[cisco-voip] Caller-ID Question

[Andre Beck]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 03:28:30PM -0500, Israel Lang wrote:
> 
> I had a department ask me today if there was a way to supply caller-id to
> certain inbound callers. For example, Bob calls in from his cell phone
> (555-555-5555). Is there a way to have Bob come up on the screen rather than
> 555-555-5555?

Nothing that is part of vanilla CCME or CCM will do this. There are,
however, a number of add-on products for either solution that can do
what you want. Mostly they work by integrating somehow with the phones
(using TAPI or JTAPI CTI), monitoring all incoming numbers and pushing
information messages to the phones using XML.

I personally don't like this solution. A call coming in without name
display information should be matched against a database and the name
information, if any is found, could be integrated into display infor-
mation. This will even allow you to see them in missed calls on your
phone, not just the very moment they call.

For a special line, I had to code an IVR application that first talks
to the caller, then redirects them to the real destination (it's
essentially a spoken nag screen so everyone calling our support is
aware that this isn't for free). As the only thing that comes with CCM
for free is a disabled (but not scaled-down ressourcewise) CRA which
didn't fit my needs, I've used TCL IVR on the IOS gateway to implement
this. I've added some further code to this IVR application which just does

a) look whether there is display information provided (which isn't,
   due to our PSTN carrier filtering any such thing out for a good
   reason)
b) sending the calling party number to a dedicated RADIUS server
c) RADIUS, when it knows the CLID, will answer with the display
   information
d) the IVR sets the display information of the call to what it got
   from RADIUS (if any), then forwards the call.

This works pretty well, the only drawback it has is it only works in
the context of our IVR which accepts the call, let's the user wait a
while and then forwards it. I don't know whether it could be rewritten
to query the CLID before actually accepting the call, and how to force
all incoming calls (not just those to a particular extension) through
this application. It will also need special RADIUS timeout handling,
as you don't want to have calls blocked because there is no answer.
But from what I remember of TCL IVR, it could be possible to code this.

HTH,
Andre.
-- 
                  The _S_anta _C_laus _O_peration
  or "how to turn a complete illusion into a neverending money source"

-> Andre Beck    +++ ABP-RIPE +++    IBH Prof. Dr. Horn GmbH, Dresden <-