Adding a custom background image to a Cisco IP Phone can be tricky. You can use Cisco Phone Designer or you can use the following instructions to upload backgrounds to the server so the users can choose a background from the phone.
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If you work on Cisco IPT environments, you have probably ran into a situation where you wanted to make a call through a gateway to test the PSTN connectivity, test translation-profiles or as a process of elimination, you wanted to eliminate the CUCM cluster. The Xlite SIP softphone is a great tool for such tests. You can make calls through an IOS gateway without making any new configuration changes to the gateway itself or to the CUCM cluster.
Since passing my voice lab, I have had several requests from candidates asking to me provide a list of the equipment I used in my home lab. As I stated in earlier posts, during my V2 studies and due to not having a Catalyst 6500 w/ 6508, or a VG248 in my lab, I subsidized my study sessions with rack time from Proctor Labs. I would mostly do this during full mock lab sessions, and then utilize my own rack during everyday study.
Well, it has almost been three weeks since I passed the Voice lab, and I have to say, as much as I love to study and learn, it has been nice not having the pressure and spending every free minute in the lab or reading! Sure over the past few weeks I have still cracked a book almost every night, but I have also been spending some well deserved time just hanging with my family and doing things like playing video games with my boys. Fun stuff!
A week and a half until my first attempt at the new version 3 voice lab and my studies have progressed well over the past few months despite being very busy with work. I also believe taking some time off after my last failed attempt of the V2 lab was a good decision. Motivation has been good and it has been nice to learn some of the new technologies and features that we have been able to implement in some of our real world telephony deployments.
I just wanted to take a minute to post links to a site that were very helpful to me last week. At my job, I rarely use UCCX(IPCC). The extent of my UCCX experience is scratching my way through the documentation enough to use it for TAPs and thats it. I installed it again recently for an install but instead of fumbling through the documentation, I went to blogsearch.google.com and found Alex Hannah’s site: UCCX.net. Below are links to a few of his video tutorials that were very helpful. Thanks Alex!
Studies for the new V3 lab have been underway for a little over a month. Most of this time has been spent reading the CME 7.0 and CUCM 7.0 SRNDs and more specifically, those sections which introduce new features and technologies. A section I have really focused on, reading several times now, is the CUCM Dial Plan section. There are a lot of new topics to become familiar with. + Dialing, Globalization, Localization, Normalization, and Local Route Groups, to name a few.
The Cisco Unified Reporting tool is a web application that can be accessed at the CUCM console and is a quick and convenient way to gather data about a CUCM cluster as well as information that may be helpful in troubleshooting.
CUCiMOC (pronounced Cookie Mock) is an acronym for Cisco UC integration for Microsoft Office Communicator and was publicly released for download on July 13th. For those of you who may not have heard of or are not that familiar with CUCiMOC, it allows your MOC client to integrate directly with Unified communications Manager 7.x (actually 6.1.3 and later)….WITHOUT Cisco Unified Presence (CUPS).
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Hunt groups are a great CUCM feature. However, Cisco does not support call pickup or group pickup for hunt groups by default. Luckily, there is a workaround. To enable pickup for calls directed to a hunt group (hunt pilot, hunt list, line group) , enter bug ID “CSCsb42763″ into into the System > Enterprise Parameters > “Cisco Support Use 1″ field.
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