I’ve posted quite a few times about Office Communications Server 2007, Cisco CUPS, Cisco CallManager and remote call control. I’ve had some bumps and bruises along the way, but now I am happy to report that… it works! CUPS and OCS are now playing nicely.
The magic ingredient? Upgrade to CUPS 6.0.4.
One of my customers who had been having issues with OCS and CUPS finally got a copy of CUPS 6.0.4 and much to my relief, this fixed all the outstanding issues. Today I successfully verified that calls made by MOC, made by Cisco IP phones are working properly. I also verified that the "boss/secretary" problem (where a second call answered by an admin assistant was automatically putting the first call on hold) is gone now.
In a comment on one of my earlier blogs, somebody mentioned that they were able to fix some of the problems in CUPS 6.0.3 by messing around with the External Phone Number Mask. That may well do the trick, but my recommendation is to move to CUPS 6.0.4.
And I have to say: the OCS/CUPS/RCC solution is really, really nice. For customers who already have deployed Cisco IP phones, this integration adds a ton of value: it’s really nice to have MOC as your company directory (in addition to using it for IM/Presence/LiveMeeting/video conferencing) and to have one-click calling. Being able to see "In a Call" when someone is on their Cisco IP phone is another major benefit.
So, overall: yeah, there have been some troubles with the integration but it’s been worth it. And let’s don’t forget that OCS is less than a year old, as is CUPS 6. So this kind of thing is somewhat to be expected. And with the right versions of software, the integration is straightforward and can be done in a pretty short time period.
My conclusion is that I recommend that anyone who has CallManager and OCS deployed ought to at least evaluate the integration between the two. I am really, really, happy with the results.
