CUCM to WebEx Calling migration - "It's the Features!

Cisco CUCM and WebEx Calling - Almost feature parity?

To mis-quote James Carville, Bill Clintons campaign advisor, "It's the features, stupid!"

Yes indeed when contemplating CUCM to WebEx calling migration, one of my long standing concerns was always feature parity, when WebEx calling first became a Cisco offering, the feature list was.... lacking, in comparison to the robust and comprehensive list of features you could get on CUCM (Now which kind of LICENSE you had to buy to get those features is another story...)

Another killer-no-filler blog post on the Call Recording blog addresses this feature-parity directly. 

It takes a closer look at things like Hunt Groups (which often are more complicated than you might initially assume, especially when you start talking about no coverage options and different treatments for external vs internal calls), Call Queues, shared lines, Extension Mobility, and of course, Call Recording.

It is fair and correct to say: WebEx calling has come a LONG way, the vast majority of feature set required by 95% of your user base is now easily covered, and sometimes exceeded by the offerings from WebEx Calling (the call queueing functionality being a particular example, or the ability to build IVR or other call routing scripts without requiring Cisco Contact Center and all the FUN that introduces.)

As always however, there is some foot-guns to watch out for, one key take away for me was: Just because both WebEx calling and CUCM might list "hunt groups" on their feature list, does not make the knobs and dials you can fiddle with equivalent between the two platforms, and some of the features that offer very similar functionality may be invoked differently by your end users and require some mild retraining (very mild and short, think: hand out one-pager documents with little tips and tricks, or optional, 30 minute lunch demonstrations). 

Of course, one feature we all know is important and for a long time got the short end of the stick when it came to feature parity. The call recording solution in WebEx calling, while it has its own issues such as a short retention period and other problems, has at least always been a native solution to WebEx Calling (and has not required you to deploy four Windows Server Standard Virtual machines, which is what you have to do for example when using a Calabrio (also known as verint) solution.

Luckily however, Call Recording dot com exists, and this is where call-recording.com makes sense for CUCM users moving to Webex Calling: supported recordings from both platforms can stay in one dashboard for call and message playback, this kind of usability of a unified dashboard is exactly the kind of thing your compliance officers care about, and it's understandable: Which HR staffer wants to worry about searching across two disparate systems for evidence in some misconduct allegation, the job is hard enough! A single unified interface like call recording offers makes this a lot easier, oh and it does not hurt at all either that their solution transcribes all calls no matter which platform (CUCM or WebEx Calling, even Microsoft teams!) you use. it DEFINITELY does not hurt that it auto tags and shows you exactly where in a call it suspects their have been incidents of bullying for example, or financial disclosures. 

I hope this helps!