#networkers2010 – Restaurant day 3 – Seven Portes

There are times you go to a place and something is very memorable. A few (quite a few) years ago, I went with my wife and some of her family to this restaurant and had exceptional food, and wonderful service. So it seemed only right that on the last night, a couple of my colleagues should be shown, what I believe is one of the best restaurants in Barcelona.

The 7 portes was opened more than 170 years ago which says something about the establishment. I had a simple desire from the menu, a seafood platter – astonishingly, there were three to chose from, so I went with the Seafood Medley – which contained steamed shell fish, including lobster, mussels, prawns and langoustines. This can only be described as the freshest, finest meal of the week (and they have all been excellent, so that is some claim). My colleagues also raved about their meals – the farmhouse chicken, was succulent and plentiful, while the brochette of sausages were also devoured with enthusiasm and enjoyment - “bangers and mash” Spanish style!

The service was excellent as would be expected in a place that has survived this long. An all together thoroughly enjoyable experience (again!).

#networkers2010 – BRKUCC-2003 A new appraoch to call routing and dial plans based on the Service Advertisement Framework

Stefano Giorcelli presented this new concept, which is his baby, effectively dynamic routing for dial plans. This is an exciting concept, as the configuration of dial-plans to this point has been done statically. The ability for call-agents to advertise destinations onto the network and for other cal-agents to learn this detail should revolutionise dial plan implementation.

SAF is aimed to advertise any service (not just dial-plan) onto the network, and thus is partly competing with various other technologies, e.g. Bonjour, Service Location Protocol, DNS SRV, however it differs from these technologies as it is not an overlay to the network, but is part of it.

There are two components to enable the call routing ability – Call Control Discovery and SAF agents. The CCD comprises a schema based on XML, thus the detail is easily read from the network. It is available with release 8.0(1) of the Unified Communications platform (CUCM, CUCME, IOS voice gateways)

The SAF network allows both static and dynamic learning of neighbours, which do not need to be physically adjacent, allowing for dark SAF-unaware networks between neighbours enabling deployment to be phased into the network. SAF will initially be available for ISR/ISR-G2 s in 15.0(1)M code and is planned in most other network platforms.

For me, this was the most exciting session of the conference – it was forward looking, provided a solution to an age old problem and was one of those “why didn’t we think of that sooner” kind of moments. I look forward to getting hold of FCS code and trying it out in my lab and getting to see it on a production network.

Stefano is after feedback on what we’d like to see in the future for this, and with his enthusiasm for the subject I can see this going far.

#networkers2010 – BRKCOL-2015 Cisco Unified Communications Interoperability with Microsoft

Hmm, I had been unsure of taking this given that I had taken the Advanced Presence techtorial and expected significant overlap. It did have some overlap, but there was enough new content to make it worthwhile.

Toby Neumann from the advanced presence techtorial gave the session and after some disclaimers regarding other companies products went through the Microsoft and Cisco (ie OCS vs CUPS) solutions to the same problem. He compared the use of SIP Proxy (ie OCS) vs Back to Back User Agent (B2BUA), and how B2BUA is a more feature-rich solution, due to the fact that SIP Proxy is not allowed to manipulate the media.

There was also a discussion of the MOC to MOC unimpaired network one-way delay – circa 140msec of codec delay – vs the ITU specification which specifies 150 msec as a maximum for good call quality. It was pointed out that the CUCIMOC client is about 100msec. All this is due to the software nature of the codec processing which cant really be compared to the dedicated DSPs provided in phones where the codec delay is significantly less.

The use of Remote Call Control was discussed, and how Microsoft is dropping support from OCS in future releases. There were detailed discussions on other integration methods.

The various client integrations – click-to-call using client services framework, and CUCIMOC 7 & 8 – were detailed. Client Services framework seems to have a big part in Cisco’s future of integration with desktop services.

Toby left us with the thoughts that the choice of what and how to integrate is up to yourself!

#networkers2010 – BRKCCT-2013 Planning and Designing a Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal Deployment

Oh dear. I walk in with five minutes to go, and it is Shahzad Ali and myself, meet the engineer without planning it. Shahzad is the guy who wrote the CVP SRND, so what he says is gospel regarding design and implementation of this stuff. More people did turn up (I think we got to a maximum of about 20).

This session was effectively a detailed session on planning and design, no configuration or troubleshooting on the menu. The session focus on the direction that Cisco are taking the product with more and more focus on SIP and less and less focus on H.323. There was a detailed section on branch design which highlighted the issues and solutions for ensuring that media stays in branch where it belongs.

There was a final section on CVP 8 and upcoming enhancements including courtesy callback – which is something everyone has wanted for a long time.

Shahzad kept the session moving well, and threw in a few quizzes with little prizes to keep everyone interested. The tiny crowd definitely got value from their time