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Cisco IP Telephony: Planning, Design, Implementation, Operation, and Optimization Review by Professor Donald Mitchell
Practical Advice for Converting to IP Telephony
Switching to IP Telephony is one of those decisions that the CEO finds easy to make. Costs decline quite a lot and quality of performance is promised to be acceptable.
Then the problem of implementation is turned over to those who will need to plan, design, implement, operate and troubleshoot the system. That lucky engineer will find that the Cisco solution is still a fairly limited one technically that requires you to make the right decisions . . . or you can end up with a system that doesn't live up to the promise that was made to the CEO. And you can guess who will get the blame for that.
I read a fair number of the Cisco networking books, and I found this one to be more candid, detailed and helpful than anyone one I have seen.
The authors wrote this book to explain what their clients had been having trouble with in implementing the first Cisco IP telephony solutions. That perspective allows you to avoid mistakes others have made.
Those mistakes can come in two areas: the system working or not; and the system's solution fitting the company's needs well or not.
I'm not an engineer, but I found the book to be easy to understand and interesting to read. For an engineer, much of the technical parts of this book will seem like old hat, I'm sure. But the tables are sure to save lots of time and mistakes by simply summarizing what needs to be done in elegant detail. For example, table 6-42 on page 233 tells you which restrictions you should place on calling (from highly restricted for lobby phones to unrestricted for the executive phones). While that's not strictly engineering (more like administration), it's something the engineers need to do properly. If not done correctly, you end up with a situation where employees waste lots of time calling their friends and family in far away countries.
People are much more sensitive to their telephone system than to their computer network. So all the details of satisfying users will be new to many engineers. For example, customizing your solution to account for the right voice-mail service is very important. Do that wrong, and you have everyone in the company angry with you. Chapter 7 is a great help in designing the right solution for your company.
No one will ever get fired for buying and using this book to put in a Cisco IP telephone system. In fact, this book may even help you earn a promotion.
Here is a list of the chapter titles to give you a sense of the book's coverage in its 648 pages:
Chapter 1 Cisco IP Telephony Solution Overview (explains the limits of Cisco technology well)
Chapter 2 Planning, Implementation, Operation and Optimization Overview (a process to get you from here to there)
Chapter 3 Large-Scale Enterprise Requirements for IP Telephony (helps you anticipate problems in the beginning)
Chapter 4 Planning Phase (marrying your IT networks to a telecom application)
Chapter 5 Design Phase (network infrastructure design)
Chapter 6 Design of Call-Processing Infrastructure and Applications (lots of details on choices)
Chapter 7 Voice-Mail System Design
Chapter 8 Implementation (a step-by-step process description)
Chapter 9 Operations and Optimization (software and hardware upgrades, CallManager operation and monitoring tools, optimization tips from time synchronization to IPT network management tools)
Good luck with your system!