Communications Enabled Applications Vendor Interoperability

With so much buzz around the release of the Communications Enabled Applications 1.0.0.0 feature pack I would like to highlight the vendors that we worked closely with to ensure product interoperability.

Below is a listing of each vendor and PBX version used in our testing.

Avaya:
Application Enablement Services
Version: r4-2-1-20-5-0
Server Type: DELL1950
Offer Type: TURNKEY


Cisco:
Cisco Unified CM Administration
System version: 7.0.1.11000-2
Cisco Unified Presence Administration
System version: 7.0.2.10000-36


Nortel:
Nortel Communication Server 1000E CPPM
Version: 4021
Release: 550J

I would like to thank Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel for their support in helping us ensure our product worked seamlessly with their specific PBX solution.

CEA Packs a Punch with PBX Interoperability

CEA 1.0.0.0 now gives system administrators the ability to extend their telephony and J2EE architecture to include 3^rd party SIP-CTI enabled PBXs. This feature strategically allows IT environments running WebSphere Application Server (WAS) the flexibility to extend their current applications to include features and functionality supplied through the WebSphere implementation of the SIP-CTI (ECMA TR/87) API.

From an interoperability standpoint, we attempted to make the setup and configuration of an external PBX as painless as possible. We’ve created a panel that will require you to specify the hostname, port, and protocol of the SIP CTI (ECMA TR/87) Gateway. Also, if your gateway supports this, you can specify a “superuser” that will be solely utilized to authenticate and authorize outbound calls through the gateway. Conversely, if your PBX does not support the use of a “superuser”, an application developer has the option of extracting the username from the request and using it to authenticate and authorize the outbound call.

For those out there who do not have access to their PBX, we’ve also included a sample PBX application which can be deployed on stand alone appserver. Although this application is for test purposes only, this sample PBX will allow a customer to get a feel as to how to deploy and test applications that interact with a virtual SIP CTI enabled PBX.

It’s our hope that you take action in deploying and consuming all of the new features made available in the CEA feature pack. In future posts, I will be blogging about some of the technical nuances that you should be mindful of when deploying a CEA solution with specific vendor PBXs.

Interoperability with major vendors

One of the things that we believe makes WebSphere CEA unique and ready for our customer's environments is that we partner with and test our solution with major vendors like Avaya and Cisco. These partners have helped us to create a solution that is ready for customer deployments. In the next couple of weeks, our lead interoperability engineer, James Hales, will be talking about how some of this works. I talked James into doing the above spoof video to introduce the set of blogs about testing and interoperability.