Cisco employees are moving towards a mobile collaborative office environment – within the workplace. We sit where we like and log into the nearest phone, using extension mobility. But when we traveled to different Cisco offices around the world, we couldn’t log in to the Cisco IP phone: extension mobility only worked at certain limited locations within our home region.
Now, employee phones can essentially follow them to any Cisco office worldwide because Cisco IT deployed the Extension Mobility Cross Cluster (EMCC) feature on Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Cisco UCM).
To serve our headquarters campus in San Jose, California, Cisco IT deployed one of the world’s largest Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Cisco UCM) clusters, with 9 pairs of subscribers and a publisher supporting this one campus. Together with these main 19-servers the campus cluster also includes Unity node servers, presence servers and management servers, for a total of 48 Cisco MCS 7845s. In June 2012, we migrated these legacy servers to virtualized machines running on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers over a single weekend. Read More »
In this post PC era, Cisco is taking another important step in advancing the collaborative workspace and making collaboration even more pervasive for customers around the world – regardless of device, application or operating system. Today we’re announcing that we are making presence and instant messaging (IM) capabilities and Cisco Jabber clients available to our Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) customers globally at no additional cost. Cisco believes that together presence, IM, voice and video call control provide the foundation for real-time communications.
For customers, with this development, Cisco is now providing a way to simply and cost effectively make presence and IM available to all users across a plethora of devices — including Windows, Mac, iPad, Cisco Cius, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android (later in 2012) — while also ensuring they’re deploying a unified communications client that is BYOD-ready. And let me emphasize, this isn’t just for those customers who happen to have a Cisco IP phone. It’s for every employee in an organization.
For partners, this helps simplify and accelerate the deployment of presence, IM and mobile collaboration as part of a holistic, best-in-class, collaboration solution. Hence, presence and IM can easily become ubiquitous in the enterprise!
We feel presence and IM are the starting points of collaboration, not the final destination.
It had been 2009 when we first did a show breaking down the ‘how to’ for making the move from a traditional PBX (TDM) to a IP based system. The industry has come a long way and we are well past the days of trying to make the technology argument. Its the only way to go these days thankfully but questions still come up on where the gotcha’s may lie…so we did what we do best…we made a video.
The episode itself is long gone but I always think its fun to look back. Here is the promo for that first show we did..
When it comes to making technology decisions for your small business, there’s a lot of information to sift through. Sometimes, determining whether that information is accurate can be difficult. To help you separate fact from fiction, we’re launching a new monthly series called Mythbusters, in which we’ll tackle a common technology misconception.
In this first Mythbusters, we set the record straight about voice over IP, or VoIP, and whether it’s reliable for your business. Once upon a time, no business that wanted reliable phone service would have considered switching from a traditional analog phone system, or private branch exchange (PBX), to an IP-based solution. The call quality was inconsistent, including jitters (clicks and other undesired audio effects), delays, and drop outs.
