Positioning meeting place as an SP service

mesumbeslin · ‎01-09-2009

Hi guys,

I have a business question here,Can unified meeting place be positioned for a SP to sell to say it's corporate customers? Like some kind of meetingplace/webex hosted solution? Anyone ever tried something similar?

Ronald Spencer · ‎01-09-2009

Hi,

It is possible and Cisco, themselves do it (for TAC and other purposes). (see here: https://mplaceext2.cisco.com/) Come to think of it, I have, while researching other issues, run across a public web presence (or two) that host similar. (search for cisco meetingplace hosted -or similar variations).

I would recommend a SIGNIFICANT amount of preplanning. Hosting this solution as a service might require licensing (which you could confirm with the licensing team). Once the legality part of it was addressed, you would want to insure that the MP server was in the DMZ or (probably more preferable) its own network (seperate from your business) -to minimize security risks.

Once you have identified the network aspect of this solution, the server will be quite easy. The build document wil walk you through its prep and install.

Meetingplace has billing built into it, so you could create groups and rates (etc). Then you could have your accounting people pull monthly reports to bill for time.

Hope this helps.

mesumbeslin · ‎01-09-2009

It does help greatly. Thanks for this information.Let me see how I can go about it.But I thought the TAC meetingplace doesn't let you create meetings,you only attend? Well,let me do some more research on this.

Again thanks

mesumbeslin · ‎01-09-2009

thanks a lot. Do you have some design docs you can point?

Ronald Spencer · ‎01-12-2009

Regarding the TAC meetingplace not being able to create meetings, I believe this is because the end user (you or I) is never given a login for their meetingplace, just the meeting information (much in the way a customer might attend a meeting within your organization).

Regarding design documents, I can refer you to the Cisco Documentation Site for the build document. Regarding design for this particular build, I am afraid I have no docs. This would have to be conceived and built according to your need. Significant time should be taken to brainstorm and address any special circumstances that might arise out of this deployment. Depending on the scope of work, it may be benificial to make each company you will service with this solution a group within meetingplace.

To understand your costs and what money might be made using this solution, you will want to understand what your cost per user would be (given x number of meetings -per given timeperiod). You will also need to factor in the support cost. How many man-hours are you (or others) going to spend supporting this solution. Depending on the implementation you choose, what are the infrastructure costs associated with it:

If it is in the DMZ, what is the cost of the bandwidth that traffic is taking from your network?

If it is to be on its own network, what are the costs associated with bringing in a new circuit and maintaining it?

The following is the Cisco Page that houses the build documents for the various versions of Meetingplace:

Meetingplace Express:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/ps6533/prod_installation_guides_list.html

MeetingPlace:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/sw/ps5664/ps5669/prod_installation_guides_list.html

Regarding Design, I have found the following information:

MeetingPlace:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/sw/ps5664/ps5669/products_implementation_design_guides_list.html