Many enterprises are evaluating cloud calling capabilities. And while a trial or proof of concept might give you a quick preview of the technology and options, there are often questions that remain: How will I roll this out to dozens or hundreds of sites? What will my timeline and budget allow for? How will the existing system or systems we already have in place integrate and allow for cross-organization dialing and interaction before my migration is complete?

Cisco has had Webex Edge Audio for Expressway for some time now. The concept behind Edge Audio is to provide an alternate path for Webex audio calls, diverting them from potentially overtaxed public switched telephone network (PSTN) connections to the internet. Now, Cisco provides an additional method to take advantage of Edge Audio via the Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE).

Edge Audio for CUBE was released for Webex in Q3 2020. It is an audio solution where Webex calls originating within your enterprise route from your Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM)/PBX to CUBE, over the internet, and into the Webex cloud. Similarly, callbacks initiated by Webex users are routed from the Webex Cloud, traverse the internet, leverage CUBE infrastructure, and are delivered onto your CUCM/PBX for on-net routing. This can greatly reduce PSTN loads and expenses, offloading that traffic to leverage internet bandwidth instead.

Big changes are upon us when it comes to Cisco licensing. On Jan. 23, 2021, everything changes with Cisco Unified Communications Manager licenses. For some organizations, this will be a moment to celebrate, given the detailed complexity of Cisco’s reporting. Who hasn’t struggled at times to figure out what your organization owns, what’s covered and whether or not that’s reflected in the Cisco report?

You can say goodbye to perpetual license purchases and multiyear support contract renewals. No more deciphering what type of license you need based on the phone model you plan to buy. No more reviewing your Prime License Manager to see if you even need licenses. No more wading through the PLM output. Cisco has finally simplified its license consumption model.

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.

With demand for businesses to consume collaboration services in the cloud at an all-time high right now, CDW has added the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud (UCM Cloud) solution to its Managed Collaboration Anywhere (MCA) portfolio. This portfolio now includes managed collaboration solutions covering the complete Cisco Hosted and Cloud Calling portfolio of Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), Cisco UCM Cloud and Cisco Webex Calling. Cisco is currently providing collaboration solutions that deliver enterprise-grade service to more than 100 million devices.

The end users of many on-premises and hosted Cisco Unified Communication customers have never been able to communicate natively from their Cisco Jabber clients to their third-party business partners who use Microsoft’s Lync or Skype for Business. It’s as if they were on opposite sides of a river with no “bridge” to cross, leaving them…