How do I enable the line selection features for the Cisco 8800 phones on Communications Manager Express (CME)?

Many of us who have deployed the Cisco 88XX phones have run across 2 features that are life savers when working with multi-line phones connected to CUCM. Those features are "Show ALL Calls On Primary Line" and "Revert All Calls". For those who haven't used those features before I recommend checking out Amy Engineer's blog on why they are helpful and how they work with CUCM.

https://amyengineer.com/tag/8841/

While these 88XX line selection options have existed in the full Unified Communications Manager offering for a while. These options are not officially available in CME at the time of this writing. Luckily, since the phones have the functionality in firmware, there is a bit of a dirty hack to invoke these features in CME.

The following configuration will enable the "Show ALL Calls On Primary Line" feature on ALL phones.

telephony-service
service phone allCallsOnPrimary 1

The following configuration will enabled the "Revert All Calls" feature on ALL phones.

telephony-service
service phone revertToAllCalls 1

After those features have been enabled the phone profiles (config files) need to be re-created.  The following commands can be used to recreate the profiles.

voice register global
 no create profile
 create profile

Then we can validate the configs or skip this part and just reboot the phones and test.  Here's a sample scenario to check the config file.  Assuming CME is writing the config files to a directory called "its" and there is a phone with a name of "SEP101010101010", the following cli commands would show if the new configuration options are written to the config file.

more bootflash:/its/SEP101010101010.cnf.xml | i allCallsOnPrimary
and
more bootflash:/its/SEP101010101010.cnf.xml | i revertToAllCalls

After validating the the new addition to the configuration the phones will need to be rebooted and then voilà the new features are active!

Fun with Cisco Compliance Recording (Live Monitoring)

* This list of notes is to remind myself of some of the gotchas during the installation.  Your mileage may very.


SQL Shenanigans
Configuring the Compliance Recording integration to SQL puked.  It threw a, "Network error IOException: Connection refused", error message.  It turns out that the TCP/IP protocol was disabled by default for SQL.  It was fixed by firing up the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and enabling the TCP/IP protocol.

Fun with the UCCX integration

• Primary & Secondary UCCX Server Hostname

Entering the hostname configuration to match the hostname of the UCCX server didn't work out.  In this case the hostname had hyphens in it.  Compliance Recording doesn't handle the hyphens correctly.  The hyphens in the hostnames need to be entered as underscores instead.  This is to ensure that the automagically generated "db instance name" guess matches the actual Informix database instance name.  For whatever reason, the software will not automagically replace the hyphens with an underscore.

(Incidentally, the install doc also states that if the server name starts with a number to add the letter "i" to the beginning of the name.  "For example, if the server name is “100-voiceuccx-01”, enter “i100_voiceuccx_01”.")

• UCCX Workforce User Login

There are 2 options for UCCX Workforce User.  Both of these are preexisting special purpose users that live in the UCCX system.

• uccxworkforce - The default user for standard "network" based recording with the media sense server.
• uccxhruser - This user supports "mediasense" based recording.

The installation guide states, "The uccxworkforce login ID does not have permission to use contactcalldetail and agent connectiondetail tables that are required for reconciliation."

• UCCX Workforce User Password

Using passwords with more than 8 characters and/or symbols is NOT supported!  The password needs to be 8 characters or less with no special characters (letters and numbers supported only)

The other fun fact is the password needs to be manually configured on both the Primary UCCX and the HA UCCX  servers.  (It doesn't synch).  But at least UCCX is nice enough to generate a warning after setting the password on the Primary "box".

Archive Work Flow
Configuring an archive work flow is mandatory for Live Monitoring (or "network" based recording to work).  I spent a couple of days going over everything with a fine tooth comb with the nice folks from Calabrio before we realized the archive work flow is mandatory for Live Monitoring.  Even if the calls are not meant to be archived, the archive work flow must still be configured (archive work flow can be set to not save recordings)  The other fun gotcha is I tested with a "test" team and almost forgot to enable the archive work flow for the production teams.

Live Monitoring - Network Based Recording Requirement
Live monitoring will not work with media sense integrated recording.  The standard "network" based CR server needs to capture the audio for Live Monitoring to work.

Sameday Download - Call Recording
Sameday audio (contacts) can not be downloaded by users until the audio is played in the browser (or at least selected so the audio loads in the web based media player).  After the audio (contact) is played in the browser it is migrated to long term storage.  The audio export process pulls the audio from long term storage.

Reference Docs
Cisco has some useful reference documents on their website.  calabrio.com also has some good information too for Cisco partners.  The Calabrio site does require obtaining a Calabrio login which can take a couple of days.

* Note - Observations based on a Compliance Recording 11.5.1 SR5 experience

I’ll be “On top of the World” at Cisco Live! “Are You Gonna Go My Way”?

Who else is stoked about Cisco Live this year? It's by far my favorite technology conference. The training is top notch, there is a personal vibe to the sessions, and I love the key note from John Chambers.

The Customer Appreciation Event is exciting to me as a music lover! The event this year is at AT&T Park the home of the San Francisco Giants. It should prove to be a fun night for my peers and I.

Grammy Award Winning, Las Vegas rock band, Image Dragons will perform!  (I'm in trouble with my kids because they're missing this.)


Also, one of my favorites, the great American singer-songwriter and Grammy Award Winning musician, Lenny Kravitz will be rocking the stage.  He's also know for his acting chops.  (My kids know Lenny as Cinna from the Hunger Games movies.)

Who else is going this year? If you haven't signed up yet it's not too late. Check out the sign up information here. Hope to see you there.