Step 1: Planning and Offline Staging

Step 1 Planning and Offline Staging

Before building a configuration for a Cisco IPC Express system, you should note the parameters of the configuration you want to put in place. This includes such information as the names of the employees in your office, the extension numbering scheme you want to use, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) numbers your office has assigned, where PSTN calls should be routed, what type of phone each employee and room will have, what the IP addressing of your office is, and where the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server is located.

You can proceed from here in two ways, depending on whether you have the equipment ready in your office or lab:

• If you have already ordered the equipment and it has been delivered, or if you are reusing existing routers and IP phones, move on to Step 2, Basic Router Setup.
• If you have no equipment readily available, but you want to start building a configuration for staging purposes, read about offline staging in this section before moving on. The rest of this chapter cannot be executed without access to the equipment.

A Cisco CME Installation Configuration Tool (ICT) is an offline HTML tool available as a shareware application provided for Cisco Partners and Resellers. You can download the tool from the Cisco.com software center for Cisco CME, and use it to set up the basic telephony-service, IP phone, and voice mail configuration for all Cisco CME supported platforms.

You fill in basic fields about the system's desired configuration and scan in the phones' Media Access Control (MAC) addresses (if they are available). The tool output provides the router configuration (command-line interface [CLI]) as well as the Cisco UE configuration, which you can cut and paste into the equipment when that arrives.

Bring up a Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) browser with the expresso.htm file. Note that expresso.htm is the only file that serves as an entrance to the tool. Figure 15-2 shows this tool's main screen, where you enter the number of phones, the IP addressing, whether you have voice mail, and, if so, the pilot numbers for AA and voice mail.

Figure 15-2. Cisco CME ICT System Parameters

Click the Phone Parameters tab on the left panel to go to the next screen, shown in Figure 15-3, where you can enter or scan in the phones' MAC addresses. Using a barcode scanner is an effective method to add phones to a configuration with the ICT tool. The Flic scanner from http://www.flicscanner.com has been tested with the ICT tool.

Figure 15-3. Cisco CME ICT Phone Parameters

Click the show cli button on the left panel after filling in the phone parameters to generate both the Cisco CME and Cisco UE CLI configurations for the given parameters. This is a flat text file that you can cut and paste into a document and ultimately into the console or a Telnet session into the router CLI to enter the configuration into the system.

Step 2 Basic Router Setup