CUCM Express and Unity Express Administrator Interfaces

Cisco Unified Communications Manager Web Interface

Now there is some management that you might need to do on your routers, and Cisco provides the CCP or Cisco Configuration Professional. That allows you to manage routing, firewall creation, Intrusion Prevention Systems, VPN connections, WAN and LAN configuration, and again it’s all through a GUI based wizard. It’s almost like if you’re used to Security Device Manager, very similar in concept, but not in look and feel, I don’t think anyway. But in order to get in and like configure your user accounts to gain access to your information, you have to create a user account with a privileged level of 15, this is full access to the router by the way and you’d go out to the routers, a global configuration mode and say username privilege 15 and then you’d say secret 0 password that would create the account. Well first you need to put in the username where I specified name. That would create the account and give the appropriate privilege level to now allow you to start to do the configuration. You also want to make sure that you can configure your router interfaces. And I want you to know some of the basics of setting up an interface, you need to get into that interface and you’d need to assign it an IP address and the subnet mask and bring it up. To do that you say no shutdown, that would create or setup your router’s interface. Now I mentioned that we also need to make sure that we can gain access to http on our devices, so to configure the router as an http server you type in ip http server. Now remember I said with Communications Manager Express you could do http or https if you wanted to be secure, you use ip http secure-server. That command will turn on https and if you want to enable Local Authentication on that device then you would want to use ip http authentication local and then you create the account. We also might want to make sure that we have VTY lines that give us access with our Local Authentication credentials, which is created. We can go in and say okay line vty 0-4 login local and we can say the transport mechanism we want to use, whether it’s transport input telnet ssh for secure connection and then we go ahead and exit there. So few commands that we need to issue out of the command-line to get things up and running.

Access the CUCM Express Web Interface

Now to access the Communications Manager Express, we type in http or https, the IP address in ccme that gives you access. And before we’ve done that we had to have created accounts, we have had to turn on http on the router. There’s a lot behind the scenes that you had to setup in order to get into this Graphical User Interface, but when we created the account and turned on the appropriate protocols then we can go in and start to configure our phones, our ephones or directory numbers, we can setup voice mail, we can do basic backup and restore and saving and reloading of the router and changes, and we can run various reports.

Access the CUCM Express CLI

With the Communications Manager Express product, I want to say that there is probably a lot of things that you’re probably going to feel more comfortable with doing on the Command-Line Interface such as setting up ephones, which is your IP phones and assigning directory numbers or ephone-dns to those phones. There are also a lot of show commands out there that you can use. Really you can do almost everything in the command-line interface that you can do in the GUI interface, so depending upon where you want to do this. But to get into the Communications Manager Express settings you go into I call it a global configuration mode called telephony-service. If you type that command and now you are in the telephony communication side of things and this is where you do a lot of your configuration of your phones and features that you want to turn on.

Access the Cisco Unity Express Web Interface

Now to access Unity Express’s web pages, again we would need to setup http or https, setup the account and then we would specify the IP address and Admin. That’s what would get us into that Graphical User Interface. And from the Unity Express Administrative page this is where you can configure your users, your privileges, your system prompts and scripts that you need for voice mail, your mailboxes, your backing up, your reports, and lots of different menu options in here. Now unlike Communications Manager Express you might feel more comfortable creating phones in the command-line, here I’d want to stay in the GUI. Here it’s a lot easier in the Graphical User Interface to add your device or add your mailboxes. But here’s another big savings, if you create your Communications Manager Express environment first, you can import the users from Communications Manager Express into your voice mail system tie them to the phones and the mailboxes and you save yourself a ton of work initially. So that is the nice thing about some of these applications is because they tie together so easily, they save us some typing.

Access the Cisco Unity Express CLI

With Unity Express we can get to the Command-Line. What we need to do is use the service-module internal-Service-Module command and we’ll specify the slot and the unit and then say session. This command opens up our back-to-back terminal connection across our backplane to that Unity Express Module.

Router#service-module internal-Service-Module 0/0 session

Trying 172.16.1.5, 2194 … Open

CUE#username jdoe create
CUE#username jdoe password cisco
CUE#username jdoe group Administrators
CUE#exit

Session closed

Router#

From here, we can do things like reload, reset, we can even do a shutdown, and display the status of our Unity Express Module, because they may come a time unfortunately that we might need to use these commands to get out to the command line because we can’t get to the Graphical User Interface, especially the reload and reset options they might come in handy when we are trying to get that Unity Express Module to restart or reboot. Especially if we don’t want to reboot the whole router. I don’t advice that, I advise you to use these Command-Line Interface commands to restart and reload the device before I would go as drastic as shutting off that router.

Now this Cisco Unity Express environment can be managed, as long as it’s a proper version, with our Cisco Configuration Professional Tool. We got to make sure though that the supported version of Cisco Unity Express is installed. How do I find that out? Cisco’s website – http://tools.cisco.com/ITDIT/CFN/ for the feature navigator. This will help you figure out if your version of Unity Express can be managed why that with this Cisco Configuration Professional, but it just basically gives you easy access to your users and mailboxes and all of the System Administrative Tasks that you might need to do.

Comparing the Interfaces

With Cisco Unity Express you probably want to use the GUI, the Graphical User Interface that either came with it or the Cisco Configuration Professional.

Functionality CCP GUI CLI
Administrator Know-How Few More Plenty
User Administration Basic Nearly Complete Nearly Complete
System Administration Basic Nearly Complete Nearly Complete
Upgrade Tasks X X
System Troubleshooting Basic Complete

Now I mentioned that full feature functionality, you’re going to eventually need to get out to the Command-Line Interface, but to get up and running the GUI is great and you can see a side-by-side comparison of first of all Administrative experience goes from minimal up to plenty, to the types of features and troubleshooting that you can do depending upon which tool you’re running.

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