Comparing Cisco and Microsoft UC – Fact or Fiction

If you haven’t seen it already Cisco recently released a new marketing document comparing Cisco and Microsoft UC offerings. Although I would love to take this document apart piece by piece and analyze all the bullet points I found one piece of information in it that really intrigued me. From point 3:

“Cisco also provides a richer set of instant messaging capabilities, including point-to-point and group chat, offline chat, IM logging and compliance options, and persistent chat, which is included in the same client and server solution, unlike the Microsoft offering, which requires a separate client and server for persistent chat. Cisco presence solutions interoperate with Microsoft Office Communicator, IBM Sametime, and Google Talk, without the need for additional servers in the demilitarized zone (DMZ), saving cost and operational complexity.”

I found this interesting in that there is specific information in this paragraph that is contrary to the information that they supply in their own SRND documentation which only makes this statement true through omission of actual facts or at best clever wording. The first section talks about group chat and in particular it makes mention of Microsoft requiring a separate server and client. This is true but what they fail to mention is that their own group chat requires a separate database to function, which means you will require a separate server if you don’t already support PostgreSQL. From the Cisco CUCM 8.0 SRND:

“Persistent group chat requires an external database to store chat rooms and conversations. The only external database supported is PostgreSQL (see http://www.postgresql.org/). “

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/srnd/8x/presence.html

Huh.

Next is my favorite. They go to great lengths to explain that they do not require additional servers in the DMZ. Hmmm, this is true in the sense you do not need a “server” as such but what other equipment, I wonder. From the SRND:

“ Inter-domain federation requires two explicit DNS domains to be configured, as well as a security appliance (Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance) in the DMZ to terminate federated connections with the enterprise.”

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/srnd/8x/presence.html

So no, you don’t require a server, what you require is proprietary hardware made by Cisco, an ASA (Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance). This is true whether you are federating with external organizations like Google Talk or internally federating with your own OCS deployment.

So two sentences, two questionable points. This is one paragraph that I believe brings the whole document into question because its hides facts about their own solution.

My Opinion

I see nothing wrong with companies going at it, and can understand Cisco forming the information about Microsoft in this document to make their own UC story look better (however flaky that may be). What makes me confused is that rather than use the facts about Cisco UC to make their own proposition look better they omit facts about their own solution to beef it up even more. There is some very clever use of wording in this document that if this is what it takes to make you look better, then maybe it shouldn’t have been released to begin with.

There is no denying that Cisco are good at marketing, but are they marketing fact or fiction?

Comments welcomed.

VoIPNorm

Communications Server 14 Roles Based Access Control

Doing demo blog posts are some what difficult without having to post every single screenshot, but I am going to have a go anyway. This is another popular request from customers in regards to getting better system control for Communication's Server. How do I let the correct Administrator get access to the correct configuration so they can do their job?

In CS 14 this has been solved using Roles Based Access Control similar to that used in Exchange and other Microsoft platforms.

 

As you can see in screen shot above I am adding my test user to the security group named CSVoiceAdministrators (all the new Admin roles begin with CS in the beta which makes it easy to find them).

Once this has taken effect in Active Directory the Voice Admin will have limited access to only voice configuration in CS 14 as shown in the screenshot below. This is both for the Web Admin interface and PowerShell commands.

Of course these screen scraps are all of the early beta so the RTM look my be somewhat different but you get the idea.

VoIPNorm

End User Tip: Adding Telephone Contacts to Communicator 2007 R2

This is really a pretty simple tip but very handy at times. I guess it’s the equivalent of adding a speed dial to a telephone.

Type a phone number in the Search box, and then drag the number from the Search Results box into a group in your Contact List.

See, simple.

Another nice thing about this feature is you can start a conference call with these numbers when you place them in a group by right mouse click on the group and selecting start a conference call.

You would be surprised at just how many people don’t know you can do this.

VoIPNorm

OCS 2007 R2 Monitoring Server Custom Query

A common question I always get is around custom queries for the Monitoring Server. The most requested is for used voice minutes by users. I thought I would post the query below in hope of saving it some where handy and giving others the chance to try it out. The query should produce a report that looks like this: Callee,Caller,StartTime,EndTime,Length

select

    convert (varchar(10), a.SessionIdTime - 0.125,101)  as 'Start Date',

    convert (varchar(10), a.SessionIdTime - 0.125,108)  as 'Start Time',

    convert (varchar(10), d.SessionEndTime - 0.125,101)  as 'End Date',

    convert (varchar(10), d.SessionEndTime - 0.125,108)  as 'End Time',

   

    convert(varchar(10),d.SessionEndTime -      a.SessionIdTime,108) as 'Time',

       b.PhoneUri as 'From N.',

      f.UserUri  as 'From Uri',

       c.PhoneUri as 'To N.',

      g.UserUri  as 'To Uri'

from

   VoipDetails a inner join

      SessionDetails d on d.SessionIdTime = a.SessionIdTime inner join

      Phones b on a.FromNumberId = b.PhoneId inner join

      Phones c on a.ConnectedNumberId = c.PhoneId left join

    Users f on d.User1Id = f.UserId left join

     Users g on d.User2Id = g.UserId

                                  

WHERE

   d.SessionEndTime - a.SessionIdTime is not null

      ORDER BY

      a.SessionIdTime DESC

 

Let me know if you have any other custom queries you would like to share. I am only to happy to post or talk about them. Thanks to Mike D for the info above.

VoIPNorm