Regardless of the vendor, when we discuss call routing in a telephony platform we’re almost always focused on the destination of the call. Similar to how the postal service operates, when the system is delivering the call or message, we are rarely focused on who the originator is. Keeping that in mind, it doesn’t take much imagination to come up with a few scenarios where it may be beneficial to block specific numbers, or ranges of numbers from reaching your end users.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to implement a check on the calling party number (CPN) in a Cisco voice solution and keep those pesky spam calls at bay.

In order to illustrate the logic, let’s define some key components and run through a few examples.

As many of us hit the six-month mark of remote work due to COVID-19, we’ve grown accustomed to days filled with virtual meetings instead of face-to-face gatherings. Cisco has been there for this transition, helping fill the void of empty conference rooms with Webex to facilitate an easy solution for video and online meetings.

From a user perspective, this transition to a reliance on virtual meetings has not been without challenges. Have you ever been unsure if you were muted, or scrambled to locate and mute that chatty person on your participant list? Do you find yourself wishing some of those Event and Training Center features were available in Meeting Center? Do you ever feel overwhelmed because you are the only one in a meeting with host privileges to manage the call? If you are like me and answered yes to all these questions, you will be excited to hear about the new features that are included in Cisco Webex 40.9.

With many companies needing to support widespread, full-time remote work, the past few months have made it abundantly clear how important it is to have a highly effective collaboration environment. But many businesses have struggled to appropriately support employees with collaboration tools — and others have missed out on opportunities to optimize their solutions.

Recently, CDW expanded its Managed Collaboration Anywhere portfolio with the addition of Cisco Solution Support. This was done to address the most pressing needs of collaboration customers today. The real value here? Organizations not only receive proactive help by way of planning and optimizing their collaboration environments, but also 24/7 reactive support when they need to solve a problem immediately. CDW and Cisco partner to deliver this service across Cisco’s various Webex-powered solutions.

Cisco Meraki is a cloud-based IT company specializing in wireless, switching, security, enterprise mobility management and security cameras. Across all verticals, Meraki has changed the way organizations manage their networks.

Whether you have some programming experience or none, you’ll see how easy it is to build a solution with the Meraki APIs. For this blog, we’ll use Python as our programming language of choice since it is probably one of the easiest languages to learn, but any language supporting REST calls will suffice. Here are just a few of the things one can do with the Meraki API.

While software-defined networking (SDN) is no longer a brand-new technology, many organizations have been slow to change the way they approach networking inside their data centers. Although we in the IT world like to pride ourselves on innovation, the truth is that we’re often just like everybody else: resistant to change, especially when what we’re already doing seems to be working just fine.

However, SDN tools such as Cisco ACI have a number of tangible benefits — both for IT departments and for the business units they support. Here are three of the top benefits for organizations that adopt Cisco ACI in their data centers.

While we at CDW are in the business of providing IT solutions and services to our customers, behind the scenes we deal with the same operational issues that other enterprises face. Earlier this year, our leadership made the decision to close our offices and arrange for all non-essential CDW coworkers to start working remotely.

Over the course of a weekend, our Information Technology teams gained firsthand knowledge of what our customers were either already going through or soon going to be. It was a tall order to tackle the enterprise networking, storage, security, collaboration and communication needs to allow 7,100 coworkers to work from home, but our teams rose to the task. Now, we’re sharing our experience with our customers.