It didn't kill me, but my family might. (part 3 in a series)

So with the CMR's all backed up as Conductor Conferencing Aliases, I feel like things are "stabilized" for now and I'm preparing for vacation.

However,  the nature of my ADD means that sometimes it is hard to think of anything else than what excites me. Lately that's been all the things at work and that I'm working on. So a week up camping with my wife and daughter (plus her friend) may possibly lead to them killing me.

I guess you cannot escape death.

In order to clear my conscience and (maybe) wrap up this trilogy, I would like to explain a tiny bit more about that I've learned about what a "CMR" is. In part 1 I explained it as magic tied back to some SQL thing - pretty much magic begetting magic, am I right?

It really isn't quite that mystical. When you create a CMR - something you can only do in TMS - it makes an API call to the Conductor to build a conference that is then stored in the Conductor but you cannot modify it. If a CMR is in the Conductor and has the same video number or video address as a Conductor Conference Alias, the CMR will take priority. This way you can have a CCA that mirrors the CMR but they can coexist peacefully. If the CMR gets wiped from the Conductor because it's marked for deletion and you hit that Regenerate CMRs button you will be totally safe. the CCA is backing you up.

Until TMS creates a CMR for someone new that uses the same video number or address.

These moments of clarity were provided in the "Cisco-TMSPE-with_VCS-Deployment-Guide" on page 57 and 58. I also learned about how a CMR differs from a CCA and most significantly in guest access. I have never played with a host/guest meeting room in the Cisco environment so it's fun to exercise this. In short: with a CMR you can have the PIN determine the participant's role in a conference. User one PIN and you are a guest, or use the other PIN and you are the host. With a CCA, you must have a separate alias for the guest to call.

Where do we go from here?

I'm going on vacation. HA!

Not much of this really matters to many because ya'll are probably on to CUCM which totally changes what a CMR is. There is no Conductor. TMS is relegated to a purely scheduling function. Who knows, it might not even have a place in the future where Spark/WebEx converge to take over.

But I feel better putting this down and maybe you found this bit interesting. The Cisco documentation is deep. I've ready too many PDF's in the last month and I really should be working on my lab again. But for now i'm going to sit back, light a marshmallow on fire, and try not to talk about tech too much.

If it doesn't kill me, it makes me stronger.

Yesterday I wrote about how a bunch of Collaboration Meeting Rooms decided to self-immolate. Read "This thing is going to kill me." for the backstory.

Since I wrote about the problem I need to update my progress. I am diving much more into how TMS and TMSPE work and connect to Conductor to build a CMR, but in the meantime I need a work around for those who lost their CMR.

Here is a short summary of the temporary workaround. Don't' forget that

Steps to proceed:

1. Identify the bridges that were deleted 
2. Compile a list of TMS-based CMRs and CCAs
3. Merge and reconcile this list, then prioritize the ~50 deleted CMRs
4. Add new CCA based on the deleted CMR 
5. Inform users that their bridge has been restored and how it is different
6. Update the SMR Template in TMS so that if a new CMR is created it would be in a range that does not conflict with any of the CCAs or existing CMRs

The new CCAs will be built as such:

• Name and Conference Name = the CMR name
• Incoming Alias = ((bridge\.%EmailName%|%VideoNumber%)@vc\.%domain%\.com|(bridge\.\.%EmailName%|%VideoNumber%)@%domain%\.com)
• Priority = using the video number from the CMR (this will make them easy to identify later)
• Conference Template = HD Meeting
• Role Type = Participant
• Allow Conference To Be Created = Yes

Differences from a TMS-managed CMR and a Conductor Conference Alias:
• Users will not be able to use the TMS portal to edit them
• CMRs are linked to an Active Directory account so they are deleted when an employee leaves
• If a number (or URI) exists in both TMS and Conductor, the CMR will be connected (this is unrelated to Priority anywhere, it seems to be a default function of the system)

Once this is complete, I will research a little more to see if there is any other possibility to move the CCAs back. During this time we can resume using TMS to create and manage CMRs. If I could not move the CCAs back, then I might as well move the remaining CMRs over to Conductor just in case someone hits the “Regenerate CMRs” button.

Definitions:

TMS = TelePresence Management Suite

CMR = Collaboration Meeting Room (aka video bridge or jabber bridge)

CCA = Conductor Conference Alias

This is short because I have to go do this :)

This thing is going to kill me.

Today was a long day.

Our environment for Cisco TelePresence has a Telepresence Management Server with Provisioning Extension (TMSPE) and  a Conductor to manage the TelePresence Servers (Bridges) and multiple separate Active Directory Domains. TMS polls for accounts that should be allowed to use TelePresence resources and users can build a Collaboration Meeting Room (CMR (video bridge)) from there. We had 2004 CMR built through TMS.

Yeah. Had.

As best I can gather, a user profile is built by TMSPE. When certian parameters of their synched AD profile change TMSPE changes (?) the profile and if there is a CMR connected with that profile it is considered "out of sync".    Don't reconcile these out of sync CMR's because it deletes them and you won't sleep for a while because of that.

If a CMR is out of sync and you regenerate it they (at least in my case) get marked for deletion. We lost 50. And those 50 were not the ones you want to lose. They are gone however and I mourn their loss. I. Trying to bring them back the remaining 150 are now out of sync.

When you have a Conductor, you can build conference aliases manually. There is an API that TMSPE uses to build CMR's on the Conductor and the CMR is pretty much a conference aliases but it is held separate and is not in that list of conference aliases. There's a tool to search for the CMRs, but that's about it.

There is a magic goo that binds TMSPE and Conductor for those CMR's and they get held in a SQL database (tmspe I think was the name). I could restore that and fix everything. But that would make for a much shorter story and require that I have a backup.

Now I'm left with figuring out how to fix things. I am so super lucky that I exported the CMR's before regenerating everything. I know who had a CMR, but there is no way to use TMS to generate a replace ment CMR that has the same video number (which is what everyone uses instead of their video address).

I could manually build new aliases in Conductor and build a matching template to give them a pin.

I could tell everyone to build their CMR's again too. But with the remote possibility of an infrastructure overhaul in a few months I am reticent to cause that jumble only to have a do-over.

Should I leave you with something witty and positive?

Blogging, Tweeting, Linked Inning, Sparking and IFTTTing

Confession; I have never blogged before. 

Since joining Twitter 10 years ago I have tweeted 16.2k times. Twitter has always been more my style because brevity befits my balderdash (ooh i like that). Extending my posts may not be as much a problem as learning the practical mechanics of starting and maintaining something like this.

So this is how I'm proceeding:

1. Bought the NOSaturn.com domain via Domains.Google.com 
2. Tried to connect my new domain to a new Blogger blog, but had to figure out first how to delete some blog I made a dozen years ago about nothing (I only posted twice) (that doesn't really count as blogging does it?)
3.  OK, really setting up the Blogger blog and choose the URL http://blog.NOSaturn.com because I might someday want a real front page
4. Set Blogger to redirect http://NOSaturn.com to the blog because I don't have that real landing page 
5. Much Much playing and experimenting with Blogger and layouts and formats and discovering what holes I have in the configurations

That was a whole lot of fun and I see some neat features about the domain tools offered. The SRV tools could allow me to connect potential future lab to real world communication abilities. 😎  But I have to admit a real annoyance that Blogger does not allow HTTPS: redirects with custom domains. regular HTTP needs to die.

Now that I have a blog with a a couple of entries, I ought to connect it to some of the socials I use. I'm not going to connect to Facebook since that's entirely a personal social thing whereas I mix personal and professional in Twitter. You'll find me on LinkedIn too because I hear that I should be there.

My professional presence on social media is encouraged as I am a 2017 Cisco Champion for Collaboration. I'll talk about that another time.

Ah, yes; back to connecting this blog to social media.... IFTTT, or IF This Then That, is a super useful and pretty easy way to make a "trigger" in one thing do "something". In this case I setup an applet that would post to Twitter and LinkedIn whenever I made a blog entry. The post would include the hashtag #Collaboration because that is what hashtags are for. This was real neat right up to the point that I got way too smart and built an applet that would take any of my tweets with #Collab and post that as a blog entry. 

    Don't do that.

Thankfully I stopped all that nonsense because a blog post triggered a tweet which then triggered a blog post of the tweet and on and on. This is like aiming a video camera right at a screen showing the camera's feed. 

I still wanted some of that same functionality but figuring that Blogger should easily be able to tweet or LinkedIn for me I started exploring again. Blogger's Help forums pointed me to some tool that has shut down, then on to DLVR.it which seems to suite me right now. We will see...

Speaking of applets, the new hotness is of course BOTS! There really isn't much difference between applets, apps, bots or all these things except who is using whatever term at any one time. (right?) One of the collaboration tools I'm enjoying lately is Cisco's Spark. It's a mashup of messaging, chat, voice, video, email, file sharing and other general goodness but I will cover that later. Spark has bots and integrations that really enhance and extend it's functionality. I setup a connection in Spark to Twitter so I could Tweet directly from Spark. That worked. Of course if I included the #Collab hashtag the Twitter post then rolled on up into a blog post. NEAT. I cleaned it up even more with another IFTTT applet that would take something I say in a designated Spark room would post directly to my blog. EVEN NEATER.

This is all a very long winded explanation for today's previous posts and a couple I deleted last night from the recursive posting debacle. 

(Remember that "brevity befits my balderdash"? )

This blog really is an extension of my ongoing professional development. There are so many tools and communication modes available now. I really believe understanding their strengths and weaknesses is central to collaboration.