April 21, 2014
Earlier this year, Cisco put out a new release of Unified Communications Manager 10.0. With this new release, came a lot of new and improved features. Some are just an expansion on what version 9.1 already introduced and others are brand new and geared toward an ever-expanding offering of Collaboration.
CUCM 10.X FEATURES
1. Self-Provisioning and Self-Care
Back in the olden days of Call Manager 3.X a new feature called TAPS (Tool for Auto-Registered Phone Support) was introduced in order to make rolling out and administering a large Cisco VoIP environment easier. TAPS allowed you to import Template Phones into the system and have the user provision any phone they receive as their own simply by plugging in the phone and having the user dial a special number and enter their extension.
When the 5.X version of CUCM was released, it became necessary to have a Contact Center Server environment in order to use TAPS, and it became much less common. With the release of CUCM 10.X, a new but similar tool called Self-Provisioning and Self-Care has been released to make the lives of the administrators easier.
High-Level Features
- Provisioning templates enable administrators to define user configuration once and apply it automatically to new users discovered through directory integration.
- End users can complete the provisioning process without administrative assistance, configuring their personal devices through an application or Intel Virtualization Technology (IVT) interaction.
- A new self-care interface makes it easy for end users to manage their options and preferences for all devices.
This is very similar to the old TAPS application and can be configured in much the same fashion. Click here for more information on Self-Provisioning.
2. Cisco Prime Collaboration Provisioning Standard
Another new feature is the Cisco Prime Collaboration Provisioning Standard. This tool attempts to unify administration of your UC environment to one interface. As of version 10.X, this means you can administer CUCM, CUCME, Unity, Unity Connection and CUE.
This should hopefully keep you from having to remember all the IPs, usernames, and passwords for all of your systems like you do today and, best of all, the standard version is included with every install of CUCM 10.X.
High-Level Features
- This solution provides a single interface for a single cluster for call control, messaging, presence, and video.
- Administrator audit log and order tracking promote accountability, network security, and operational control, and they facilitate troubleshooting.
- Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) integration for user changes helps ensure consistency among systems.
- Batch provisioning ( single cluster only) increases operating efficiencies and reduces costs with scheduled scripts and templates that let an operator rapidly and consistently add or modify a large number of users or a large number of endpoints or device profiles (and the corresponding configuration settings).
3. Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance Standard
Another new tool from the Prime Collaboration line is the Collaboration Assurance Standard. This tool allows an administrator to easily monitor their Cisco Unified Communications environment including Cisco Unified Communications Manager 10.0, Unity Connection, and TelePresence.
The system can be configured to continuously monitor in real-time and do advanced troubleshooting of the environment. It can easily be configured to notify when a problem arises in order to proactively fix the issue as opposed to waiting for users to call and complain.For video, it allows viewing of the end-to-end session paths including jitter and packet loss.
High-Level Features
- This solution provides a web-enabled single interface for fault monitoring for core Cisco Unified Communications and video components.
- Email notification of alarms alerts operators even if they are not viewing the management system, reducing downtime and helping ensure that critical alarms are not missed.
- Pre-canned and customizable performance metrics dashboards display short-term trends for core unified communications components and provide visibility into critical performance metrics for reduced troubleshooting time and effort.
- The ability to search components within a unified communications cluster and view them in real time allows you to customize searches and find the status of components quickly.
- Custom performance alerts based on user-configurable thresholds facilitate proactive notification of problems.
For more on these tools review the Cisco Prime Collaboration 10.0 Data Sheet.
4. Network-Based Call Recording
A major requirement of customer service and contact center environments is call recording. For years the only options were either SPAN based recording or phone based Built-in-Bridge. Both cases had some limitations especially if calls were transferred off site.
With the release of CUCM 10.X, a new feature called Network-Based Recording has been introduced. This feature enables call recording without caring about what type of device is being used. Since this recording is happening at the gateway, even calls that are going out through mobility can be captured. This recording can then be integrated with Cisco MediaSense and other third party call recording software for reporting and playback purposes. For more information read the Cisco MediaSense Release 10.0 Data Sheet.
In conclusion, with the release of Cisco Unified Communications Manager 10.0 a lot of new and interesting features have become available. The above only describes a few of them, for a more comprehensive list of new features evaluate the Cisco Unified Communications Manager 10.0 Data Sheet.
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