This release includes enhancements to Outbound Option to provide High Availability.

Campaign Manager High Availability

This release supports the Outbound Option High Availability feature that allows the Campaign Managers and the Outbound Option Import on both Loggers to operate in active/standby mode. It ensures replication of the Outbound Option databases on both sides. The dialers automatically connect to the active Campaign Manager.

When the Unified CCE system starts, the Campaign Manager on Logger Side A functions as the active Campaign Manager, while the Campaign Manager on Logger Side B fuctions as the standby Campaign Manager.

The Outbound Option import is synchronized on each Logger side with the Campaign Manager on same Logger side. Therefore, the Outbound Option import and the Campaign Manager on each side work in tandem. Together with two-way replication and dialer high availability, this provides a robust fault tolerant Outbound Option experience with continuous operation even if the active Campaign Manager fails.

For more information, see the Outbound Option High Availability section in the Solution Design Guide for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise available at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-enterprise/products-implementation-design-guides-list.html.

Two-Way Replication

Outbound Option High Availability supports two-way replication between the Outbound Option database that you create on Logger Side A and the Outbound Option database that you create on Logger Side B. Two-way replication offers a High Availability solution in which a failure on the active side of a server allows continuation of outbound dialing and imports on the standby side. All data is replicated between the two sides using Microsoft SQL Server replication.

Enable the Outbound Option High Availability two-way replication on both Logger sides by using Web Setup.

For more information, see the Outbound Option Guide for Unified Contact Center Enterprise available at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-enterprise/products-user-guide-list.html.

This release requires the following prerequisites made to the platform:

• Ensure that you are running Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP2 (64-bit).

• If your Administration Clients run on Microsoft Windows 7, upgrade to a minimum of Microsoft Windows 7 SP1.

Important

Ensure that these prerequisites are in place before upgrading to Release 11.6(1).

Cisco UCS C240 M5SX server is supported for deployment of Release 11.6(1).

License Consumption

This release introduces the License Consumption Report. This report uses VRU and dialer port monitoring and utilization statistics.

Use this report to monitor the agent license consumption and other resources such as the VRU-IVR ports and the outbound dialer ports. You can generate this report for specific intervals such as hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. This further helps you ensure that you have adequate license allocation to cover the peak or maximum license usage during the license agreement period.

The License Consumption report displays the following for a specific interval:

• Total Agents, Enterprise Agents, and ICM Agents logged in

• Maximum VRU ports utilized

• Maximum Dialer ports utilized

Note	The VRU and Dialer port, and ICM Agent data will not be available until the Routers, Loggers and PGs are upgraded.

In this release, the Cisco Unified Intelligence Center (CUIC) reports are updated to present the license consumption data from the updated Database tables.

Spikes in license consumption could occur in events such as shift changes when agents of the outgoing shift have not logged out while the agents of the incoming shift have logged in. The Spike Suppression feature included in the License Consumption report allows you to suppress the steep spikes using the standard 95 percentile algorithm. This makes it convenient to view the report while ignoring the spikes.

The changes made in the Database Schema tables provide the License Consumption report updates. For more information, see the Database Schema Changes topic.

Download and import the License consumption report (Templates_CCE_11.6.1_LC_11.6.1.zip file) from Cisco.com.

Note	While importing the report, do the following: In the Data Source for ReportDefinition field, select UCCE Historical In the Data Source for ValueList field, select CUIC.

For more information, see the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Reporting User Guide.

Release 11.5(1) allowed you to use the UCCE: 4000 Agents Rogger deployment type for a Cisco Unified CCE 2000 Agent Reference Design solution.

This release adds the UCCE: 2000 Agents deployment type for a Cisco Unified CCE 2000 Agent Reference Design solution.

Since the releases earlier than Release 11.6(1) do not support the UCCE: 2000 Agents deployment type, you can perform a permanent uninstall of Release 11.6(1) only if the deployment type is changed to a deployment type that is supported by the earlier release.

This release supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) v1.2 and uses it as the default option. The older versions of TLS/SSL are disabled by the 11.6 Installer.

Note

In case there are third party applications installed on CCE VMs that are impacted when the older versions of TLS/SSL are disabled, re-enable the required TLS/SSL versions. For more information, see Microsoft documentation about enabling TLS/SSL for Schannel security provider. Similarly, third party applications must use TLS v1.2 while creating connections to CCE VMs or CCE database.

For backward compatibility of Unified CCMP with Cisco Unified CCE 11.5 or earlier, enable TLS v1.2 as per Microsoft instructions and recommendations for your Microsoft SQL Server version.

Note	For Microsoft Windows 7 client systems, install the Microsoft Windows Update KB3080079 to ensure that the remote desktop connection over TLS v1.1 or 1.2 is supported.

The following components support TLS v1.2:

TLS Options for Cisco Unified CCE and Other Components

Implement TLS v1.2 on all the components and Unified CCE. Internet Script Editor (ISE) and other web applications require TLS v1.2 for HTTPS connections.

For Live Data, CUIC, and Cisco IdS to interoperate with older versions of Unified CCE, run the set tls client min-version command to set the minimum TLS version to v1.0 or v1.1 as required.

See the individual component sections for more details on upgrade considerations and default behavior of TLS v1.2 in that component.

Use the Transport Layer Security CLI commands to view or change the TLS minimum version for inbound or outbound connections. For product-specific TLS configuration, see Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Installation and Upgrade Guide at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-enterprise/products-installation-guides-list.html.

Dialer High Availability

With the Campaign Manager High Availability, all the active dialers connect to the active Campaign Manager. During a Campaign Manager fail-over, the dialers try to connect to the last known active Campaign Manager during the configurable interval (EMTClientTimeoutToFailover), after which the standby Campaign Manager becomes active and the dialers connect to the newly active Campaign Manager.

EMTClientTimeoutToFailover is the interval at which the active Campaign Manager sends the failover message to the router if the Dialer or BAImport do not connect with the Campaign Manager.

Note	Upgrade the Peripheral Gateway to Release 11.6(1) to utilize the Outbound Option High Availability feature. This upgrade is mandatory to enable the Dialers to connect to the Campaign Managers on side A and side B.

For more information, refer to the Solution Design Guide for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-enterprise/products-implementation-design-guides-list.html.

Outbound Option Records Handling

When dialer initiates a call for a customer record, the Campaign Manager moves the CallStatus of the customer record to an intermediate Dialed state in the DialingList table. This new state allows the active Campaign Manager to ensure that the customer records for calls that were disconnected due to a failure or fail-over are not dialed again.

Do Not Call Cache Update

To support Outbound Option High Availability and replication between Logger Side A and Logger Side B, Do Not Call data now resides in a Do_Not_Call database table. Previously, the Do Not Call data was stored in the DoNotCall.restore file on Logger Side A. The DoNotCall.restore file is a text file that contains a comma-delimited list of phone numbers and extensions (if extensions exist).

When you upgrade to the current release and enable Outbound Option (whether or not you enable High Availability), the Do_Not_Call table is initially empty, as it is newly created on each Logger side. Populate the Do_Not_Call table on Side A and Side B by importing the DoNotCall.restore file, just as you would perform any other import of customer contact information. You do this only once, when you perform an upgrade.

See the Outbound Option Guide for Unified Contact Center Enterprise guide at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-enterprise/products-user-guide-list.html

NALENND™ (Region Prefix and Member Data) Database Updates

This release includes new NALENND™ (North American Local Exchange NPA NXX Database) updates for Outbound Option.

Other Notes

The following considerations are important for Outbound Option:

• Outbound Option high availability has specific requirements for the disk size where the outbound database resides, for CCE deployments.

• Optional Outbound High Availability has specific requirements for the SQL Server Agent account configuration.

For more information about the specific requirements, see the Outbound Option Guide for Unified Contact Center Enterprise guide at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-enterprise/products-user-guide-list.html.

Unified CCE Database Schema Changes

This release introduces minor database schema changes. Therefore, do not use the Enhanced Data Migration Tool for this release. The Unified CCE, Release 11.6(1) installation performs the database migration.

The release includes changes to these tables:

This release supports VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 6.5.

Cisco Unified CCE supports only the VMFS 5 file system.

For more information, see Virtualization for Unified Contact Center Enterprise at:https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/virtualization-unified-contact-center-enterprise.html

You can upgrade to Cisco Unified CCE, Release 11.6(1) from Release 11.0(1), 11.0(2) or 11.5(1) directly. To upgrade from a release earlier than Release 11.0(1), upgrade to Release 11.0(1) and then upgrade to Release 11.6(1). If there are later 11.x Maintenance Releases installed, uninstall these maintenance releases before installing Release 11.6(1). You can determine which maintenance releases you have applied, in the Programs and Features list in Control Panel.

Before upgrading or uninstalling Release 11.6(1), close all the open Microsoft Windows Event Viewer instances. This will prevent an installation failure with an error that the following DLLs are locked:

• icrcat.dll

• icrmsgs.dll

• snmpeventcats.dll

• snmpeventmsgs.dll

If the failure occurs, close the Event Viewer and retry the installation or uninstallation.

If the failure persists, restart the Microsoft Windows Event Log service.

COP Files Installation

Before upgrading a standalone deployment of Unified CCE (Release 10.5 or Release 11.0) or Packaged CCE with CUIC to a Release 11.6(1) co-resident UCCE: 2000 Agents deployment (CUIC with Live Data and IdS), install the required COP files. See the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Installation and Upgrade Guide for more information about the installation of the COP files.

Upgrade Utilities

The EDMT, RegUtil, User Migration Tool, and DB Estimator upgrade utilities do not apply in this release. Use the Release 11.0(1) version of the EDMT, RegUtil, User Migration Tool, and DB Estimator upgrade utilities to upgrade to Release 11.0(1), as needed.

For the upgrade utilities, see https://software.cisco.com/download/type.html?mdfid=268439622

Live Data Deployments

In this release, Live Data supports only 12 Agent Peripheral Gateways (PGs). Deployment upgrades from Release 11.0(2) to Release 11.6(1) with more than 12 Agent PGs (UCM PGs and TDM PGs) are only supported if you are not using Live Data.

Microsoft Windows Patches and Updates

An upgrade to Release 11.6(1) requires the latest Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft SQL Server 2014 KB patches and Service Packs.

If you applied a Microsoft Windows update since March 2014, the Microsoft Windows Update KB2919355 (Hotfix) should be installed. To determine if this Microsoft Windows Hotfix is installed, from your Control Panel go to Programs > Programs and Features. Click View installed updates.

Make sure that Microsoft Windows Update is not running when you install the Release 11.6(1) patch.

Note

On the Microsoft Windows 7 based administration client systems, install Microsoft Windows Update KB3080079 to ensure that the remote desktop connection over TLS v1.1 or 1.2 is supported. Download and install the necessary Microsoft Patch updates to ensure that the ransomware Wannacry does not affect the Cisco Unified Contact Center deployment.