CallManager 4 to Communications Manager 6 training notes, day 1

The three-day course that Doug and I are attending is on upgrading from CM 4 to 6 and becoming familiar with version 6, including understanding some of the new features and noting some of the changes in existing features.

• Communications Manager 6.x is stable (comparable to 4.1.3; contrast with 5.x). Statement based on qualititative data (customer discussion in users groups, at training classes).


• 6.x - lots of SIP support. SIP on local endpoints "sucks" (says the class instructor, who is not a Cisco employee) - not because of CM's support of it but because of limitations of SIP. SCCP is a high quality protocol for local endpoints. Use SIP for remote/soft clients.


• Operating system is Linux based on RedHat distro; database is IBM Informix.


• Appliance model restricts access to filesystem and database. My reaction is to want to fight against this but can see the benefits of closing this up. Access to database for CDR: no ODBC. Can push out the CDR records to an external server on a regular interval. (CSV)


• Realtime Monitoring Tool (RTMT) is improved and is now a primary way of accessing many data/statistics of CM.


• "Workspace Licensing" - the Standard offering contains most of the PSU per-user needs including IP phone, voice mail (Unity voice-mail-only), user control of devices, plus softphone (IP communicator) which we are becoming more interested in. IP contact center agents would still need to be licensed individually.

The actual upgrade process is mostly automated using provided upgrade tools. Some files need to be copied manually from the 4.x installation. Upgrading CM itself is not too bad. The devil is in the supporting applications, namely Unity and CRS (IP contact center and IVR). Unity 5 supports both CallManager 4.x and 6.x and so can be upgraded prior to CM. CRS 3.5.4 is not supported with CM 6.x. The upgrade path here would have to be CRS to version 4, then upgrade CallManager and CRS immediately afterward to the version that works with CM6. We felt bad for others in the class who had a large suite of Cisco IP telephony apps hooked into Call Manager.