[Asterisk-Users] Cisco Call Manager & Asterisk for Voicemail

[Paul Davidson]

Not to discourage you- but getting CCM and * to play well together
with H.323 is beastly.

MWI, following Shaun's instructions, *SHOULD* work just fine- I
suspect you're running into the issue I had for a long time- CCM calls
to * work fine- but * can't call CCM.  I did eventually make it work-
but only with chan_h323, and CVS HEAD- no stable branch works yet.  I
believe 1.2 will solve this- but don't even bother before CVS HEAD of
about a month ago.  chan_oh323 worked marginally better- but still
didn't give me a functional way to call back from * to CCM.

I think there's a basic fear of chan_h323 out there- lots of people
trying asterisk-oh323 on the perception that it's somehow simpler-
I've found absolutely no difference in pain configuring it from
chan_h323- and the philosophy behind chan_h323 from a programmatic
standpoint, I believe, is stronger (I'm not trying to start a war
here, this is MY perception- I won't yell at you if you disagree with
me).  Frankly, the new h323 channel driver makes no sense to me-
chan_h323 works perfectly well, I don't see any reason to invest time
and effort to make a new one work- there's nothing superior about the
technology whatsoever, and right now the feature set is anemic-
completely useless to me in a CCM integration environment.  I think it
was summed up best in a note on mantis- there's now three channel
drivers for one protocol- can someone please explain which one will be
'the one' going forward so I know where to place my resources?  h323
must be popular- sip and iax only have one active channel development
project going, sccp has two (three if you count the old branch of sccp
vs sccp2)- that makes h.323 the number one thing going, right?

Just my two cents, off topic as they may be.  Kudos to Shaun for his
paper- I'm going to take a couple of hours tonight seeing if CCM is
sending over the forwarding number in the PDU.
-pbd
On 5/26/05, Scott Herrick <scott at angvall.com> wrote:
> Well, I have my CM and my Cisco phones leaving and retrieving VM from *.
>   :-)
> The challenge now is the MWI.  Shaun's notes are great!  I discovered
> the version of H323 is not playing well with asterisk-oh323.   It looks
> like I'm going to need to gut the h323 config on my * box and start with
> a set of known working (interoperable) versions.
> 
> It looks like if the MWI are working then the * VM call handlers/auto
> attendants will also work.  Has anyone got * doing Auto Attendants for a
> Call Manager?
> 
> I'm going to read a few tutorials on H.323 and OH.323.  Back soon.
> 
> Thanks
> Scott
> 
> Paul Davidson wrote:
> 
> >>Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 16:50:02 +1000
> >>From: Shaun Ewing <sewing at gmail.com>
> >>Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Cisco Call Manager & Asterisk for
> >>        Voicemail
> >>To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> >>        <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
> >>Message-ID: <897da30e0505252350617e4ff3 at mail.gmail.com>
> >>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> >>
> >>On 5/26/05, Scott Herrick <scott at angvall.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>>BUMP
> >>>It's CM 3.3.6
> >>>
> >>>MAN that would be sweet if * could take the place of Unity!
> >>>
> >>>Anybody?
> >>>
> >>>:-)
> >>
> >>I've got it working with Callmanager 3.3(5) and Asterisk (connected
> >>with chan_oh323).
> >>
> >>Not totally integrated - one still needs to set call forwarding
> >>(busy/no answer) on each extension that needs voicemail, but MWI works
> >>and so does the messages button (eg: on 7960G) to retrieve VM.
> >>
> >>If somebody can tell me how to send a call in Callmanager to (for
> >>example) extension 27000 when 7000 is unavailable by checking the
> >>voicemail box (rather than entering an individual number for each
> >>extension), it'll be perfect.
> >>
> >>I can share my progress so far if it will be beneficial.
> >>
> >>-Shaun
> >
> >
> > You've done the hard bits.
> >
> > The bad news is that, under CCM, there's really not much in the way of
> > VM configuration.  You should set up the VM Pilot stuff to your
> > extension for the Asterisk voicemail- this allows you to click the
> > 'voicemail' box on each extension rather than keying it in- but you
> > still have to touch each extension.  You can use their automated tools
> > to make systemwide changes to all extensions- but I don't trust them
> > at all, and I don't think that would help you in this case.
> >
> > I'd love to see how you configured the MWI and how you've set your
> > dialplan- from the way it looks, you're using a different extension
> > for each mailbox.  Theoretically, there should be fields on the PDUs
> > from h.323 that show the forwarding number- that's the way Unity does
> > it- and you go into VM for the forwarding number, not for the
> > extension dialed.  I'm not sure without playing if any of the h323
> > channel drivers make the forwarding number available as a channel
> > variable- if they don't, it should be a relatively trivial patch,
> > assuming CCM sends it across (which I'm pretty sure it does- again,
> > time to set some debugs and watch the PDUs).
> >
> > -pbd
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