How to Schedule TMS devices to dial external MCU meeting rooms?

[Burgert Kloppers]

Hi All,

Is it possible to schedule internal devices registered to an internal TMS to dial to an external MCU meeting room?

If so, how would one go about doing it?

[Jens Didriksen]

All depends on how the external site configures the dial-in options, URI dialling, MCU_conference_number@domain, or if the MCU conferences are not registered with a GK and/or SIP proxy; dial the IP address of the Auto Attendant, then navigate to the relevant conference using FEC or DTMF.

You schedule it in TMS as per normal, using "External" and "dial out", just like any other external site.

/jens

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[Burgert Kloppers]

Thanks for the information,

That part I understand, let me give more information.

When scheduling one internal device and adding the external MCU cridentials as an external system works perfect.

My problem is that I have a couple of devices registered with TMS with no internal MCU, I then need to schedule more than one of these internal devices to connect to a external MCU. The problem is that you cant add a external MCU or offline MCU to TMS meaning as soon as you schedule it will not have a root and gives an error.

Am I missing something?

[Wayne DeNardi]

One work around to that would be to create a TMS meeting for each of the endpoints individually (rather than including them all in the one meeting), where they all dial out to the external MCU.

[Jens Didriksen]

What Wayne said. :) Bit more work, but it's the only option available if you can't get the external MCU to individually dial the end-points instead.

/jens

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[Burgert Kloppers]

Thanks you all,

Would have been nice to be able to add an external ofline MCU like you can add an ofline external vc unit.

[Wayne DeNardi]

Yep - it's not ideal - but is the only way I can see to do it.

If it's something that you're going to be doing regularly, you could flag it with your local Cisco Account Manager as a possible Feature Request for a new version of TMS.

Wayne
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[Jens Didriksen]

Yup, I've submitted a feature request a while back asking for the number of participants to be "unlocked" when adding a resource to TMS as "Room".

This is currently locked to "1", however, making this editable would be a great help as you then can add virtual meeting rooms to TMS bookings, and schedule the end-points to dial into that particular VMR.

/jens

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[Patrick Sparkman]

One method is to use a Participant Template, under Booking in TMS.

I've done this myself for an organization we conference with, for there MCU.  There is a option called "Reusable", which will allow you to schedule that device multiple times over bypassing TMS's scheduling logic of it already being scheduled and preventing you from scheduling it again.

Yes: The template will be used as a model and can be added to conferences. For dial ins the template can be used for one or several conferences several times. This disables the availability check for this participant in Cisco TMS. No: The template can only be added once to one conference at a time, but is possible to reuse in a later conference. Cisco TMS availability checker will ensure that the template is used only once by setting the participant it represents to in-use.

[Jens Didriksen]

True, but you'd still need to individually schedule each end-point to call this MCU/VMR, as once I add more participants, TMS automatically adds one of my MCUs to the conference.

Allowing number of participants to be editable when adding a resource such as a VMR as "Room" will get around this as it would then be treated in the same way a codec with on-board MCU.

/jens

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[Patrick Sparkman]

Oh, okay, I get it know.  Yeah, that doesn't help.  :)

[Michel Tosu]

In a technical webinar update about the future for the TMS I participated in, this feature was said to be implemented in April this year but I guess it got removed for some reason.

They said that in 14.4 we would be able to set up external MCU conferences, meaning that we could set up a few different virtual meeting room numbers that we would be able to select as a place for all the scheduled endpoints to dial. I think it's a nice feature and it's sad it has been removed.

[Wayne DeNardi]

Wasn't in TMS 14.4, but is now there in the newly released 14.5.

[Michel Tosu]

I noticed that when I read the release notes after I heard that 14.5 were released! Boy was I surprised!

[Wayne DeNardi]

You'll be even more surprised when you read the release notes a bit further and see you need the Network Interop licence to be able to do this... and that's $50k US list price.  It's cheaper to buy another bridge!