The Howerter Blog

This year I started my first big project at work. It was decided to convert our old PBX to Cisco IP telephony. Over the last couple of years, we have been slowly converting all of our remote offices to centralized Cisco IP telephony. Those were easy projects due to the users not knowing anything different. The Cisco IP telephony solution is pretty user friendly, but we all know that users don’t like change. So, I started the daunghting task of making the new phone system as much like the old system as possible. I found it difficult to start on a task this big. The current phone system had been up for 16 years. In 16 years, there were a lot of customizations performed that I had to figure out. Of course, there was no way to get them all, but I did my best. It seemed like every week, I would find something that I had forgotten.

Since I started this job in 2005, I had been taking notes on what would need to be done for this conversion. This served as a decent starting place. First thing up was the infrastructure. Our network infrastructure was mostly configured for IP telephony already, due to our remote offices. We had purchased PoE switches and replaced every non-PoE switch in the main campus. QoS was configured on every switch port and every router interface. We decided that we wanted some features that were included in the newest version of Cisco Communication Manager (CallManager). Since I had upgraded to a version of CallManger that Cisco was pushing (aparentley to early), there was no upgrade path to the newest version. This means there was no upgrade program to copy all my settings and install them on the new system. This meant I had to do this manually, which took me about a week. This was definitely not a fun task, but it was one that had to be done. After this was complete, we moved on to rolling out the phones to users…