This document describes additional information about some of the changes in Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) Release 10.5 in order to raise awareness of important points on how a UCCX Release 10.5 system is designed, installed, and upgraded. UCCX Release 10.5 was recently released and contains many new features, bug fixes, and serviceability improvements. Information on these new features will be published with Release 10.5.
UCCX Release 10.5 does not support Windows-to-Linux upgrades. Any release from Release 7.0(2)ES3 and earlier cannot be upgraded in a single step to UCCX Release 10.5. Windows UCCX installations must first be upgraded to the latest service update (SU) on Release 8.5(1) to the most recent SU on Release 9.0(2) or to the most recent SU on Release 10.0(1). You can then upgrade that release to UCCX Release 10.5. As of July 10, 2014, interim Releases for Windows-to-Linux upgrade to UCCX Release 10.5 are 8.5(1)SU4, 9.0(2)SU1, and 10.0(1)SU1.
Refer to Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (Cisco Unified CCX) Software and Hardware Compatability Guide for the latest information on UCCX upgrade compatability.
You might encounter these installation and upgrade scenarios when you install or upgrade UCCX.
You design a new UCCX Release 10.5 installation and install UCCX as a virtual machine (VM) with the Cisco-provided Open Virtualization Format (OVF) template for UCCX Release 10.5 based on the guidelines in this document.
You upgrade to UCCX from Release 8.5(1)SU4, 9.0(2)SU1, or 10.0(1)SU1 that runs in a virtual environment to Release 10.5. Follow the standard Linux-to-Linux upgrade procedures located in the UCCX Release 8.5 documentation for this upgrade. Pre-upgrade checks are added in order to allow Linux-to-Linux upgrades only from these releases:
You upgrade UCCX from Release 8.5(1)SU4 or 9.0(2)SU1 that runs on physical servers to Release 10.5.
You upgrade UCCX from Release 7.0(2) to Release 10.5.
UCCX Release 10.5 runs on the Unified Collaboration Operating System (UCOS) Release 10.0. Older releases of UCCX run on UCOS versions before Release 10.0. UCOS Release 10.0 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Release 6, 64-bit and includes these items:
As a result of the UCOS Release 10.0 migration in UCCX Release 10.5, a Refresh Upgrade is required in order to upgrade from a version of UCCX older than Release 10.5 to UCCX 10.5. Refresh upgrades require additional downtime and pre-installation tasks. Find instructions and expectations when you upgrade to UCCX Release 10.5 through the Refresh Upgrade process in the installation documentation.
UCCX Release 10.5 also supported Prime Collaboration Deployment (PCD) Release 10.5. You can use PCD in order to conduct these operations against a UCCX Release 10.5 cluster:
With the migration of UCCX to UCOS Release 10.0, you can change the UCCX hostname more easily. Cluster Manager (a process within the UCOS) has a remote notification mechanism that automatically notifies other nodes in a cluster of a hostname change.
When you change the hostname on a UCCX high availability (HA) cluster, the command utils uccx modify remote_hostname is not required. It is highly recommended that you follow the exact instructions for hostname modification. These instructions are found in the UCCX Administration Guide.
UCCX, as part of the Unified Collaboration Release 10.5 solution, now supports IPv6 addressing. IPv6, either in Dual Stack (IPv4/IPv6) mode or IPv6) is supported on UCCX, CUCM, and IP phones, but is not supported on SocialMiner or MediaSense. Follow the instructions in order to configure UCCX, CUCM, and IP phones for IPv6 addressing in the appropriate Administrator Guides.
In UCCX Release 10.5, the respository database (db_cra_repository) used in order to store metadata about documents, prompts, scripts and grammars, has increased from 10mb to 40mb. This allows administrators to store a larger number of scripts, prompts, documents and grammars and allow customers that face storage restrictions to further upload these items.
See UCCX Respository Restrictions for more information about UCCX respository size restrictions.
The changes made to the UCCX OVF and partition alignment error detection made in the UCCX Release 10.0(1) release still apply to the 10.5 Release. For more information on these items, see the UCCX Version 10.0 Pre-release Field Communication.
In UCCX Release 10.0, +E.164 support is added for many configuration items within UCCX that includes Triggers, Agent Directory Numbers (when you use Finesse only) and in many of the Script Editor steps. UCCX Release 10.5 further extends +E.164 support and includes these items:
Finesse Agent Desktop in UCCX Release 10.5 has many new features. See these descriptions of the features:
In UCCX Release 10.5, Finesse is enhanced in order to support all three Outbound Dialer modes supported in UCCX Release 10.5 and includes:
In UCCX Release 10.5, Finesse clients can run on Windows 8.1 and Internet Explorer 11.0 can be used in order to access the Finesse desktop. Client OS/browser support for UCCX Release 10.5 is as follows:
Operating System | Browser |
Windows 8.1 | Internet Explorer 11.0 Firefox (Version 24 or Later) |
Windows 7 | Internet Explorer 9.0 Internet Explorer 11.0 Firefox (Version 24 or Later) |
Mac OS X | Firefox (Version 24 or Later) |
Finesse now supports the configuration of multiple lines on agent phones when UCCX is configured for multiline. You can configure one or more secondary lines on an agent phone. However, the Finesse server blocks any events received from the Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) server about call activity on an agent's secondary line. These events are not published to the Finesse clients, which means information about calls handled on an agent's secondary line does not appear in the Finesse desktop.
For example: If Agent A uses his or her secondary line in order to call Agent B (on Agent B's primary extension), the call does not appear on Agent A's desktop. Because Agent B received the call on his or her primary extension, the call does appear on Agent B's desktop. In a UCCX deployment, Agent A's extension appears on Agent B's desktop in the format 'PrimaryExtension.SecondaryExtension'.
Finesse in UCCX Release 10.5 officially supports the Extension Mobility feature. No functional changes were required in Finesse to support this feature, however extensive testing was performed in order to verify that extension mobility is compatible with Finesse in UCCX.
Significant enhancements have been made to the UCCX Web Chat feature in UCCX Release 10.5 and SocialMiner 10.5. Web Chat continues to be a feature licensed under the Premium license package only, requires Cisco SocialMiner for integration, and many of the new chat features are applicable to Finesse deployments only.
New chat features in UCCX 10.5 include:
UCCX Release 10.5 adds two new outbound dialer types to the existing three outbound dialer types across agent-based and Interactive Voice Response (IVR)-based dialing modes. Agent-based predicitve and progressive campaigns can only be used when Cisco Finesse is activated.
Dialing Mode | Dialing Type | Release Available |
IVR |
Progressive | 8.5+ |
IVR | Predictive | 8.5+ |
Agent | Preview | 8.0+ |
Agent | Progressive | 10.5+ |
Agent | Predictive | 10.5+ |
Agent-based predictive and progressive campaigns dial contacts and transfer these contacts to reserved agents based on the Call Progress Analysis (CPA) result returned by the gateway.
Agent-based predictive and progressive campaigns, with the use of CPA, automatically detect live voice, answer machine, SIT tone and fax/model calls and can react accordingly, prevents a call to be placed from an agent device that results in something other than live voice.
These two new dial modes do not use Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) resources in order to place outbound calls, as Agent-based preview does, and only connects a call via CUCM to an agent phone when necessary (live voice or answer machine is detected).
The difference between Agent-based predictive and progressive campaigns is the same as IVR-based predictive and progressive campaigns:
Administrators have the option, on a per-campaign basis, to define the treatment of Agent-based outbound calls that result in:
In these two cases, the administrator can configure a UCCX Trigger DN to which to route the call or to drop the call.
Agent-based predictive and progressive campaigns are licensed by an additional license on top of UCCX Premium licensing packages. This license (similar to the Outbound IVR License introduced in UCCX Release 8.5) determines the maximum number of agents that can concurrently process (in Talking or Work state) agent-based predictive and progressive calls and also the maximum number of ports used for IVR-based outbound calls (as was done in UCCX Release 8.5) and transfers from Agent-based predictive and progressive campaigns that result in a transfer to an IVR script.
In outbound call, the agent has the option to schedule a callback at the time requested by the customer (+/- callback time limit). The agent can also cancel a scheduled callback that has been scheduled previously during the call.
UCCX Live Data and Historical Reports have been enhanced to report on Agent-based predictive and progressive campaigns.
Historical Reports - Added to compliment current Agent Direct Preview Outbound Reports, Historical Reports include these items:
Live Data Reports - Include statistics on all Agent-based Outbound types (Direct Preview, Predictive and Progressive):
Cisco Agent Desktop Browser edition has been discontinued and removed from the UCCX 10.5(1) release.
Revision | Publish Date | Comments |
---|---|---|
1.0 |
31-Jul-2014 |
Initial Release |