Back in my VISTA IT days, Tommy and I put together a multi tier Cisco IP Phone management system. Remedy was the management platform, which was integrated to use Cisco Call Manager’s MS SQL database. Classic ASP was the server side web language. The end clients were Cisco 7960 IP Phones, and web browsers.
The 7960 IP phones are essentially dumb terminals with an embedded xml service browser. These lightweight xml services are transformed into ui on the phone just like html is transformed in your web browser.
When you setup a new phone, you have to register it’s MAC with your Call Manager server. Next, you have to subscribe each phone to any service that you want to make available to that user. Kind of like subscribing to an RSS feed today.
I built all sorts of apps for these phones just like I would a traditional browser. Hotel software, traffic software, flight tracking softwaare, etc. In fact, it was at the same time that Pappa Johns first introduced their online ordering sytem. I contacted PJ’s about their new service and tried to setup a proof of concept for The Innovation Through Convergence Expo, but they declined.
So our big idea for the show was an ip phone service management application. This was a big convenience app since back then you had to configure each phone, and the services manually. You’d have to register the phone, then assign services to each phone. Now do this for each phone in your office, keeping in mind that not everybody has access to the same services. Talk about a pain. So what we did was take the phone management piece out of Call Manager and used Remedy to handle that. You still need to register each phone with your server, but that’s it.
At the time, Cisco’s Call Manager ran on top of MS SQL server. Our Remedy system, and our ASP also ran on MS SQL, so it was an easy integration. So once you had your phones registerred with CallManager, you could log into the Remedy system and manage all your phones, and their available services with the same ease of a regular CMS system.
By running the management piece in Remedy, we received the following value adds :
- Familiar management interface ( we were a big Remedy shop )
- Access Control to services — Groups, Roles, etc… ( I don’t remember Call Manager doing this back then )
- Floating user accounts ( log in to phone or browser )
- Quick and easy updates to one or many phones ( Call Manager was one phone at a time )
- Remedy’s data was in sync with Call Manager’s ( we were a Remedy integration shop too )
I’m sure the application had a few more bells and whistles, but that’s what I can remember. The final thing that I was really proud of was the browser piece. While these web services were Cisco IP Phone specific, I built in some XSL / XSLT translation magic which allowed regular browsers to run the same applications.
This was mostly for testing and debugging, but it made for cool web integrations. These web services in the browser equated to web2.0 widgets. This wasn’t a big sell, but it was a cool concept to show off at the show. In fact, most people just didn’t understand what was going on. We had a cisco phone with it’s green screen, and a laptop running the exact same apps side by side. Since this app had user management, you could log in and use the same services from anywhere.
Funny thing about all this. I thought this application was such a joke compared to the things we were building at the time. I was really just excited to get out of my office and go to Dallas. I had no expectations of winning anything, and we did.
Sometimes I wonder if this was really just a pat on the head from cisco for being a partner. Either way, it’s pretty cool. After winning the award, Ron Pike and I went out by the elevators and threw our bouncy balls down into the lobby. SIX STORIES BELOW! All week we had been planning out the time, and how hard we’d have to throw the balls so they would bounce across the lobby and into the main fountain down below. We never got to practice since the lobby was always swarming with other conventioneers. Plus, these bouncy balls are the medium sized scwag balls you get at conferences that scream when you bounce them. You know the ones. They sound like a kid’s laser gun and have the pupil burning leds in them.
Yeah, we got some yells from the people down below, but that’s just how we roll.
Best Innovative Single Award from Cisco
Tags: asp, best single idea, bouncy balls, cisco, cisco 7960 ip phone, cisco award, cisco ip phone, convention, remedy, remedy ar system, xml, xsl
