The challenge that I had is providing UC service across different sites (I had many), Audio conferencing, Video conferencing, Web conferencing , Telephony conferencing , Voice mail and all of nice stuff all together; well it wasn’t an easy task.
When I came to my company I found CCM 4.3 mounted already and in place, so I had to work it out with OCS 2007, we decided to have a HW video conferencing solution and not relying on the round table since it is not available in the middle east yet so we investigated Cisco/Polycom and Tandberg and we chose Tandberg.
At the early time I wasn’t involved yet in the vendor selection for the video conferencing, so I was working in choosing a telephony conferencing solution, knowing that OCS R2 will provide that module for me made it much harder to choose between Alcatel, Cisco and Nortel.
When Tandberg solution mounted in our HQ and was in place in 3 of our sites I found that it is amazingly works with OCS 2007 and Cisco Call Manager, so I decided to integrate them together which worked so perfectly after, I will share my experience with you across several configuration notes, solution design posts and Finally showing you how an End to End solution will be implemented between the 3 island and connecting them together.
Now will walk through how to install and configure Tandberg Video conferencing, Codian MCU 4200 and OCS 2007 along with CCM support to provide end to end unified communication experience, in the first part I made a small introduction about the subject in this part I will describe the End to End experience and going to the basic configuration of the MCU 4200.
What do you want exactly, this is a so hard to answer, especially in the UC field, all of the vendors as well as partners are introducing end to end UC solutions, so what to chose and where to place is the hardest question.
What do you want, let us talk about that part a little bit, what do you want from UC, what you can achieve, to tell you the truth, you can do almost anything, from launching you mail/voicemail/IM end point from your mobile phone, until mounting you desktop phone from your PC or mobile, do FMC, bypass toll charges, doing audio/video/web conferencing and mixing all of them together, now you can place calls to PSTN network over GSM using E1 modules that carries SIM cards, typically anything.
So where to go, it is up to you, your budget, organization and how you do work internally, some companies work with other parties externally WW so they might need web conferencing, or you might have international branches where they want to minimize their phone bill, so ultimately there are no best fit for you, you have to note that when you ask consultants to do assessment for your organization because vendors will start talking and talking but you need to decide what you need exactly.
Let us go back to my solution, let me give you a brief about the architecture:
- And E1 connection from my service provider that hosts 100 extension over ISDN.
- One Cisco Voice gateway.
- 2 Cisco Call Manager (publisher/subscriber).
- 1 Codian MCU 4200 V2.3
- 5 Tandberg Endpoints in site1
- 1 Tandberg conferencing unit in each branch office.
On the OCS create a normal user, you don’t need to create and email, you can give him an email address and enable OCS 2007 for him, don’t login with OC to the user as this will remove the LCS 2005 attributes from the user and MCU will lose its presence.
After giving the IP of the MCU, and configuring the initial configuration like system name…etc follow the below steps:
- From the settings page go to the SIP pane.
- Enter the SIP address and the SIP proxy address for the MCU; this will be dialed from the OCS clients to join the Conf.
Note that in version 2.3.1.8 you cannot use the authentication since the firmware support basic auth, you need to upgrade to version 2.4 to support NTLM, I upgraded to 2.4 but it didn’t work so I rolled back and I work with Tandberg support on it.
- To overcome the auth, issue you need to add the IP of the MCU in OCS server in the authorized hosts tab and you need to mark it tread as authenticated.
- Once finished you will note that registered mark appears as above.
- Now you can add the MCU in your buddy list and you can dial it, once dialed you will be prompted for the conf. ID enter it and you can see/hear the conf.
And now the final part of this article, we will talk about configuring the CCM/Tandberg to work all together, this will let you leverage the conferencing capability from any phone anywhere, it is cool and very important and I found that most of the Tandberg customers don’t know about it.
To make it works, make sure to do the following steps at the 4200 MCU:
- From the Gateway menu, add a new gateway, type in the IP of the Cisco Call manager, and you are done.
- Add the MCU as a gateway.
- From the routing plans, add a new route pattern, this will match a number (for example 1000) and route this pattern using the gateway you just configured.
No users in the OCS can add the conference ID as a user and call that user, also call from the phone the MCU and amazingly they can hear users from the Video Conference points and on the OC clients.
Note: I have been working on this for 2 weeks now, I have upgraded my MCU from 2.3 to 2.4, this “as Tandberg” allows me to use NTLM authentication rather than anonymous authentication for MCU registration, but it didn’t work.
For some reason the MCU cannot obtain the GRUU that is returned from the OCS and cannot register itself in OCS, I believe that this is a bug in OCS (as far as I can see) because the OCS is using some SIP extension that has make my life harder before, I am working with Tandberg folks on it now, So keep your MCU at 2.3 until further update.
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