CUCME Presence

Fact: Every CUCME deployment should contain presence information.

When you realize how easy it is to configure presence within CUCME, it’s amazing that more engineers do not deploy this useful feature.  CUCME Presence provides line state information to other users using the SIP methods of SUBSCRIBE and NOTIFY.

There are two ways that presence information is made visible in a CUCME deployment: (1) BLF speed dials configured on phones and (2) phone directories accessed through the phone menu.

When a phone changes line state, CUCME sends out a notification to all watching devices.  To begin, enable the sending of presence methods via SIP.

sip-ua

   presence enable

Now that the system will provide presence updates, execute the following commands to present line status in the phone directories.

presence

    presence call-list

If you stop here, you’ll notice that presence information doesn’t display.  The reason is that CUCME, by default, disallows presence information on all lines.  To enable the “watching” of line status, each line will need to be configured with the “allow watch” command.  This applies to both SCCP and SIP phones.

SCCP example:

ephone-dn 1

    allow watch

telephony-service

    create cnf-files

SIP example:

voice register dn 1

    allow watch

voice register global

    create profile

    reset

Now that presence is enabled on the system and “allowed” at the line-level, configure any necessary BLF speed dials to monitor specific lines from the buttons on a phone.  The command is the same, whether SCCP or SIP.

ephone 1

    blf-speed-dial 1 3400 label Ezekiel Smeltz

voice register pool 1

    blf-speed-dial 1 3400 label Ezekiel Smeltz

To verify that presence is functioning properly:

show presence global

show presence subscription

To dig deeper for troubleshooting or curiosity:

debug presence x

debug ephone blf AAAA.BBBB.CCCC

debug ccsip messages