Category Archives: VOIP

Cisco and DST…

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Well, they ‘almost’ got it right. (ignoring the fact that they waited until the last minute like everyone else and grossly underestimated the effort involved in everyone updating)

Most things work, and have the right time. That is unless you have a 797x color phone. You know one of the ‘good’ phones, the expensive ones.

7970 Cisco Screen

If you have one of these, check the time. Is it right?

It probably is because when you did your update you rebooted all of the phones right?

Now reach around back and unplug it (if you are using this powered over Ethernet simply unplug the cable, if you have a power brick, just unplug that).

Let the phone boot up.

What time does your phone say now? Yeah, that’s what I thought, it’s back to the wrong time.

Now simply reset your phone, ‘hit settings, **#**’ and viola!, you’re back to the right time.

So what’s the difference from a ‘powered-off boot’ and a reset/reboot? And why does that screw up the time? Who knows, but it’s stuff like this that drive us absolutely crazy.

Cisco sues Apple, duh.

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Story here via Yahoo news.

So it’s well known that Cisco through Linksys/InfoGear has had the trademark for “iPhone”.

Everyone was amazed when Master Jobs declared “and we’re calling it iPhone”.

It wouldn’t surprise me that Steve is this “Pompous” to move forward without a deal.

Now maybe, just maybe they _do_ have this worked out. Any press is good press no? Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if this is just being played out the long way just for press coverage. ;)

Cisco Unified Call Center Express, Where’s the Redundancy?

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Well son of a @#$%@ Mr. Chambers. Before you run off on a tangent and try to give us video Tele-Presence. How about giving us something we really need, like hot standby functionally for IPCCX (now know as Unified Call Center Express)?

Right now we’re in the midst of dealing with software bugs in IPCCX (oh sorry, Cisco Unified Call Center Express) Which the TAC expects us to UNINSTALL and REINSTALL in the middle of the day, taking my queues off-line and leaving my inbound customers just hanging the wind.

Oh, we can run the complex script we’re working on but we can’t “Debug it” because it crashes. The TAC and Development Engineers have alluded to seeing this before but the only fix apparently is to reinstall. They aren’t *sure* that will fix our problem but what the hell. We’ve already wasted an entire day, what are a few more hours? Why they wouldn’t want to take a look at what’s actually going on and try to correct it I’ll never understand.

This wouldn’t bother me so much if the box we were developing on was a backup to the production box (i.e. the HOT stand by box), but it’s does because NO such functionality exists. Ok there is warm standby now, but that’s not the same, and it didn’t exist until 4.x which we _just_ upgraded to. Callers in queue would still be lost. But at least our agents wouldn’t be down for the hour and a half while we reinstall just to get the script development environment working again, if that in fact solves our problem.

Can you tell we’re just a tad frustrated?

Cisco Networkers 2006 [The Keynote & and my wireless us busted] part 1 of ??

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Opening Day, Keynote and what not.

John Chambers and the Magical “Baseball and Technolgy” Demo.

Uhm, John, put the crack pipe down please.

First you talk about all these wonderful technologies. These vaporware things running across the ‘Network’, which is now the ‘platform’, and on the 2nd day; we Networker attendees couldn’t check our schedules or reliably log into the provided wireless network. That’s a big oops.

The entire Networkers scheduling infrastructure was down in the Hilton end of the conference before and after the keynote. *Most* of them were down in the Conference center as well too. Now granted this was an impressive thing to pull off, but this is “The here and now”, and that’s what the 10,000 attendees are hear to deal with, and Cisco and the partners failed to deliver that at the conference.

Mr. Chambers started off strong, explaining how Cisco was right in 1996 when nobody else was. So basically we need to listen to them now. Setting the stage so that when the demo commenced and we watched all the nonsense, we could reflect back and say, “Well, they were right 10 years ago, so they must be right now”. But now isn’t 10 years ago.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot right in what Cisco is doing. Being hell bent on video though, just drives me crazy. I’m happy for you Mr. Chambers that you find video conferencing a great productivity enhancement. That for you it’s a wonderful tool. But most of the world doesn’t want it, and/or isn’t ready for that just yet. A lot of people just don’t want to be seen. Especially when dealing with strangers. But that’s another point and I don’t want to get off topic.

This crazy demo…

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Cisco VOIP

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Having lived with it now for about 6 months. It’s about time we started writing about it. Over the next few weeks we’ll start talking about some of the good things we like about it and of course put in our fair share of Cisco jabs along the way.

This weekend CmdrChalupa and I took home remote office routers and phones to test remote the remote site setups that we’re adding to our current infrastructure. I haven’t chatted with him yet but mine is working well. I have the the 2800 series router with Call Manager Express. He took home the soho Cisco 871 with wireless.
We’ll be shipping my configuration to a small office over seas. They’ll be connected back to us over the Internet through a VPN tunnel.
This tunnel will connect into our new Cisco 2801 VPN box. Both providing Voice QOS back to the Call manager.

The remote site will be survivable and has room to connect up-to 8 analog lines. This new (split)VPN tunnel will allow them to access services on our network they haven’t been able to run easily in the past like our CRM client as well as have their phones connected real time. A Visio is shown below.

Visio_1.png

The current office will support 2 people to start with hopes to expand as growth allows. Again ‘best effort over the Internet’ has so far worked well for us. The have been using the ‘Soft Phone’ or IP communicator on their laptops. The problem however is if they don’t have it fired up, you get a fast busy when you dial them and they aren’t there. Now having real phones in place should at least alleviated that problem and they’ll more easily be able to use voice mail.

We’ll report back after implementation.