With all the fantastic Cisco documentation available online, why does the world of UCCE need this book? UCCE is such a big topic that it would be easy to think that it is possible to try and cover absolutely everything. Unfortunately, this would turn this book into nothing more than a product reference manual that could potentially be out of date as soon as a new UCCE software version became available. I also feel that I would potentially end up just replicating existing product manuals and reference material already available on Cisco.com.

As I write this section, Cisco has released UCCE 8.5. I actually started writing this book while working on UICM 5.0. It began life as a collection of engineering notes that I would use when deploying UICM with various different legacy ACDs. Many of my earlier notes have been removed because they are not directly applicable to a pure Cisco Unified CM PBX. One thing I have learned during this process is that the majority of tools and techniques I have learned about can be applied to nearly all versions of UCCE. With this in mind, I have also tried to keep this book version-agnostic where possible. As the UCCE product evolves, several great features and enhancements are included. Writing a book about these features runs a risk that the book could become quickly out of date.

UCCE covers many components and applications. Documentation on each individual part can usually be found on Cisco.com. My aim for this manual is to pull together these parts and explain how they can be deployed and used in the real world. To do this, I draw from my experience to detail methods and approaches that I have found to be successful during my career working with UCCE. I am not afraid to say that sometimes I have gotten it wrong. I also highlight the times I did this in the hope that other engineers can learn from my mistakes. I also cover items that I feel have not been covered in enough detail elsewhere, hopefully saving other engineers the time and effort trying to get certain configurations working.

UCCE is a collection of platforms (UICM, Unified CM, CVP, IP IVR, and various other peripheral application servers). I have deliberately kept the focus of this book on the core product and have only touched on the other integrations where essential. I have done this so as not to have too much overlap with several other fantastic books in the Cisco Press catalog.

In the late 1990s, I was fortunate to work at the British Telecom (BT) research laboratories in the U.K. We were busy testing a call-routing platform created by a U.S. company called GeoTel. The GeoTel ICR solution provided an intelligent call-routing platform that could connect various ACD types by multiple vendors. All the call routing and reporting was available in a single common interface.

BT’s interest in the GeoTel platform was to modify the platform into one that could be hosted in a service provider environment and allow multitenancy so that the platform could be segregated and allow several customers to be supported on the same hardware.