Cisco Unified Communications Manager CoS

Class of Service

We don’t want to leave our telecommunications solution open and make it a free for all so that everybody and anybody can dial long distance and international numbers. Classes of service allow us to define who’s allowed to dial those international numbers and who’s restricted. If you make sure that things are locked down then people can’t inadvertently make those long distance calls. So we use this to control how people are allowed to dial certain numbers and when. We can also make sure that we route calls with the same number differently per user, maybe we use different gateways per site. We want to make sure that we route calls to the same number differently possibly per time of day. That’s another option that we have, we can say well between you know 9 and 5 this is where the call should go but between 5 and midnight it should go somewhere else. So we’ll look at all of these different classes of service that we can set up within the Communications Manager.

Call Privileges Requirement Example

To break down our classes of service this is a good example of what you could do really on paper and then we’ll see how to do it in the Communications Manager.

Calling Privilege Class
(CoS)
Allowed Destinations
Internal Internal
Emergency
Local Internal
Emergency
Local PSTN
Long Distance Internal
Emergency
Local PSTN
Long Distance PSTN
International Internal
Emergency
Local PSTN
Long Distance PSTN
International PSTN

 

We could say, we have a class of service called “Internal” and they’re allowed to dial internal numbers and emergency. Always, always every telephone in your building should be able to dial 911 or 112 respectively, or if you’re in other countries whatever that emergency code is. Second of all, we could say the local group can dial internal emergency and maybe the local PSTN numbers. That could be 10 digit dialing. Also there’s long distance. This should include internal, emergency, the local PSTN and then long distance calls. And then finally you might have a group that can dial internationally and that again would include internal, emergency, local PSTN, long distance and then international calls out to the PSTN.

CoS Planning

How we could implement our class to service plan based on the business needs? We might have a lobby phone for example. That’s a good one – it’s out there in the open space and you probably want to make sure it’s restricted. You might even just say you can only dial internal and 911 but a lot of times you might allow local calls as well because it doesn’t cost you anything. So the lobby phone gets the great restriction where the employee phone maybe they can dial the international and local and long distance. This just shows you how we can apply different classes of service based upon the phone and the type of needs that that phone has.

CoS Configuration

Now the question is, how do I get this up and running on my Communications Manager. There are several different pieces that you can use. One of them is Partitions the other is Calling Search Spaces.

Call Privileges Element Characteristics
Partitions Group of numbers (directory numbers, route patterns, translation patterns, etc) with similar reachability characteristics
Calling Search Spaces (CSS) Defines which partitions are accessible to a particular device
Time Schedules and Time Periods Used to allow certain partitions to be reachable only during a certain time of the day
Client Matter Codes (CMC) Used to track calls to certain numbers
A user must enter a client code to track calls to certain clients
Forced Authorization Codes (FAC) Restrict outgoing calls to certain numbers
A user must enter an authorization code to reach the number

What happens is the calling search spaces basically contain the partitions. The partitions are the destinations – they’re the similar reachability so in other words if I want to be able to dial a Route Pattern that is local let’s say it’s the local dialing it’s a route pattern that points to local PSTN calling. I could add that to my partition and add that partition to the calling search space and now if I assign that calling search space to a phone they can dial that route pattern that’s how I give them the permission. Some little extras that you could add to all this deal with time of day. I could set up a time schedule and a time period that allows certain partitions to be reachable only during certain times. This is kind of cool if you have a company that maybe has serviceability 24/7. Something else we can do – Client Matter Codes. Now this is really used to track calls. I love to use the example of an Attorney’s Firm. If an attorney was working on a case and they needed to make calls on behalf of that case and they want to bill for that time what they can do is key in a code on their phone that we’ve set up that associates with that client and now at the end of the month we could do some billing records for them and they could look for all the client matter codes that are 4040 let’s pretend that’s the number we used for that case and they can add up all that time and then turn around and bill that client, that’s your client matter code. Forced Authorization codes are a way to say okay all of the phones have capabilities to dial numbers whether its international or local but you have to have the appropriate authorization to do so, so let’s say I have a conference room phone for example and we need to make an international call to some other people to bring them into our conference call in that conference room – well I certainly don’t want to say that conference room phone has full blown capabilities to dial everywhere but what if I occasionally want to. I could walk into that conference room dial the number and then it would prompt me to enter a code and I would go ahead and do that and if my code gave me the authorization to dial an international call the call would go through. With forced authorization codes the nice thing about them is you can set up different levels so let’s say if my forced authorization code is a level 10 and somebody else’s is a level 20 I can say level 10 you’re only allowed to dial long distance but if you have level of 20 you are allowed to dial international calls. So again we have a lot of control with all of these tools in how we can manage and restrict phone calls based on whether or not you have the appropriate codes or you have the appropriate calling search space associated with your device.

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