OCS 2007 and Cisco CallManager – Direct SIP is supported!!

I’m really happy that Microsoft now supports "Direct SIP" connectivity with CallManager v. 4.2, 5.1 & 6.1. What this means is that you do not need a 3^rd party voice gateway to connect to CallManager. Whohoo! Although I’ve been running CCM 5.1 and OCS with Direct SIP for almost a year now, it’s nice that there is support for it. And now I can feel "safe" recommending it to customers.

In order to be officially supported, you need to have the exact version of CCM that I linked to above, AND apply a fix to the Mediation Server. The fix strips off the + from outgoing OCS calls to CCM. Up until then, the + caused problems with Cisco.

But now… this is huge. Direct SIP connections are simple to set up in CCM and OCS – I’ve got it down to about 5 minutes on each side now J And the best news of all is that you aren’t limited to just the 23 calls that a single PRI gives you: with the SIP trunking the number of calls is limited only by your mediation server hardware and CCM’s hardware. And the bandwidth between servers (but they should really be on the LAN anyway).

BEFORE:

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AFTER:

Waaaay better.

Yes, I know that it was technically possible to use the Cisco Gateway as both a SIP/MGCP gateway before, but that’s not exactly easy stuff either. Not compared to using direct SIP anyway.

To me- this is a major green light for ANYONE with CallManager 4.2, 5.1, 6.1 to integrate with OCS. There’s no excuse not to give it a try at all. Go ahead… it’s easy…