It takes up a significant part of our day to keep up with all
the communication devices and methods we have to keep in touch. In
this Cisco Unified Communication white paper, we take a high-level
look at what makes up Cisco Unified Mobility. We examine call flow.
For incoming calls, Mobile Connect can allow up to 10 remote
devices to be rung down while also ringing down the primary office
phone. On outgoing calls from a remote corporate user, Mobile Voice
Access allows the company to centralize long-distance and
international billing, rather than reimbursing employees for the
use of their personal devices. Finally, we also look at the rich
feature set provided by Unified Mobility and walk thru the process
of configuring the Mobile Connect feature on our CUCM.
Introduction
Have you ever stopped to think of all the electronic gadgets we
have these days to stay connected? From cell phones, pagers, PDAs,
netbooks, and laptops to home phones via Voice over IP (VoIP), we
are doing more and more in an effort to always have the latest news
and access to those things that are important to us via the
Internet. In short, it is starting to take up a significant part of
our day to keep up with being able to talk to everyone that we need
to talk to. Beyond that, I also want to ensure that if you're
talking to a client, you're using a solution that allows the client
to see your Caller ID as a corporate number. If you're talking to
your spouse on the same phone, he/she needs to see your personal
Caller ID displayed.
Today's networking environment is nothing like it used to be.
Back in the good old days (actually, many times, it wasn't so good
and it wasn't so long ago), it was normal to think of going to work
at 8 a.m., sitting down at a desk, taking lunch from noon to 1
p.m., then going home at 5 p.m. Additionally, when we went to work,
we typically went to the same building and sat at the same desk
every day.
These days, instead of a "Working Hours" mentality, it is more
normal to see a "Working Moments" way of thinking. Instead of
reporting to the same desk at 8 a.m. every day, we may be catching
a flight to a corporate branch in another city or visiting a
customer site to finalize an install in another country. With this
new way of working, business requirements don't begin at 8 a.m. and
end at 5 p.m.-they happen around the clock and require an entirely
new way of approaching network connectivity and communications.
Modern networks demand that we have a "unified" way of working,
in order to simplify our already crazy schedule. This means that
while we're rushing through the airport, we can stop at a coffee
shop, login to our corporate network via a VPN tunnel, and check
the status of our server farm. We can also check our voicemail and
send and receive faxes from within our e-mail inbox. Additionally,
we can even communicate with customers from our cell phones and
have our Caller ID show up as our corporate desktop phone name and
phone number. The possibilities are almost endless when we apply a
unified approach to communications while operating in a mobile
environment.
What Is Unified Mobility?
This white paper will focus on discovering and implementing
Cisco's Unified Mobility solutions so that we can give our mobile
employees an easier, and yet, more robust way of communicating, no
matter the wired or wireless network they are currently connected
to. We're also going to see how to simplify the long list of
numbers that a traveling professional has to keep up with.
Instead of having to remember the phone numbers of our business
desk phone, mobile IP phone, cell phone, and home phone, we're
going to configure a system that allows users to be reached at a
single phone number. Regardless of the physical device the employee
is using, he or she can be reached with this single number. This is
what it means to have "Unified Mobility."
What Are the Components of Unified Mobility?
Cisco Unified Mobility consists of two components: Mobile
Connect and Mobile Voice Access (MVA).
Mobile Connect allows an incoming call to an
employee's corporate phone number to be offered to up to 10
additional remote devices, in addition to the desktop phone. These
remote devices will typically be the user's cell phone, home phone,
or spouse's phone, and must be external to the corporate network.
In the following diagram, you can see that an incoming call from
the PSTN is being routed to both the employee's desk phone and her
cell phone at the same time. This is another reason why Cisco
Unified Mobility is also referred to as "Single Number Reach."
Mobile Voice Access (MVA) is an additional
technology built on top of Mobile Connect to allow employees who
are located outside of the enterprise network to make calls as if
they were directly connected to the corporate Cisco Unified
Communications Manager (CUCM). This has multiple benefits. For
example, companies that have a large number of mobile employees no
longer have to reimburse each employee for the usage of his
personal cell phones when making business-related calls. They can
now instruct each of the mobile users to dial an MVA pilot number
when calling customers. This allows the company to centralize the
toll charges into a single phone bill.
