Cisco Unified Communications Manager 7 Dial Plan Enhancements
and Their Effect on the Dial Plan
Author: Berni
Gardiner
Abstract
Collectively, the CUCM7 dial plan enhancements provide
administrators with the tools to simplify dial plan configuration
for global environments or corporate environments with multiple
locations. These new elements allow dial plans to contain fewer
configuration components and provide more flexibility by moving
appropriate configurations to the edge devices such as gateways,
trunks, and IP phones. This white paper presents the changes to
CUCM7 and some of the challenges and solutions CUCM7 provides.
Introduction
The dial plan is a key element in Cisco Unified Communications
Manager (CUCM) environments. The dial plan is at the very core of
the user experience. For companies that have multiple locations, or
that are global, a comprehensive dial plan can become large and
very complex. These companies will see the greatest benefits when
implementing the new dial plan elements of CUCM7.
Changes to CUCM7
For each location, administrators must configure a separate set
of dial plan components such as route patterns, route groups, route
lists, Tail End Hopoff (TEHO) patterns, and Automatic Alternate
Routing (AAR) groups to handle location prefixing. For a company
that has many locations, either national or global, this
configuration can become extremely cumbersome and difficult to
create and manage.
CUCM 7 addresses this challenge and provides new dial plan
elements that dramatically simplify dial plan configuration. These
new elements allow administrators to improve both the end-user
experience and the administrative task of creating and maintaining
the dial plan. There are two major changes in the way dial plan
administration can be handled using new configuration elements of
CUCM 7.
The first change is to decouple specific route group
configuration from route list configuration. The route list can now
be configured to point to a generic route group called the Standard
Local Route Group. This will eliminate the need for a set of route
patterns and route lists per location and is discussed in more
detail in the Local Route Group section below.
The second change is to perform call route processing using a
"normalized number" format. The idea is that each location will
take a "locally formatted number" and convert it to a number in
"standard format" for call route processing. The chosen standard
format is the "globalized notation," which presents numbers in
E.164 format. Once a call is routed to the destination device -
either gateway, another CUCM cluster, or phone - the number is
converted back into a local format based on the location of the
device.
The new configuration components that support number
normalization include the following:
- Support for "+" dialing
- Calling Party Number Transformations
- Called Party Number Transformations
- Incoming Calling Party Settings per Gateway
Collectively, these new features enable a CUCM system to:
- Route calls based on the physical location of the caller using
the local route group assigned through the component's device
pool.
- Represent calling and called party numbers in a global format
conforming to the International Telecommunications Union's E.164
recommendation.
- Present calls to external networks (for example, the PSTN) in a
manner compatible with the local requirements for calling party
number, called-party number, and their respective numbering
types.
- Present callers with both the local and global form of the
calling party number on incoming calls from gateways, based on the
calling number digits and the numbering type.
Overall improvements include:
- Significantly fewer route patterns, route lists, and AAR group
configurations.
- Users who roam outside of their normal dialing area will no
longer need to know the dialing requirements of each country as
they travel through it. Users can now dial an E.164 formatted
number and have the dial plan determine what digit manipulation is
required for the local PSTN to process the call.
- As new locations are added to the dial plan, using localization
and globalization techniques, the administrator needs only to be
concerned with the local dial requirements of that site and how to
globalize the number for CUCM processing.
- Digit manipulation has been removed from the route list and
moved to each local gateway.
Local Route Group
The Challenge: Prior to the availability of local route groups,
the administrator had to configure, per location, multiple route
patterns pointing to a location's route list, which pointed to the
location's route group, which pointed to the local gateway for each
site.
For example the configuration could contain the following route
patterns.
1. 911
2. 9.911
3. 9.[2-9]11 (3 digit service calls)
4. 9.[2-9][02-9]XXXXX (local 7 digit dialing)
5. 9.[2-9]X[02-9]XXXX (local 7 digit dialing)
6. 9.313XXXXXXX (local 10 digit dialing)
7. 9.1[2-9]XXXXXXXXX (long distance dialing)
8. 9.011! (international dialing)
9. 9.011# (international dialing)
This would result in nine route patterns per location, one route
list per location, and one route group per location - assuming only
one gateway or multiple gateways requiring the same digit
manipulation, giving a total of eleven elements to be configured
per location. Multiply that by just ten locations and the total
elements required would be 110 configuration components.
Related Courses
CADPI - Cisco Advanced Dial Plan and Integration
UCM70 - Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Manager
7.0
ACUCW1 - Administering Cisco Unified Communications Workspace Part
1: Basic