Cisco Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager 8.5 White Paper
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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What Do Companies Use Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager For?
Different companies have different pain points or return on investment (ROI) goals they would like solved by Cisco
Unified Provisioning Manager. They use all or part of Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager’s “toolbox” to solve their
business problems. The toolbox can be subdivided into a set of tools by problem to be solved or by type of
operation.
Usage by Problem to Be Solved
I need to roll out one or more sites
For the first site or two, it generally is best to use the Cisco Unified Communications applications’ GUIs to
directly set up the Cisco Unified Communications applications and devices. If more sites are going to be
deployed, it is best to capture common deployment settings in templates with keywords for devices or site
names. It is usually better to make smaller templates of common settings and later nest them to create a
larger template to describe a specific site. Some large companies have rolled out many sites by creating
templates for common areas, such as manufacturing buildings, sales offices, and retail stores. These
sites can be added to templates that are built for different physical regions or countries to make sites
uniformly configured based on function while customized by state or country.
When rolling out new sites, it is often required to add many subscribers and their services all at once. If
this is the case, batches can be created with lists of user IDs, phone types, and services. These batches
can be loaded into the order management system in Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager to be executed
immediately or at a future date to bulk-create users and user services in a new site. This functionality is
sometimes used to bulk-migrate subscribers from a legacy PBX into a Cisco voice-over-IP (VoIP)
network.
Summary: The tools are infrastructure templates and the batch order functions.
I want onsite or regional administrators to handle MACs and password reset
Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager can have a single domain for all subscribers or multiple domains with
subscribers. In order to delegate day 2 tasks to different regional administration groups, subscribers for
each group can be put in different domains. With this configuration, administration for a specific
subscriber group can be delegated to a specific regional administrator or regional administration group. A
regional administrator assigned to manage subscribers in one domain will not be able to make changes
to subscribers in another domain.
When a day 2 administrator is created in the provisioning system, that person is usually assigned to
manage only one domain. Starting with Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager 1.3.1, day 2 administrators
can be assigned to multiple domains.
Summary: The deployment architecture needed is multidomain. Tools required are the order manager
GUI and possibly the multidomain administration feature.