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.
(more…)
The company I work for has been implementing thin client technologies based on Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services for a long time. Today, VMWare’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is starting to be the hot item. This post addresses the network concerns presented by thin client technologies. My first experience with this issue was presented by a small branch employee playing ‘Wheel of Fortune’ online. The network died every time it was her turn to spin the wheel.
I recently had the pleasure of installing my first 3G enabled routers in a production environment. To my pleasant surprise, the process and configuration is very simple. I was able to follow Cisco’s documentation to the letter. From zero to DMVPN took about 3 hours.
Although the configuration is simple, I still got confused about a couple of parts on my first try … basically just over thinking. Also, there were a few issues maintaining solid connectivity but I will just chalk that up to inexperience.
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.
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!
Attention Everyone! Please join me in congratulating James Key for passing the CCIE Voice lab. In the words of James himself … “It is done. CCIE #25772 Voice“. For those of you not on twitter, James passed the CCIE Voice lab on Tuseday of this week.
Allow me to give you a little background on his achievement. I first met James 3 1/2 years ago when he was hired as an entry level Cisco engineer with very little experience. He left a good job as a …cough…Windows Admin to pursue a career as a Cisco Engineer. Shortly after one year in the field, he made an announcement to our group that he was pursuing the CCIE Voice certification. At that time, we had no idea what kind of dedication he would show to achieve this goal.
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.
