Stupid IPCC Express

This application is so convoluted and confusing, but it is a necessary evil. This will likely be the first of many posts on how to do basic things. Of course with IPCC Express, nothing will be intuitive.

Today's lesson will be: How to make a normal agent user into a supervisor user. All instructions apply to version 4.0(5) but may be useful in other versions. The agent logs into the "Cisco Agent Desktop" using their callmanager userid and password. Not pin, password. Agents use this application to do their daily work. If they become a supervisor, they may want to feel important and log into the "Cisco Supervisor Desktop" to do supervisory things. First, you must log into the CRA/IPCC express admin page "http://yourservername/appadmin". The username is usually CRAAdmin (may be case sensitive). If you don't know your password, good luck. Ask someone who does. Maybe I'll cover password recovery in another post. Once you log in, navigate to tools->user management. Find your user/agent on the right pane, and move them to the left. Check the box that reads "supervisor" and update. Now the user is a supervisor. They need that all important "Cisco Supervisor Desktop" software now. This can be found by navigating within the CRA/IPCC Express admin page to Tools->Plug-ins and then "Cisco IPCC Express Desktop Product Suite". Download and install the "Cisco IPCC Express Supervisor Desktop" software. Once this is done, you'll want to launch the software and log in. Here is the gotcha: you log in as the same username as you would as the agent, but the password is NOT the same. The password to log in as a supervisor defaults to the same as your login id. In other words, if your agent/username is 1234, then to log in to the "Cisco Supervisor Desktop" software your password will also be 1234. Once you log in, you can change this password.

There you have it! Please post any questions or comments.

Safari for Windows

Apple Software Update ran today, and instead of telling me the usual "a new version of iTunes is available" - it said "a new update is available - Safari". What!? I vaguely remember hearing that Safari had a beta on windows, but now it is really here. I'll have to try it out. Look out, Firefox!

---UPDATE---
Safari on Windows sucks so far in my opinion. It is slow, which is my main complaint. Other issues include compatibility with my trackpad scrolling feature, and the fact that new windows pop up in new windows and not tabs. I couldn't find a way to fix these.

High Definition Telephony

A colleague and I tested a few "wideband" VoIP codecs yesterday. We tested iLBC, Cisco Wideband (aka Lin64k) and G.722. I was told that iLBC was really G.728. We tested bandwidth in kbps on all codecs as well as how it sounded to our ears.

First up, iLBC/G.728. Sounded like G.729 but maybe a tad worse. Bandwidth was about the same as G.729.

Second was Cisco Wideband, or as it showed in our IP phone's statistics Lin64k. This was uncompressed wideband audio, and the bandwidth proved that. It pulled about 256-270kbps. The upside, it sounds incredible. You can really hear crisp highs and the lows sound great too. I wish all phone conversations sounded like this.

Third and last was G.722. I could not tell the difference between this and Cisco Wideband. That is to say it also sounded incredibly good, but it uses about as much as G.711 (about 70-80kbps). If I were deploying a wideband codec, this is the clear winner due to lower bandwidth and clear and high resolution audio.

Conclusion: We also tested conferencing using these codecs, and nothing worked. You will only get this wideband audio on a 1 to 1 call within the enterprise. No conference calls, Unity voicemail doesn't support it, and certainly no outside PSTN calls. Due to this inconsistency, wideband will probably be deployed on a very limited basis. But where it is deployed, people will notice.