One of the niftiest features Call Manager offers is Single Number Reach (SNR). Configuring SNR takes a wee bit of work, but once it’s setup you’ll never love your life more. Why? Because SNR ends the tradition of giving out a work number *and* a cell phone number just so customers, end users, and sales piranas can abuse you all hours of the day. With SNR, you can send your work calls to your cell phone on your terms, which pretty much rocks my socks.
Recently I was troubleshooting this feature of awesomeness trying to determine why a user’s mobile phone wasn’t ringing when the work number was called. Few obvious things to look for when troubleshooting this:
- Make sure there’s a Remote Destination Profile AND a Remote Destination configured – I know they sound like the same thing, but they are not and you’ll need both
- Make sure the Calling Search Space on the Remote Destination Profile permits a call to the cell phone- meaning if it’s a long distance call to the cell make sure your chosen CSS allows long distance
- Make sure that the user is associated with his/her Remote Destination Profile
- Last but not least, tweak the timer settings- Answer Too Soon, Answer Too Late, Delay Before Ringing, and Just Hang Up the Damn Call Now are timers that are all extremely helpful when customizing this feature for Mr or Mrs Picky Pants. (Yes, I made up that last one, but it sounds like an option that should be there)
So, what if you’ve got it all configured correctly and the user’s mobile phone still doesn’t ring? Time for a sanity check – if you’re me, you put your own cell phone number in the Remote Destination and give it a whirl. Now this may sound less like sanity and more like madness, but it means you’ve injected a known working quantity into the equation. If there’s one thing I know my cell phone does, it’s ring. All. the. time.
But back to the story. Given the new parameter, SNR works like a charm. So why did SNR like my phone so much better than the user’s? Mine does have a pretty cool case, I’ll give you that. However, doubting that this was the magic factor, I did some research and dug up some interesting information. I found that her model of phone had a TON of complaints posted online. The complaints: that model – an EVO on the Sprint network- apparently has a nasty habit of not ringing when people call. Fortunately, there were lots of suggestions on how to resolve this particular issue and my customer’s phone now rings all the time. Especially since I forwarded my work number there.
The moral of the story – voice is a murky, complex world in which we engineers often find ourselves trying to manipulate devices that lay just outside of our influence or control. Whether it’s an ancient fax machine located half way across the country with ECM turned on, a cell phone running a buggy version of code and a bad PRL list, or perhaps even another vendor’s video endpoint that refuses to make nice with the expensive equipment on your end of the conversation- we’ve got to hone our skills to narrow down the issue and face the fact that sometimes the fix will be out of our hands.
In case you’ve got an EVO phone with a ringing disorder, check out this forum: http://forums.androidcentral.com/htc-evo-4g/41825-does-your-evo-rings-4-times-before-you-hear-fix-your-slot-index-cycle.html
And if you need to configure SNR from scratch, I’d recommend starting here: http://tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1575474
And an official Cisco doc, complete with judgmental dude looking down at you while you read, can be found here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/hucs/7.1a/provision/CH13_HUCS.pdf
Amy Engineer 
Good stuff! That’s actually one of the reasons why I was a bit reluctant at first to learn VOICE. Too much unknown, even for seasoned vets. Slowly but surely I’m getting deeper into it. Hope to be on your level one day. 🙂
I’m just getting used to the fact that no matter how much I know, there is soooo much I don’t know. It’s all about practicing good troubleshooting and thinking on your feet. Those skills improve over time – but man, I still have a ways to go.
Love reading this post. You really mix good humor and technical data well. I haven’t done anything with SNR, since I’m still running CM 5.x. But, upgrading in 2 months. 🙂
Great post Amy! We use Mobile Connect (aka: SNR; why they changed this is beyond me) a ton, and have it widely deployed! There are a few things that bite us. 1) Teaching users to silence the ring on the cell phone if they don’t want to answer vs, ignoring or pushing the “end” key which sends the call to cell phone voicemail. 2) Clicking the “Line Association” on the remote destination next to the users extension number in the CUCM config. 3) Calling an IP Phone from the cell phone that is also the remote destination. I use this last one all the time to test from outside, but it doesn’t ring my phone as one would expect, it takes me to my cell phone voice mail. Turns out most carriers log you into voicemail if you call the cell phone number from the same number as the phone. Setting up a “block list” with my cell phone number in the list fixes that issue. I can then call my IP Phone to test things and I don’t get the login prompt on my cell voicemail.
Keep up the great work Amy!
You make great points!! Nice solution to that last one, I ran into the same thing when I was testing! I didn’t think to setup a block list.