Working with Users and Names

The Cisco CME and Cisco UE configurations include various username fields. Understanding which Name field controls which aspect of your system helps you configure your Cisco IPC Express system, including voice mail, to the best benefit for your business.

Names are associated primarily with users, but also, in some specific cases, with phones. Cisco CME and Cisco UE mutually identify a user by a unique user ID field. Before discussing the various Name fields in more detail, it is necessary to understand how a Cisco IPC Express system handles user IDs.

User ID

A user ID is a tag the system uses to track and identify a user and his or her associated configuration. Cisco CME and Cisco UE use the user ID tag to coordinate configuration information about a specific user between the router's configuration (Cisco CME) and the configuration information stored on Cisco UE's local disk or Flash unit.

The user ID is a single configuration field, but it shows up in various locations in a Cisco IPC Express system configuration:

• The Configure > Phones screen as the Login Name field
• The Configure > Users screen as the User ID field
• The Voice Mail > Mailboxes screen as the Mailbox Owner (User/Group ID) field
• The ephone Username field in the router CLI

This user ID uniquely identifies each user. It cannot change after the user is defined. If it must change, the user must be deleted and reinserted into the system's configuration. You want to avoid doing this, so plan user ID assignments carefully before entering them into the system configuration.

Caution

Deleting a user also deletes his or her associated voice mailbox. The action of changing a user ID, therefore, amounts to redefining the user's mailbox and losing (deleting) all of the user's current voice mailbox contents. Clearly this is undesirable, which is why user IDs typically never change after the system is configured and your employees start using it for their daily tasks.

If a user preexists in the Cisco CME configuration before Cisco UE is installed and configured, this user ID is automatically imported from the Cisco CME configuration into the Cisco UE Initialization Wizard. (This wizard is further discussed in Chapter 13.)

Note

If the Cisco CME CLI ephone-dn username configuration is changed by using the router's CLI, and the Cisco UE GUI is then synchronized with the latest changes, a new user is created and shows up in the configuration. The mailbox associated with the old user definition cannot be moved to the new user.

 

Name Fields

You can configure various Name fields associated with a user or a phone. This information is contained in multiple fields so that you can control different aspects or features of your Cisco IPC Express system independently, because the features often serve different purposes. However, it is instructive to know which fields affect which features so that you know what part of the configuration to change to activate the feature you are interested in. The different name fields and how they are used are discussed in the following sections.

Name Display on an On-Hook Phone

A username is displayed in the top-right corner of an idle IP phone display. This name is associated with the user's extension, which appears on button 1 of that phone. The Name field shows the phone number (extension) by default, but it can be configured to show the name of the person at that phone. This field shows up in the following locations in the system configuration:

• The Extension > Description GUI screen
• The ephone-dn description configuration in the router CLI

Example 10-6 shows an ephone-dn configuration that shows Joe Blow on the display of his IP phone when the phone is idle. The phone display uses the description configuration to control the display, not the name configuration. Joe's extension is 3005. The fact that the name configuration is set to Jonathan Bloe does not affect the idle IP phone display. The name configuration affects other aspects of the system's operation, but it is not relevant to the name displayed on an idle phone.

Example 10-6. Idle IP Phone Name Display

router#show running-config
ephone-dn 5
 number 3005
 description Joe Blow 
 name Jonathan Bloe
 call-forward busy 3105
 call-forward noan 3105 timeout 10

 

Caller ID Name

When a call is ringing on an IP phone, the caller's name appears in the top-left corner of the called party's phone display. This field shows up in the following locations in the system configuration:

• The Extension > Name GUI screen
• The ephone-dn name field in the router CLI

Looking back at the configuration shown in Example 10-6, if the employee at extension 3005 calls you, you see Jonathan Bloe displayed on your ringing phone.

Extension Label

Extensions are associated with one or more buttons on your IP phone. By default, the extension number associated with each button is displayed on the idle phone console. Typically, this is your own extension on button 1 and additional extensions you monitor on higher-numbered buttons. You can configure a text string to be associated with a button. This field shows up in the following locations in the system configuration:

• The Extension > Label GUI screen
• The ephone-dn label field in the router CLI

Example 10-7 shows a configuration in which User2 has his own extension, 3002, on button 1 of his phone and extension 3050 on button 2. Extension 3002 (ephone-dn 2) has no label configured, so it shows up as 3002 on the phone display. Extension 3050 has a Customer Service label assigned, so this text string shows up next to button 2 on the phone.

Example 10-7. IP Phone Button Labels

router#show running-config
ephone-dn 2 dual-line
 number 3002
 name User2
 call-forward busy 3105
 call-forward noan 3105 timeout 10
!
ephone-dn 42
 number 3050 secondary 4445553050
 label Customer Service
 description Customer Service 
 name Cust Svc
 call-forward busy 3501
 call-forward noan 3105 timeout 10
!
ephone 2
 mac-address 0002.FD06.D959
 speed-dial 4 3100 label "AA"
 button 1:2 2:42 

 

Dial-by-Name for Subscribers

The Cisco UE AA has a dial-by-name feature in which a caller can spell the name of the user he or she wants to reach, and the system looks up the associated extension. The same feature is available when a voice mail subscriber composes (or sends) a message to another subscriber. The message addressing can be done by using the Cisco UE dial-by-name feature. The Name field for this feature shows up in the following locations in the system configuration:

• The User > First Name GUI screen
• The User > Last Name GUI screen
• The user fullname first and user fullname last fields in the Cisco UE CLI

Example 10-8 shows the Cisco UE Dial-By-Name fields for User5.

Example 10-8. Cisco UE Dial-by-Name Fields

cue#show user detail username User5
Full Name: Joey Blow
First Name: Joey 
Last Name: Blow 
Phone: 3005
Phone(E.164): 4445553005

Cisco UE's dial-by-name feature matches the Last Name field. If that field isn't unique, Cisco UE proceeds to match the First Name field in the configuration. This sequence cannot be changed or customized.

However, if the system operation desired is to have First Name and then Last Name matching, the fields in the configuration can simply be reversed. These fields are not used for any other features, so no name displays or phone displays are altered by transposing the First Name and Last Name fields underlying the dial-by-name feature.

Note

Note that the dial-by-name prompt in the system AA script continues to ask for the last name followed by the first name. This system prompt cannot be changed or customized. If you want to change the AA prompt as well, you have to write a custom AA script and record your own prompt, as covered in Chapter 9.

For example, suppose Joey (first name) Blow (last name) works for the company. In the normal configuration, dial-by-name matches Blow (the last name in the configuration) and then Joey (the first name in the configuration). If instead you want to have Joey matched first and then Blow in the dial-by-name applications, Joey has to be configured as the last name and Blow as the first name, as shown in Example 10-9.

Example 10-9. Customizing the Cisco UE Dial-by-Name Fields

cue#show user detail username User5
Full Name: Joey Blow
First Name: Blow 
Last Name: Joey 
Phone: 3005
Phone(E.164): 4445553005

 

Dial-by-Name for Nonsubscribers

Your office may have users or employees who do not need a voice mailbox but who should be available via the dial-by-name feature in the AA. If so, you can enter these employees in the Cisco UE configuration as users without mailboxes. By virtue of the user profile (and its associated extension and phone), the employees appear in the Cisco UE Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory and, therefore, are recognized by the dial-by-name feature in the AA. Note that without a mailbox defined, a user cannot have a spoken name recorded (because this configuration parameter is part of the mailbox definition). However, the names can be spelled via the dial-by-name facility and found in the database. If a spoken name does not exist, the system reads back the extension as confirmation to the caller.

Note

Users without a mailbox defined do not count against the Cisco UE license. However, the number of users allowed to be defined on the Cisco UE system is derived from the number of licensed mailboxes, and this may change over different software releases. Currently, in Cisco UE the number of users allowed to be defined on a system is set to twice the number of mailboxes specified by the license. For example, if a 12-mailbox license is installed on the Cisco UE system, a maximum of 24 user profiles can be defined in the configuration.

 

Spoken Name

When a call rings on an extension and then forwards into voice mail, the greeting may say, "Sorry. Joe Blow is unavailable," and then the caller can leave a message. If the user's spoken name is not recorded in the system, the greeting instead says, "Sorry. Extension 3005 is unavailable." The Spoken Name field shows up in the voice mailbox login as the option Spoken Name in the subscriber TUI menu. This field cannot be entered, viewed, or controlled via either the GUI or the CLI.

A subscriber can record a spoken name only if he or she has a mailbox on the Cisco UE system. Users who are accessible using the dial-by-name feature therefore might not have spoken names (because they do not necessarily have mailboxes). On the other hand, a user who has a spoken name must have a mailbox and, therefore, must have a user profile and must be accessible in the dial-by-name feature.

Dial Plan Considerations