Added a User for the First Time
Today I did my first bit of serious Cisco CM 9.1 administration. I added a new user. Wasn't too hard and I wouldn’t have been able to do it unless I had been showed previously how to remove a user and set up a new phone.
The good news it that it all made sense. and I did have to figure out too much on my own. The bad news it that it took around 20 minutes to arrange all of the parts. Here are the steps I took.
- I looked for an unused extension in Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) Admin. Since I did not have an extension to recycle I copied an existing extension and made the appropriate changes in the extension entry. Select Directory Number from the Call Routing menu.
- I entered the extension as the work phone number in the user’s Open Directory entry. Those with a Microsoft backend, which is most of you, would take a similar action in Active Directory.
- Back to CUCM and I synced LDAP. The LDAP Directory option is off of the LDAP submenu which is on the System menu.
- On to editing the user. Select End User from the User Management menu. The user record was created when I forced the LDAP sync. Not much to do here but to link up his physical phone to his user record. I had created this phone record last week as a guest phone.
- Edit the physical phone record so it uses his extension and the departmental extension, and change the name of the phone. Select Phone from the Device menu.
- Now to set up Cisco Unified Client Services Framework, which is treated as a phone. The easiest way to set this up is to copy an existing CUCSF entry and then modify it with the new user’s extension and name.
- Did the same with the iPhone and Tablet devices. This person might never run Jabber on either and iPhone or Tablet, but I find it easier to set up everything at once than to have someone come to me later and ask to do the server set up. And yes, there are many other types of phones that I can set up, including Android phones.
- Back to the user record and link up this record with CUCSF, iPhone and Tablet records. I could have delayed linking up the physical phone until this step and eliminated step 4.
- Now I just have to setup the voice mail account. I log onto the voice mail server, do an LDAP sync, import the user, and set the user to use the correct template.
So a bunch a steps, but once you learn the CUCM logic it is simple enough. Most of the time I was copying and modify records, I didn’t have to set up anything from scratch, the heavy lifting was done during the system’s initial configuration. But I would love to see an interface that could make the above quicker, simpler and easier for someone without a technical background.