Cisco Communications Manager 9.0 Joins the 21st Century with Native Call Queuing, Paging

Those who know me know I am the biggest Cisco fanboy going. If they farted i'd probably explain how Cisco Cleanair technology helps ensure that wireless traffic is not affected by their farts.

But even I cannot fathom or accept the terribly long time it took them to introduce native paging and call queuing to CUCM, especially when you consider CME has had both of these features for quite a while now.


However! That Day has finally come!

Let's chat about what you can accomplish with this, this blog post won't go through how to configure but we will chat about what you can do with them

Paging

Paging in CUCM 9.0 requires you to deploy a separate virtual machine called SingleWire Informacast, which is a third party program for paging that has been available for CUCM seperately for quite some time now. The fact that you have to deploy another virtual machine just for paging is somewhat annoying.

Singlewire can do all sorts of funky things including sending messages with pictures, sending text with pictures to phones, live broadcast, ad-hoc broadcasts scheduled broadcasts and much more. However if you want it to be "Free" with CUCM you can only use the basic version, which allows live broadcasting to up to 50 phones in a group. You can try a 60 day trial of the advanced version when you install Singlewire, to be honest don't give your real email address: they seem to love spamming me after I asked to try the advanced version.


Native Queuing

The feature we have all been waiting for!



The screenshot above should give you an example of the kind of features we have available.

A Music on hold source is selected for your call queue, if all your line group members in your hunt group are busy, the call hold music is played, you can specify a maximum number of calls and have overflows such as:

• Overflow no answer
• Overflow max wait
• Overflow no agents 

This is much better than what i was expecting they would give you: I suspected that the amount of options available would be somewhat limited, but happily I was proven incorrect. all of the above is just found under your standard Hunt Pilot.

You can also see from the top page that for all hunt groups (not just this one) they have finally given you the option of using the line group members forward settings! This often caused problems so is great to see the option finally available.

You can even specify that a user should be logged out of the hunt group if they fail to answer. (Be sure to assign the user the HLOG Softkey if your going to do this though.)

You can even now setup new music on hold sources with periodic messages:




 As you can see from the announcement settings at the bottom, you can specify seperate MOH for the initial announcement, and have periodic announcements at predetermined intervals.


Conclusion
Both these features are a long time coming, while paging is a little disappointing as a separate application and virtual machine, the queuing functionality makes up for it: 90 percent of the functionality that most smaller, helpdesk based contact centers will require is adequately covered with this functionality.