Cisco Unified Call Manager Training 3

[daleblizz]

Hello,

For the last 25 years I've been a Nortel PBX (and some Norstar, BCM, etc.) tech. (And for the last four years, Avaya IP Office.)

The company I'm working for has about a 130 offices and around 4,000 employees and someone at the top decided that they wanted to convert everything to Cisco. That started converting at the beginning of June.

We are a CLEC and we're using eSIP trunks we developed ourselves. We have a pretty sharp IT department that has a couple dozen, or so, experienced Cisco techs. Since our main business is wholesaling bandwidth, and a lot of that works on Cisco equipment, they can handle the router side of things.

I work in the internal voice department. There's five of us and we will be administering all but three of the 130 Cisco sites remotely. We had a one week crash course on CUCM and whatever the Cisco voicemail is called, taught by CDW techs (engineers) and are currently "attempting" to take care of the 2000 employees who have already been cut over, with the other 2000 to be completed by about the beginning of October. (We're not completely on our our own yet, the CDW engineer has been answering questions for us.) But that's set to end in October.

Now our managers have come to us with Cisco training credits and gave us a week to come up with what Cisco courses we would like/need to take.

Sorry for the long introduction, but I have no idea how to come up with what training I need.

When I went to Cisco's site, they seem to be driven toward getting people certified and not necessarily taking courses designed to keep a system running. I could be wrong on that -- I'm just not sure what I'm looking for. (Certification is fine in the long run, but I really don't see that happening before October.)

The IT department is keeping the routers and switches servers running and patched and we're doing the rest.

Any suggestions on what training to go with would be appreciated.

Thank you.
Dale

 

[madwok]

Dale,

I was on the same boat and went with CCNA , CCNA Voice path .
I liked the CBT Nugget series as I did not have much time to attend class while maintaining over 100 BCM's, Avaya Definity, IPO's combo.

Cheers,

 

[daleblizz]

Thanks "madwok

 

[tdmneil]

Same thing here.. ISDX/Realitis and Norstar technician for years, then sent on a 2 week CIPT part 1 and 2 course at global knowledge which was a total disaster as it was far too rushed. Then after that I was supposed to be CUCM 6.0 trained and expected to look after some pretty big clustered CUCMs.. It was pretty soul destroying. In the end I managed to take a step back and do this route: CCNA, CCNA Voice, then CVOICE, CIPT 1 and 2. I could have done QOS as well and taken the CCVP exam but I was pretty fried by then. I also managed to set up a CCME lab and went from there. The best thing I found was as much hands on experience is the best way to pick it up. In the end after 2/3 years, the company I worked for ditched cisco and went with Mitel, which for me coming from a TDM background is so much easier to configure with minimal cli config and so much more flexibility. Personally I hated working with CUCM and I'm pretty glad I'm out of it..... But that's just my opinion - cisco is pretty much the biggest PBX vendor in the World now, so they must be doing something right!

 

[madwok]

Dale,

For hand on & practices, I have a 2811 with AIM CUE for CME and use VMWare for CUCM7 . As you know , you will need couple FXO cards stuffed to the 28xx ( or whatever gateway ) and you can play to your heart content . IMHO, nothing beat break & fix it as I came from old school.

For book, I constanly use :

1) Configuring Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Unity Connection - 2 nd edition - David Bateman
2) CCNA Voice - Official Exam Certification Guide - Jeremy Cioara . Cavanaugh, Krake
3) Cisco IP Communication Express - Au, Choi, Haridas ...
4) CCNA - Todd Lammle

CBT Nuggets, Train Signal on CCENT, CCNA , Voice is pretty decent
The CCNA path has built me a good foundation in attacking any VOIP platform whether it is Cisco, Avaya, NORTEL, NEC , Asterick & what not.

Have fun in your new adventure ))

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

If you have access to Global Knowledge Training courses I would recommend starting with CIPT-1 and CIPT-2, Don't waste your money on their ACUCW-1 & -2 courses unless you need only basic system admin skills (moves, adds & changes). The ACUCW courses are both subsets of the CIPT courses. These courses are each 1 week in length and your CLCs (Cisco Learning Credits) can be used to pay for them.


Original MUG/NAMU Charter Member

 

[daleblizz]

@tdmneil
"But that's just my opinion - cisco is pretty much the biggest PBX vendor in the World now, so they must be doing something right!"

Maybe, but I'm hearing a constant stream of complaints from the offices we cut over from Nortel and Avaya to Cisco, that the Cisco doesn't have the features they were used to using. Many offices are having problems with their analog fax lines and the conference bridges from the Nortel PBXs just went away without anything to replace them on the Cisco.

Thanks for your suggestions. I worked for one company that sold Mitel years ago, but they wouldn't let me near them. (They hired me to work on their customer's Nortel switches.)

@madwok
Thanks again. Our company does have a CBT Nuggets account, so I'll see what I can dig up there. And I've copied the book titles down to see if I can get them.

Most of the IT guys show pictures of their home Cisco labs, like it's their new baby, and they're pretty sharp, so I guess that does work. I worked with Nortel PBXs for about three years before I went to any training them. I felt sorry for the guys who came into the classes cold.

@MitelInMyBlood
Originally we were just going to do moves, adds and changes and let the IT department handle everything else. Now they're wondering why we don't have command line training are aren't able to troubleshoot. Everyone is learning.

My manager was pretty amazed when he found how much longer it takes to "program" a phone on Cisco than it did on Nortel or Avaya. (We're building five devices for every user, so it's a little like comparing apples to oranges.)

Although, I can't for the life of me figure out why when you "copy" a device, you still have so many fields to fill in. I guess Cisco copy means something different than Nortel copy.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm used to going to Global Knowledge for Nortel courses and didn't realize that Cisco credits applied there. That should make the course selections easier.

It's different world for me right now, but I guess Nortel programming looks pretty strange to someone who hasn't done it before too.

Thanks again, everyone.

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

dalebliz:

I've been on Mitel since 1986 so I feel your pain
The Cisco phones are feature-rich but are not plug & play, feature-for-feature replacements for any of your legacy phone systems & as you've discovered, programming the Cisco's give new meaning to the word tedium. Users accustomed to having a plethora of available line keys for personal speed dials, etc. are going to have to move to something like CUP-C, integrate the phone & PC together and use click-to-call. Things like DISA, as we knew it, is gone, replaced with something more secure (MVA) that the end user hates.

Original MUG/NAMU Charter Member

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

The CIPT-1&2 courses are both severely compressed - there's a whole lot there to digest and very little time in which to do it. However, many Global Knowledge instructors are often willing to stay late after class, but you need buy-in from other students.

CIPT1 and 2 should probably also be taken back-to-back if you can swing it. As I said above the ACUCW-1 and 2 courses are actually subsets of CIPT 1 & 2, and several students from a recent CIPT-1 course had been to ACUCW1 & 2 before attempting CIPT-1 and felt that helped them better grasp the CIPT1 course material. CIPT1 should probably be a 2 week course

After CIPT 1 you may get more out of attending CVOICE as this gets you more into working on the voice gateways.

So in progressing levels of complexity:
ACUCW1
ACUCW2
CIPT1
CIPT2 and/or CVOICE
IUC will take you through Unity Connection

Original MUG/NAMU Charter Member

 

[daleblizz]

Thanks again, "MitelInMyBlood":

Work wants us to start with the basic stuff first. So I guess they're sending me to ICND1. I'll print this out for the future.