Configuring Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Unity Connection: A Step-by-Step Guide (Networking Technology Series) 2nd Edition

I love this because if you are trying to help others learn about Cisco Unified Communication Manager this is a great item to use to have them read and paractice with. Came in handy many times that I wanted to configure things in the call manager.

I can only say when I need a book quickly and cheap there is nowhere else to go but AMAZON.com.They had this book available and with more of a discount than I could have gotten as a Cisco Gold Customer. I really appreciate how quickly I received the book too.

Worked

On time as it was promised

Nice book will fill your needs of knowing and configring

it's a very useful book

The book is intrinsically about the system administration of these Cisco products. It stresses that you should do a design phase prior to any actual installation. This should be as detailed as possible, to [try to] anticipate the phone behaviours and needs of the users. A key idea that needs to be kept in mind during this is that individual components of the system will fail, so redundancy needs to be built in at all levels above the cable that connects the device [ie. IP phone] to the rest of the network. The author remarks that the only real exception to redundancy is this single cable from the phone. Because a motivator for going to VoIP phones that have inline power is the reduced cabling needs. And users seem to accept as self-evident that if this cable breaks, then certainly the phone is disconnected.Chapter 2 discusses Communication Manager 3.3, where all services are turned off by default. Apparently, in earlier versions, some services were turned on, right out of the box. While the text does not say this explicitly, I suspect that this led to certain attack vectors that came in on some of those active default services. So live and learn, and Cisco is hence bolting down the services. What this means is that you, the sysadmin, needs to [or at least should] understand each service that you activate.The complexity in the book rises when you reach Chapter 4, on route plans and call flow. It increases in the next chapter, which is about implementing the equivalent of black and white lists for different devices. If you temporarily imagine each device to be not a phone but, say, a browser with Internet access, then the concepts of those lists are easy to grasp. But when it comes to phone devices, the implementation of the lists is rather intricate.CUC and Unity also can handle the processing of incoming calls, as evidenced in Chapter 9. Here, if you have a background in Interactive Voice Response systems, you can see similarities to what Cisco offers. But a major difference is that, as far as I can discern, speech recognition is used nowhere here. The incoming caller chooses from various options by pressing buttons.

With Cisco Unified Communications solutions (namely Unified Communications Manager and the Unity family of products) reaching the version 8 milestone in their lifecycle, there has been a lot of information published on the subject already. I've probably got a dozen or more Cisco Press books covering these topics on my own bookcase within close reach. But this one is different. It's not just a `reference guide' that is full of information but requires you to jump around to find what you're looking for. It's not a certification study guide covering only theory and leaving the practical knowledge behind - this title covers both, and does it well. It is my current `go-to' title of choice. Let me talk about what sets this book apart from the rest.Configuring Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Unity Connection: A Step-by-Step Guide does a good job at accomplishing what Bateman has set out to do; create a configuration guide in a step-by-step, building-block approach. Walking you through each new topic, building on knowledge you have already gained from previous topics, you will walk away from this title having a solid foundation of what you need to know to successfully implement a Cisco Unified Communications solution and keep it running. He doesn't take you through the installation process itself, but covers just about everything else beyond that step necessary from a configuration standpoint when setting up a new system, as well as the daily administration activities you'll be required to perform.This is clearly not meant to be a certification guide, but I would recommend it to the network administrator new to Cisco Unified Communications and certification candidate alike; both audiences will benefit greatly from the exercises and explanations presented in this book.The author calls it `The definitive, up-to-date guide to planning, configuring, and administering Cisco call processing and voice messaging'.... I'll buy that. I would rate this book a solid 4 out of 5. I would have liked to have seen a bonus CD accompanying the title with multimedia content (I'm thinking video walkthroughs of some of the more involved processes, maybe some lecture content on the more complex theory topics); maybe in the third edition (hint, hint, nudge, nudge).