What are Media Termination Points (MTPs) in the CUCM Environment?

Today we are going to discuss a topic, which confuses the newbies a lot, when they start working with Cisco Collaboration devices. It will be about one of the Media Resources, namely about Media Termination Points (MTPs). The beginners are always confused about the purpose of MTPs.  Why we would need an MTP and how it is different from transcoder? The concept of transcoder is pretty straight forward - when there's a codec mismatch between two endpoints (like G711 / G729), a transcoder will be used to "translate" the codecs.  But why MTP?

Dropping Conference in CUCME When Initiator Disconnects

Hello all!

This post is a response to a question from a student of my recent CVOICE course. The question was as follows - how to drop a hardware Conference  in CUCME when initiator of the Conference is leaving the session.

The solution is easy. In ephone or ephone-template configuration just add a command conference drop-mode. Its syntax is:

conference drop-mode [creator | local]

Parameter creator means Conference is stopped when initiator leaves it. Parameter local says Conference is stopped when the last internal CUCME's phone disconnects from the session (ie prevents a situation where the conference are used by external subscribers only).

An example of configuration is here:

HQ-1(config)# ephone 1
HQ-1(config-ephone)# conference drop-mode creator

Wish all of you a nice day!

Hardware Media Resources on CUCME

Hello again, my dear colleagues! :)

Finally I got some time for another blog post. As always, there was a lot of work, despite the summer period, there was a business trip to our branch in Almaty, where I delivered my traditional Cisco voice courses. And, of course, there was a long-awaited vacation. :)

The reason for writing today's message was my joint work with one of my students - Adonis Troitsky from Almaty. Recently, I assisted him in solving a problem with the registration of hardware media resources (conference bridge and transcoder) on CUCME 8.0. The Cisco Authorized Courses go into some detail about how media resources work with the "server" Cisco Call Manager (CUCM), but they don't cover how to use it with CUCME (Cisco Unified Communication Manager Express). Let's compensate the vendor's omission and cover this topic in more detail.