THE STACK

In today’s business environment, one thing is certain: all companies need to get the most out of their investments. And that includes investments made in technology. What happens when the time and resources required to manage your technology precludes you from progressing and getting value from your investments?

It’s a question that many companies face, and previously, not one that was easily answered.

But to get to the answer, we need to start with the problem. And without a doubt, one of the biggest problems facing businesses I speak with is finding the time to invest in and get the most out of their Unified Communications (UC) solutions. Why? They simply don’t have the staff or the bandwidth to turn on the full functionality of these vast systems. The multiple daily tasks that need to be done in order to keep things up and running prevent their highly trained/certified resources from delivering more value from their technology investments. Sound familiar?

Your company is a Cisco Unified Communications environment and you are having issues with registering phones to your environment. You verify the configuration on the CUCM and everything seems okay, what are the possible issues preventing registration? How can I diagnose the issue?

PROBLEM

Your Cisco phone is not registering to CUCM.

In this blog post, we will explore 3 possible solutions to troubleshoot in order to identify and resolve the issue.

If you already have Expressway MRA and SIP URI dialing activated in your Cisco Unified Communications environment, then you should seriously begin to think about activating another very key feature within Expressway: Business-to-Business dialing.

This feature will bring your collaboration with your partners and customers to whole new level; allowing you to have audio and video calls with them as seamlessly as you do with your coworkers.

A big part of the configuration process for B2B calls is deploying public DNS SRV records that will allow your partners and clients to call you using your corporate domain.

Assuming you have all necessary ports on the firewall already opened.  The following will take you through the steps required to effectively configure the B2B SIP URI dialing feature within Expressway.

Our support team received a call from a customer complaining that their next generation firewall (NGFW) was intermittently blocking access to their new voting website. As we were in the process of making firewall changes inside their environment and are responsible for the management of their network they turned to us for help.

The website was a vanity domain hosted at GoDaddy that redirected users to a deep link within another website. We accessed the site and confirmed that it was working properly and sending a 301 redirect as expected, it worked properly both inside their and our environment. We reviewed the firewall logs and found no indications that traffic was blocked by any firewall or IPS. The customer insisted that there was an intermittent problem accessing the website that seemed to affect some users at random.

In case you have not yet heard: Cisco Collaboration Systems Release (CSR) v11.5 applications are now available on Cisco.com: CUCM, CUC and IM&P 11.5 and have been posted. 

One Important Note: CUCM 11.5 will no longer support the following 12+ years old phones: