Cisco enterprise phone system is known as Cisco Unified Communications Manager combine with Cisco Unity Connection. I will admit I’m no expert at either of these systems, but I have worked with both Call Manager and Cisco Unity out in the real world, and I’ve had some training on them. But hey let’s learn more about them together and see what we can come up with. Cisco also has Cisco Webex calling but I’ve only had a little bit experience with that. The only other call manager I’ve been trained on but haven’t touched outside of a lab is BroadSoft which is also owned by Cisco.  I only have older versions of Call manager and Cisco Unity things might look a little dated. I would like to get new versions but maybe one day.

Cisco call manager is in a nutshell is a PBX, it is where the IP phones, softphones, users, gateways and video endpoints are configured. Call manager handles the call routing, dial plans, voicemail integration (Cisco Unity), call admission control and media resources such as your hold music. Example if you make a call to someone and they don’t answer the phone could be configured to send the call to another number or send it to voicemail.

Cisco Unity does voicemail, voicemail recording, voicemail features, message storage and well as IVR features such as your auto-attendant & call candlers for example if you call a company and they say for Sales press 1 for IT support press 2 and so on is configured in Cisco Unity.

Cisco call manager and Cisco Unity can be setup and installed on-premises in a virtual environment or on a Cisco UCS server or it can be setup in a cloud as Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud.

My voice Lab

The way I have my call manager and Cisco unity lab setup is that I have both call manager and Cisco unity installed on my Dell power edge R630server that is running VMware ESXI and I have that connected to a 2960 switch my two Cisco 7940 VOIP phones are connected to which provides the POE to the phones. To access my voice map, I have USB Ethernet adapter with the same subnet as my voice lab.

My overall goal with my lab is to setup an enterprise system where you call a number it goes to an auto-attendant and route calls to different departments, setup voicemail, call forwarding and so on my plan is to also post on here my process. I don’t think I’m going to be making big jump in building this out till after the holidays,

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