Opinion: Best practices for deploying Cisco CallManager 7

DiData was one of the first organisations in Australia to do this, and Stevens provided his own organisation with hands-on experience and practical knowledge in rolling this platform out.

Cisco’s CallManager is a foundational technology for any coherent VoIP or unified communications rollout. Stevens provides some best practices to companies thinking about a CallManager 7 rollout and how to make this work.

‘Communication is the key to success for any modern organisation. Whatever your goals, whatever your technology base and whatever your industry, efficient communications will help your staff work more productively and enable your IT department to concentrate on value-adding activities.

The key to such communications nowadays is the network. IP telephony is really only the thin edge of the wedge; a fully-fledged unified communications system encompasses voice, video, email, instant messaging, video conferencing and mobile devices.

This enables workers to reach each other no matter where they are or what communications devices they have available, from a single, simple interface.

Calls can be routed automatically between fixed-line and mobile handsets; voice messages can be left in email inboxes; IM sessions can become audio or video calls with the click of a button; and perhaps most importantly, with ‘presence’ functionality fully operational, users can see at a glance whether a colleague is available and if so, by which means.

At Dimension Data we made a bold prediction some years ago that unified communications would be a key technology and dedicated some of our key in-house technical resources to investigate its potential applications.

Working closely with both Cisco and Microsoft, we have established ourselves as leaders in this rapidly-emerging field.

Our close working relationship with Cisco has allowed us to introduce key technologies into our own internal systems ahead of the market.This provides us with critical real-world experience in planning for, deploying and operating the technologies we take to market.

It shows our clients that we have confidence in the solutions we sell and confidence in our ability to support them.

Cisco CallManager 7

Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (the product family formerly known, and still commonly referred to, as ‘CallManager’) is a software call monitoring product that tracks all network-connected VoIP components and routes traffic accordingly. It’s a foundational technology for any coherent VoIP or unified communications rollout.

Our partnership with Cisco includes participation in its EFT (early field trial) program, which gives us an opportunity to take a look at, and provide feedback on, upcoming product releases.

It also allows us to deploy new products slightly ahead of their commercial release, so we can hit the ground running when the products are released to the market.

We’ve consistently been among the first organisations in Australia to roll out the various iterations of Cisco Unified Communications Manager, and version 7 was no exception.

In May 2008 our key technical staff spent a weekend deploying version 7 throughout Dimension Data and while the experience from a user’s point of view has been invisible, behind the scenes we’re now enjoying a number of important benefits.

Some of these features include the following:

The addition of E.164 “+” dialling which enables smother integration into database applications that use features such as click to call.

The Local Route Groups feature which enable the simplification of the backend dial plan architecture.

Intelligent Bridge selection which enables the system to detect if it is an audio- or video-only conference call and then select the appropriate bridge (audio or video) for the conference.

Improved mobility features such as ‘dial via office’ which enables a user to use the mobile communicator client on their smart phone to transparently place calls through Cisco Unified Communications Manager to reduce mobile toll charges and international roaming call charges.

Active Directory 2008 support.

Additional SIP enhancements.

Dimension Data IPAD

The other key component in our rollout was Dimension Data’s own identity management system: IPAD (IP telephony– Active Directory connector).

When you have disparate communications solutions, you can manage identity information separately; it’s time-consuming but if one application goes down, the others can function.

However, in a unified communications environment, this information must be synchronised among all systems; if, for example, Microsoft SharePoint and CallManager have different information about the same user, clicking on the user’s icon in SharePoint may not result in your call being forwarded via CallManager or your instant message going to the user via Microsoft OCS.

This goes beyond just user provisioning and speaks to the need for there to be a single ‘point of truth’ for user information. That information must then be communicated and synchronised across the environment for the solution to function as it should.

We use and recommend our award-winning IPAD solution for this purpose, but the broader point is that without a means by which to properly manage identity information, you simply won’t be able to take full advantage of your unified communications environment - and the user experience will suffer as a consequence.