My mobile phone is now an android!

My mobile phone provider has been bugging me lately to get an upgrade, so eventually I have caved in and gone and had a look at what’s around. I have a few basic criteria in my phone:

1. Bluetooth integration with my car.
   The BMW professional navigation system is a bit fussy. It doesn’t work at all with S60 Nokias. My full contacts list must be imported to the car (automatically)
2. Exchange sync.
   I use exchange 2007 for my email/contacts/calendar and have come to rely on it.
3. The usual.
   Wifi/bluetooth/3G (HSDPA) etc

As I mentioned, I’ve tried Nokias and gave my N70 to my wife, going back to a 6123, then onto a Vodafone v1615 (HTC Tytn II – Kaiser). I’ve been very happy with the WinMo phone, as it does all of the above, but its getting a bit long in the tooth and I felt like a change (but not an iPhone!). So in to the Vodafone store I went and out I came with an HTC Magic – “Google phone”.

I’ve been very impressed with the phone so far (24 hours), however a note of caution for potential buyers – requirement 2 is not currently met regardless of what HTC’s site says. Vodafone have removed the Exchange sync component! This means that you have to use one of the paid for options from Android Marketplace – not in my plans. I’ve had a rant on the Vodafone forums along with everyone else about this – lets see what happens.

On the positive side, the browser is excellent, the interface is slick and smooth, the connection to my home wifi network was a breeze (once I located the MAC address of the phone), and most importantly it works perfectly with my car!

Given that the phone has only been available for 9 days, I’m sure that any little niggles I find will be resolved. I now know what the iPhone mob have been going through with the App Store. Fortunately, the Android store (through Vodafone) only has free applications at the moment, so no damage done yet!

I’ll post updates regarding the exchange sync if I hear anything.

BIOS Flash Upgrades - Lessons learned

I've been looking to upgrade my main desktop for a little while - it is (was) an AMD-X2 4200+ (Socket AM2 - but that's a different story) on a ASUS motherboard with 4GB Ram running Vista-64bit - very happy it was too. I was looking at possibly moving up to a Phenom at the high end of the scale and for this I needed to flash my BIOS to give it support for the newer CPUs - not been keeping it up to date. So saturday afternoon I decided to do the necessary and flash the BIOS - no big deal, that is until the system wouldn't POST after the reboot - argh worst nightmare, so after trying everything in the manual and that I could find online I admitted defeat.

I am now the proud owner of a Gigabyte motherboard (with dual BIOS chips to allow you to mess up one of them), and an Intel i7 920 - yes change of architecture and I've wondered what I could do with 4 cores hyperthreaded and a potential 24GB of memory (I only got 6).

I am now in the process of re-installing Vista (something I didn't want to have to do, but hey) so here are some of my lessons from this tale:

1. Don't flash your BIOS unless you have to
2. Flash your BIOS before you go and buy that nice new processor
3. Intel processors need more power than AMD processors (did I mention the new 1000W power supply - overkill I know, but my 4 year old 500W couldn't get the thing going)
4. You want to hear only one beep when your motherboard boots - continuous short beeps means you need more power (see above)
5. Vista will not boot if you change the processor architecturedummy
, motherboard, raid controller etc and you will have to re-install.

So that's it - Vista is reinstalling and so will I be for the next few nights. Still I should now be able to really crank up my UC lab with VMWare sessions, and lightroom should fly :-)

Agent Targeting Rules - Bye Bye to Device Targets

As a Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) system increases in size and complexity, in terms of numbers of Peripheral Gateways, IVRs and Agents, there are certain aspects of the system that start to cause more and more overhead in administration. Device Targets are one of these things that grow and grow the larger your system gets. Add another PG, need another label on your existing device targets, add another IVR, need another label on your existing devices targets, and on it goes. Fortunately, as of UCCE 7.1.3, Cisco has provided a mechanism to remove the need for device targets completely (at least for System, CallManager and Generic PGs)

First  a little back to basics, what is the purpose of a device target. It is a way of getting a call from one routing client to another. So in the simplest of systems (taking this to the extreme, ie no IVR), there is a device target with a label with the number of the extension of the agent and a routing client of a Call Manager. The Call Manager uses the information in this label to dial the agent.

Now what if this could be calculated and dynamic rather than a static label. This is where Agent Targeting Rules come in to play, and the best thing is you can implement them on either  new or existing systems without breaking anything (if you go through the below  phases).

So where do I find these Agent Targeting Rules – first, in the release notes for 7.1.3 <CCO Login may be required>,  - they are in Configuration Manager –> Tools –> List Tools.

There are three types of rules (only two of which I have used in a production environment): Agent Extension; Substitution Agent Extension; and Translation Agent Extension (which I haven’t used). All the rules are based on Peripheral, Routing Client and Number ranges (you did design your contact centre with agent phone numbers in nice contiguous blocks didn’t you ? No, well it doesn’t actually matter). The rules do exactly what they say
– agent extensions is used where the full number is dialable from the routing client without modification
- Substitute Agent Extension allows you to prefix the number and select the number of significant digits from the range specified
- Translation Agent Extension – this (I haven’t tested this) allows you to use a translation route between devices (assuming they have already been set up).

Peripheral Gateways can be configured to operate in three modes 
– ignore rules (ie use device targets)
- compare rules but fall back to device target and report an error if the rules are inconsistent with an existing device target
- ignore device targets (rules only – they’d better be right!)

The migration / creation process is this:
- Create Rules
- Change Peripheral Gateways (ICM configuration + restart) to
use “Rules Compare to Existing Device Target mode”
This mode compares the DT to the result generated by the rule, but will use the DT and report an error if the rule is inconsistent. If only the rule generates a label – it is used and no error generated.
- Test and correct rules if required
- Change PG to “Agent Target Mode”
- Delete device targets, if an existing installation (as they are no longer used)

So lets have a simpl(ish) example
Your contact centre has two location with a Call Manager PG at each location, and an IVR at each location, calls come into both Call Manager clusters and are passed onto their local IVR for call treatment. Site A has agent extensions in the range 1000-1999 with a site access code of 441 when dialled from site B. Site B has  agent extensions in the range 2000-2999  with a site access code of 442 when dialled from Site A. To set up this scenario you need the following set of rules (on site A – a similar set of rules is required on site B)
SiteA_Local_Agents
- Peripheral: SiteA_CCM_PIM (the location of the agents)
- Rule Type: Agent Extension
- Routing Client: SiteA_CCM_PIM.RC, SiteA_IVR_PIM.RC (the local Call Manager and IVR)
- Extension Range: 1000-1999

SiteA_Agents_From_SiteB
- Peripheral: SiteA_CCM_PIM
- Rule Type: Substitution Agent Extension
- Agent Extension Prefix: 441
- Agent Extension Length: 4
- Routing Client: SiteB_CCM_PIM.RC, SiteB_IVR_PIM.RC (the remote Call Manager and IVR)
- Extension Range: 1000-1999

And that is it, change the PG configuration and restart it.

I have this in a production environment, so this isn’t just a lab exercise. We have had one issue, there is a bug in 7.1(5) which causes the router to “forget” what it is supposed to be doing (corruption of routing table) – this is fixed with an ES. Other than that they work fine and I’ll be using them all the time from now on.

Bye Bye Device Targets.

Appliance Based UC Servers – and keyboards

If you live in the US or have a US keyboard attached to your UC server (any of the appliance-based platform - Cisco Call Manager, Unity Connection or Unified Presence Server) then you will never come across this issue. Otherwise, here’s a quick tale of woe – and a doh moment!

I was building a set of Unified Communications Manager servers attached to a KVM in a server room. I was going through the setup entering user names, passwords and shared secrets as normal. I’d then go back to my desk and attempt to log-in remotely using the same user name and password as entered locally – no joy. A bit of head scratching – back to the server room, change the password, back to desk, password works from the desk. Hmm, maybe it’s a new feature to force you to change the password once the system is up! Don’t remember seeing that one in the release notes. Anyway, by the time this had happened to the third server (these were built over a period of months not hours), I was getting a little frustrated. Eventually I worked out the problem by typing the password onto the screen – not at the password prompt – I know I should have done this much earlier, but you forget these things when you don’t do it every day!  - and lo’ (or more accurately  “DOH”), there where my @ should be was a “.  Yes, default (and only) keymap on these servers is US.  Now I used to live in Australia, and when I came back to the UK, I was getting problems typing things for the exact opposite reason (Australia uses US as their keyboard layout – like “Rowter vs rooter”).

So there you have it – lesson of the day – always type a something to the screen if you have any doubts about the keyboard layout (or you just think you are going crazy)!

London at Night

I am fortunate (or unfortunate depending on your view!) that I work in London. Yesterday (Saturday) I was working at another location which allowed me to travel a different route through London, givving me the opportunity to take one of the photos that I've seen done many times, but wanted to do myself. The London Eye at night.

I had expected to finish work late afternoon, so had packed my camera, 28-135 lens (next time I'll take the 10-20 I think), my gorrilapod and my TC-80N3 remote (which I got for christmas and don't really know how to use yet - but I'm learning - what there's a manual!).

I'd taken some pictures of the Houses of Parliment lit up at night a few years ago, so I went and tried to recapture them - not sure how happy I am with the results - so no posting of those. I then went onto the embankment and picked a few spots for the London Eye shots. These are my two favourites.


London Eye and County Hall


London Eye

I used the Gorillapod on walls for support, and eventually worked out how to set a long exposure through the remote (bulb on the camera, set the time for the exposure and press start on the remote). It's so much better than getting the shakes - it was just above freezing.

Ah well - that's a tick in the must do photos of London - plenty more to shoot.

Coomera River Before Sunrise

Picture gadget time!

This was taken from the jetty at the holiday home we had during our trip to Australia in March 2008. It was taken about 5:45am just before we were to go out deep sea fishing (we didn't go deep sea fishing in the end - too rough - wouldn't think it looking at the river!)

When to MTP, when to transcode ?

That was a question I saw on NetPro today (paraphrased slightly), which made me think of something I'm currently working on.

I'm currently involved in the implementation of a new Audio Conferencing system, which involves Avaya conferencing connected to Cisco IPT. This involves SIP trunking between the IPT platform and the conferencing system. This brings into play the usual "how do I get my DTMF to work?" question.

Normally, I'd just create an MTP resource on an IOS gateway, add it into a Media Resource Group and apply that to the SIP trunk. This works fine when calling from an IP phone to the conferencing system, but when an MGCP gateway gets involved, its time for some interesting behaviour - if you type your DMTF quickly, digits get dropped - not all though. If I use a Transcoder (same gateway etc), it works fine.

Now a transcoder by default uses two DSP sessions per call (even when going from G711 to G711) as the default configuration sets up allowed codecs to include G711 and G729. So take away the G729 as an allowable codec and its down to one DSP session per call, just like an MTP.

I'm guessing this could be a bug with UCM 6.1.2 and the IOS version I'm using, but I have a project to complete, so I'll have to come back to this at a later time as the workaround is suitable

So to answer the initial question, I guess the answer might be, use a transcoder all the time and control your codecs to optimise your DSP usage - unless you are doing a certain lab exam!

Introduction

I guess an introductory post is always a good idea for a new blog, so here's a little about me.

I'm a UK based contact centre consultant who specialises in the design and build of IP contact centres using Cisco products. This include Unified Communcations Manager (CallManager) and (usually) Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE).

I've been doing this since 2002 when I was involved in the design and build of a large contact centre for a UK retailer which grew to a significant size with centres in various locations including South Africa and India. This managed to cover not just Cisco IPT, but Nortel Symposium and Avaya integrations. I've been involved in the design and imlementation of a few IPT and IPCC systems since then.

I am a bit of an early adopter, and like my tech to come with a beta tag, not in a production environment of course!

In my spare time (what spare time!) I follow Everton in the English Premiership, and have an affection for photography (or at least I have the kit!).

Anyway enough of an intro, I'm sure more will come out in time.