YACFCMEHCUCMD or Yet Another Cool Feature CME has CUCM does not

HI Guys

(People visiting from Aggregators please visit: http://www.ccierants.com/2011/11/yacfcmehcucmd-or-yet-another-cool.html)

Introducing Unlocked MeetMe Conferences.

Like my very Long acronym in the title? Yes it's time for yet another great feature that CCME has that CUCM does not, the list just keeps getting longer and longer, I am a Cisco fan boy through and through but it boggles my mind that CME gets features that CUCM does not, CUCM is meant to be the flagship.

Plus if you believe the rumors, the plan is to remove CUE running on modules and instead have SRE running Unity Connection, so if that is there plan long term for unity connection, you have to wonder if the next logical step is to do the same for CUCM (you can already do it too, CUCM will run on SRE modules as far as I know)

So anyway, on to the feature

So we all know and love Meet me conference on CCME and CUCM i assume, it is a pretty funky feature where you can setup a conference by pressing the meetme button, dialling the number of the conference 'Room" and then having your participants dial the meeting number (either externally or internally) This means you as the conference organiser don't have to dial everyone in, you can just say

Ring me at 5:00pm on this number to join the conference, deal with it.

Your participants then just dial in, pretty simple and effective hey.

But it has a few small limitations, for some it is a hassle to have to press the meetme soft key, they forget to do it. To me though one of the main limitations is that you actually have to be infront of a Cisco Handset in order to start the conference off, what if you want a conference but your away from your desk when the conference starts, maybe an important customer wants to talk business so you hop into your car to go see him before realising, DAMN, i forgot about my conference, and i can't even start the conference now because I am on the road.

Well, conference meetme unlocked is what your after in this situation.

With Conference Meetme unlocked, you can have a meetme number that is always ready to go, simply dial in and the conference starts, even if your the first one to start the conference!

It is super easy to configure as well, here is a quick example configuration:


ephone-dn 6 octo-line
number 3000
conference meetme unlocked
!

Easy as that guys, just that simple keyword at the end of conference meetme "unlocked" and walla your ready to go.

Let's use a show command to get a bit more info:

PeterCCIE18371#show ephone-dn conference meetme
type active inactive numbers
=======================================
Meetme 1 7 3000
DN tags: 6
All DN tags unlocked.


now for those of you who have never even setup a normal meet me conference I have included all my configuration for you just to give you a bit more to work with :)

Just quickly, 10.0.0.3 is my local CCME, (which is Fa0/1 IP address)

sccp local FastEthernet0/1
sccp ccm 10.0.0.3 identifier 1 version 7.0
sccp
sccp ccm group 1
associate ccm 1 priority 1
associate profile 1 register CONFHQ
dspfarm profile 1 conference
codec g711ulaw
codec g711alaw
codec g729ar8
codec g729abr8
codec g729r8
codec g729br8
maximum sessions 1
associate application SCCP
telephony-service
sdspfarm units 1
sdspfarm tag 1 CONFHQ
conference hardware
ephone-dn 6 octo-line
number 3000
conference meetme unlocked
!

Of course you must be careful from a security perspective to ensure that only people within your organization can dial this number, this can be accomplished with COR's (incoming COR's and Outgoing COR"S) I have even seen some smart cookies out there on internet land who have setup AA scripts so there meet me's have a PIN!

I hope this helps someone out there!