In recent weeks I’ve had two different clients ask about integrating Cisco systems with OCS. After the initial talks about what OCS can do and how they will use it, the next question always seems to be, can I still use my Cisco phones once we move to Enterprise Voice with OCS?
Thanks to a product from NET called SmartSIP (originally created by Evangelyze and acquired by NET) the answer is yes! SmartSIP is a server based app that allows you to register SIP phones to it, and then proxies that registration back to OCS so the SIP phone can act as an OCS endpoint.
This type of functionality is important on many levels. First of all it gives you a low-cost option (less than 6 Tanjays for the server license) for keeping your existing SIP phones around, lowering the cost to implement a UC solution. Secondly, and this one is more and more important to the environment as each day passes, we get to keep thousands of perfectly good phones out of landfills.
Now that we’ve covered the purpose of this article we can jump right into the architecture. The first question we have to cover is how SmartSIP works. SmartSIP is a SIP registrar that allows devices to connect to it, and then connects to OCS on their behalf. Once registered to OCS, the SIP phone acts as any other OCS voice endpoint, taking advantage of the native functionality within OCS to send calls to all active endpoints.
For this article SmartSIP will be installed on my mediation server, this is a supported configuration for up to 250 seats and was the exact installation method I used during the private beta testing I did with the product. For larger scale deployments it is best to have it on its own box. Here is what my lab environment looked like……
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