Phone inventory tracking - Import using BAT

[mcwxmcw]

My office is in the process of setting up CallManger for about 500 phones. Not that big of an installation, but I don't want to manually enter all of these MAC addresses. What I'd like to do is use BAT in conjunction with some sort of Bar Code reader. Does anyone have a bar code reader and software they would recomend?

I guess I could use TAPS instead of BAT, but I'm not that familiar with it.

~Matt
My related blogs...

http://telecomtoday.blogspot.com/

http://thegadgetguys.blogspot.com/

 

[HmmG3]

We had some scanners like the following laying around and tried them out:

http://www.currentdirections.com/hardware/intermec/1551e.html

It plugs inline with the keyboard. So when you scan a MAC address on the box, the scanner would "type" the address into the BAT spreadsheet.

However, there is a drawback to this if you plan to deploy lots of phones at once. In our case, we now had over 80 boxes that had to go to specific locations. This can be a pain to keep track of. The next day we ended up having somebody at a PC enter the MACs manually for each phone during deployment. It ended up being faster.

You might want to look into TAPs. Coming from an Avaya background, it seems to be the most efficient method of deployment.

 

[iptuser]

TAPS is easier


Install TAPS via the Plugins
Install CRA 3.5 for the IVR prompts
Configure TAPS and create a new IVR script called TAPS
Configure a DN for the TAPS access
Configure a Device group with a CCS for TAPS only

Then BAT install the real configuration of the final handset you want to go live with

Configure Auto Reg. on the CCM

Plug all the handsets in - check first in the TFTP log in per 1hr in case it is too small

All the phones should now register as Auto Reg, then go around and dial the TAPS DN you created and follow the instructions- it ask you for the real DN so it downloads that info. you provided in the orginal BATs uploads