". The simple act of pushing configuration to IOS is a challenge. Only until very recently (in the last 18 months or so), the IOS team added an XML API that allows the configuration of a device using more "modern" techniques. Still, it is not fully operational and tools like CCA rely on the "serialization" of commands through a VTY session. This is one of the reasons why for complex operations, time for completing a task is high and performance is low. Parsing the configuration is not easy either. Unless you reformat the output of a "show run" or a "show startup" to XML, for example, (which is one of the things that the aforementioned XML API does but CCA doesn't use today), you have to rely on things like descriptions, specific parameter ranges (like dial peers) and banners to properly read the config back. This is extremely error-prone, as you have experienced. The problem is exacerbated when you inject out-of-band CLI, to the point that CCA becomes unusable. Finally, the feature gap between the initial version of CCA and what could be done in CLI was so vast, that we had to spend most of our effort over the last couple of years trying to bridge it. You said it, we have come a long way. For instance, the CCA Admin Guide is hundreds of pages today, so the features are there. When you focus on Time to Market, quality becomes a challenge. We are committed to testing and validating our tool to the best of our capabilities, but we obviously need to do a better job at that. Way too many quality issues are being found in the field by partners like yourself. This is unacceptable, and here is what we are doing to address this problem:

1) Our Sales Teams have been authorized to escalate critical issues that are reported with CCA, to the highest possible levels in TAC and the Business Unit.

2) We are realigning some Development and DevTest resources to harden CCA and make it more predictable. Over the next few months, our main focus will be QUALITY.

3) Better documentation and training are being developed, including best practices, a Site Survey document and Design Guides, to name a few.

Why the focus on CCA, you might wonder. The reason John is that CCA offers a way to scale the number of WW deployments of our Voice Solutions and move more product, without our resellers having to invest countless hours in getting trained on IOS. In other words, it gives us and our partners, better bang for our buck. This is the conclusion that we have reached after conducting several closed surveys and market studies. For a more specialized partner like yourself, this duality can become an impediment to growing your practice. The answer that we have for you today is UC520. Traditional TAC support (and therefore CLI support) for UC540 and UC560 is NOT planned. An alternative is to obtain an Express certification and position ISR's. You would give up certain things, like SPA500 support, some 3rd party applications, etc., but it is also the natural evolution for a reseller with your profile.

Regardless of what you do or what we are recommending that you do, we WILL FIX CCA. The Team is working non-stop to manage its predictability and performance and you should expect to see significant improvements over the next couple of releases.

Finally, on the question of TAC/Smartnet support for UC540 and 560, there are no plans to move to that model, main reason being cost and competitive positioning.

Thanks a lot for your feedback. You know how to reach me if you want to take us up on that offer to discuss the issues with the CCA PM Team.

Marcos

[John Platts]

I have found the following problems with CCA:

• CCA does not like multiple ephone-dns with the same extension and assigned to one or more phones. I often use shared extensions that are configured with two or more ephone-dns on the UC520.
• CCA does not currently like shared octo-lines. I have successfully configured them, and I know that they work in the 7.1.x and 8.0.x software pack releases.
• CCA does not like configurations where two or more phones share the same first line button in a PBX configuration. I have configured systems where two or more phones share the same first line  in a PBX configuration.
• Several of the data and security features found on the SR520, UC520, UC540, and UC560 are not configurable in CCA and can only be configured using CLI. On the other hand, many of these features can be configured through a GUI on the ISR, ASA 5500, SA500, SRP500, and Cisco Small Business routers.

Will CCA support zone-based firewall on the UC520, UC540, and UC560 in the future? I know that CCA currently configures zone-based firewall on the SR520, but not on the UC520, UC540, or UC560.

Here are new features introduced in CME 8.0 that are not yet in CCA:

• Multiple music on hold streams
• Logical Partitioning Class of Restriction

• Cancel Call Waiting

• Do-not-disturb and privacy feature buttons

When will these new CME 8.0 features appear in CCA?

[Marcos Hernandez]

John,

As your questions are more about future plans and not a specific problem related to UC500, I recommend that you contact your Pre-sales engineer or SBMM. They will be able to share details about the roadmap.

Thanks,

Marcos

[marshallcromwell]

Marcos - is it possible to have a shared line (I assume it would have to be a Key System or Hybrid configuration) that can have multiple

people on that line on the same time (similar to a home phone)?

For example, Caller is on 1001 and if other staff in the office pick up 1001, they can participate on the call at the same time?

I know that we can set up conferencing, but they want the ability to have multiple people on the same line without having to engage a conference call.

If not on the UC500, is there anything withing the Cisco UC solution set that might work or other suggestions?

[Marcos Hernandez]

Hi Marshall,

This feature is usually called "party line" and UC500/CME supports a very simple form of it using cBarge. You still need a conference resource, but joining and leaving is a lot simpler. From the documentation:

The cBarge feature uses a shared conference resource which allows more that one person to barge into the call. A cBarge conference supports the maximum number of parties provisioned on the centralized conference resource. The centralized conference resource must be provisioned to use cBarge. cBarge is supported on SCCP shared octo-line directory numbers and SIP shared-line directory numbers.

When any party releases from the call, the call remains a conference call if at least three participants remain on the line. If only two parties remain in the conference, they are reconnected as a point-to-point call, which releases the conference bridge resources. When the target party parks the call or joins the call with another call, the barge initiator and the other parties remain connected.

For UC500, cBarge is supported in CCA 2.2.5, scheduled to release in a few days.

More information on:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucme/admin/configuration/guide/cmebarge.html#wp1017969

Let me know if this helps.

Marcos

[JOHN NIKOLATOS]

Marcos - can you give me an example of how cbarge works...  Would a user have to start a conference first?  How do you get the cbarge button to show up?  How could someone barge into a call?  I just never done it and am a little confused.  I am expecting to see a CBARGE button somewhere and I would image someone hits that nad then dials an extension to barge in on the call.....

[Marcos Hernandez]

Hi John,

See below for sample CLI that I have working in my lab. Remember that cBarge will be in CCA 2.2.5, due in a few days.

A prerequisite is to have HW conferencing (ad-hoc) enabled and phone privacy needs to be off. You need to be on latest IOS and 8.0.X software pack (to ensure the phones pick up latest firmware)

Call flow would be something like this:

1) Phone A and Phone B are in a shared octo line. This means phones with no octo-line support won't support this feature, obviously.

2) Both phones are provisioned with a softkey template that has "cBarge" for the "Remote in Use" state

3) A calls C and the call is connected

4) B will see A as "Remote in Use" on the shared line.

5) How to join the call is described in the documentation:

The cBarge soft keys display by default when a phone user presses the shared-line button for an active remote-in-use call. The user selects either barge or cBarge to join the shared-line call. When there are multiple active calls on the shared line, the barge initiator can select which call to join by highlighting the call.

!

sccp local Loopback0

sccp ccm 10.1.1.1 identifier 1 version 4.1

sccp

!

sccp ccm group 1

associate ccm 1 priority 1

associate profile 3 register mtp123412341234

associate profile 1 register confprof1

!

dspfarm profile 3 transcode

codec g711ulaw

codec g711alaw

codec g729abr8

codec g729ar8

codec g729r8

maximum sessions 2

associate application SCCP

!

dspfarm profile 1 conference

codec g711ulaw

codec g711alaw

codec g729ar8

codec g729abr8

codec g729r8

codec g729br8

maximum sessions 2

associate application SCCP

!

telephony-service

sdspfarm conference mute-on 111 mute-off 222

sdspfarm units 5

sdspfarm transcode sessions 8

sdspfarm unregister force

sdspfarm tag 1 confprof1

sdspfarm tag 3 mtp123412341234

no privacy

!

!

ephone-template 13

softkeys remote-in-use  CBarge Newcall

softkeys idle  Redial Newcall Cfwdall Pickup Gpickup Dnd Login

softkeys seized  Cfwdall Endcall Redial Pickup Gpickup Callback

softkeys connected  Hold Endcall Trnsfer Confrn Acct Park

!

ephone-dn 30  octo-line

no call-waiting beep

number 250 secondary 12149999999 no-reg primary

label Marcos

description Marcos

name Miller Marcos

preference 1 secondary 1

call-forward busy 299

call-forward noan 299 timeout 25

corlist incoming user-domestic

!

!

ephone-dn 45  dual-line

number C001 no-reg primary

conference ad-hoc

no huntstop

!

!

ephone-dn 46  dual-line

number C001 no-reg primary

conference ad-hoc

preference 1

no huntstop

!

!

ephone-dn 47  dual-line

number C001 no-reg primary

conference ad-hoc

preference 2

no huntstop

!

!

ephone-dn 48  dual-line

number C001 no-reg primary

conference ad-hoc

preference 3

!

!

ephone-dn 49  dual-line

number C002 no-reg primary

conference ad-hoc

no huntstop

!

!

ephone-dn 50  dual-line

number C002 no-reg primary

conference ad-hoc

preference 1

no huntstop

!

!

ephone-dn 51  dual-line

number C002 no-reg primary

conference ad-hoc

preference 2

no huntstop

!

!

ephone-dn 52  dual-line

number C002 no-reg primary

conference ad-hoc

preference 3

!

!

ephone 1

no privacy

ephone-template 13

button 2:30

!

ephone 2

no privacy

ephone-template 13

button 2:30

!

ephone 3

no privacy

ephone-template 13

button 2:30

!

Let me know if this helps,

Marcos

[JOHN NIKOLATOS]

Marcos - thanks just before you sent this I got it to work..  It was hard from the documentation to tell that you needed the same SHARED line on each phone...

This is a good solution for the question I asked about SHARING a line...  for conference where one person dials into the conference and then tells other people to join after important information is being said...

[Steve Davis]

Hello Marcos,

My client has a UC560 with the lates IOS and CME, 8.0

We are interested in the silent monitoring and call recording and I saw your post below.  I will be looking into Telrex but as far as UCCX I have a couple questions.  This is compatible with UCCX 8.0 Enhanced, correct?  Also, how many agents on the UC560/CME does it support.  I saw the UC560 documentation states only 12, but this documentation looks like it was written when it first came out. Has this agent limitation increased with the new CME.

Thanks for your help!

Steve

[Marcos Hernandez]

Steve,

The documentation you are referring to is stale and we should really stop distributing it. We DO NOT promote the integration of UCCX with UC500. It hasn't been tested in ages and none of our Select partners can sell it. Forgive me for being so candid, but I don't want to waste your time. Do NOT position UCCX with UC500.

Thanks. Feel free to contact me anytime.

Marcos

[JOHN NIKOLATOS]

Marcos - I have a few users with SPA525's and the 2300 cameras.  The SPA525 has a door solution.  I have installed 3 cameras and we have users with 525's watching the doors for when someone hits a buzzer.  The buzzer calls an extension on the phone system and all is working but here is the problem.

The SPA525's do not allow you to dial numbers within the camera view..  so if they leave their phones on camera view and someone calls the extension they can answer and ask how it is but are unable to DIAL the code to open the door.  They have to exit the Video interface and then dial the extension which takes a while to do...  YOu have to exit the camera view, then the camera options, then the settings menu and then get to a place where it your dial the phone buttons they actually give a tone to the door..

I notice a DOOR button on the SPA525's and I notice it is a URL code.... but maybe you can have it send DTMF tone as well?  I just need to be able to dial a code like 12345 so the dorr module hears it...

What is the DOOR URL anyway?

John Nikolatos

www.niktek.com

[JOHN NIKOLATOS]

Marcos - one more point...

About a month ago or so, the SPA525 camera view had a button that said CALL not DOOR... and when I configured that I could get it to dial an extension of a phone...  but it seems that is no longer there? 

OK I added the "associated caller ID" and now I get a dial button and I can dial the door... but it kicks me out of the camera view...