Chesapeake NetCraftsmen

I just finished wrapping up all of the logistics for a trip I am making at the end of the month to beautiful San Jose, CA. I will be representing Chesapeake NetCraftsmen at the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) 2012 annual conference. A few years ago, a group of NetCraftsmen consultants had the ability to work with a large university healthcare system to design a solution for providing an end-to-end Cisco Telepresence solution.

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Recently I had the opportunity to develop a custom XML application for one of our customers. The application we were replacing was the standard Corporate Directory application built into Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). The customer needed to change the directory numbers that were stored in CUCM to accommodate another application. As a result, they needed a way to apply "directory lookup rules" to the corporate directory. That's where we come in.

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I was recently working on a CUCM 8.5(1) system and encountered a bug that reminded me of something similar from back in the days of ye' olde CUCM 6.x.  Now let me say upfront that this is certainly not a critical issue.  In fact, it is basically just a cosmetic bug and doesn't impact the system at all.  Bugs are always interesting to me so I thought I'd share.

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I've recently seen several Cisco Support Community posts about Cisco Unified Attendant Console (CUxAC) and at least a couple of them are related to instances where BLF does not work as expected.  I have also encountered this issue and thought I'd share my experience.

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In November, I did a write up on some methods one can employ to deliver live audio streaming with Music on Hold (MoH) in a Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) environment running in a virtual environment on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. I have since completed a deployment leveraging one of the options discussed in November and wanted to provide some further discussion.

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I recently tested CounterPath's Bria 2.0 for iPhone on Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). I was running a previous release of Bria on my iPod Touch but wanted to wait until the video add-in was available before doing a write up the product. I found a few gotchas with Bria 2.0 for iPhone but the product is more or less stable and the future 2.0.1 release should address the main issues I encountered.

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This past week David Hailey and I were working on a Unity Connection 8.5 deployment and came across an interesting (and somewhat frustrating) issue with redirecting callers to Unity Connection call handlers. The "fix" was one where you wonder if Cisco is having fun with you. I am still scratching my head in disbelief.

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For the latest entry in what has evolved to be a series on 3rd party SIP soft phones, I wanted to do a write up on configuring and using CounterPath's Bria softphone on Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). Bria is what CounterPath calls their "carrier-grade next generation softphone".  I tested CounterPath X-Lite version 3.0 around a year ago and I definitely liked the product. I wanted to revisit the CounterPath offering since there has been at least one major release in the CounterPath line, an upgrade to CUCM, I am now running Mac OS X, and I really wanted to test video with the Cisco 9900 series phones.

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I had opportunity to participate in a UCCX version 7.x to 8.x upgrade recently which involves a change in the underlying UCCX Operating System (From Windows to Linux).  Based on that and some of the changes Cisco has made, I think is critically important that scripts make use of Exception Statements.  If you have ever had a UCCX call trigger the dreaded; “I’m sorry we are currently experiencing system problems and are unable to process your call.   Please try again later“; then you most likely have generated an exception.  This results in the application using the Default Script.   In most cases, this may not be the optimum way to process the call.   Fortunately Cisco has two steps in the General Palette that we can use to handle these exceptions.  These steps are the “On Exception Clear” and the “On Exception Goto” steps.  Every script writer should consider adding these so that fatal errors when running the application do not result in fatal call handling for their customers.

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I recently experienced an annoying problem that I thought I would share. I was creating a bulk import file for my Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) lab system and I kept getting validation errors. Turns out that using tar on Mac OS X creates an archive that has more baggage than it should. Thanks to our little friend the "Resource fork".

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