Wednesday 3 April 2013

WebEx audio entitlement with CUWL Pro subscription

If you look at the list of included items within CUWL pro you'll notice that WebEx social and WebEx meetings in in there, the following table is UC Licensing 9.0:



<--- You can see here WebEx listed.














Ignore WebEx Social for the time being because this the old Cisco Quad (social networking for the enterprise) very very good but not the subject of this post.

When you think of WebEx you normally think of a collaborative online meeting environment, which is audio, video, chat, slide show and an interactive white board. But what do you get with CUWL Pro? The quick answer is most of it, the longer answer is below...

First of all there are 2 options for WebEx with CUWL, Hosted (WebEx Meetings) or on-premises (WebEx Meeting Server). The Hosted version gives you a subscription to WebEx Meetings for 1 year (which can be increased to 3 or 5 years). One big note here is you get 1 port for every 10 CUWL users. So if you are deploying 100 CUWL users you will get 10 ports. A port allows 1 user to participate in a WebEx meeting, this can either be hosting a meeting or a participant. Ports don't have a bearing on the number of meetings you can have, so for the 10 port example this could be 1 meeting of 10 or 5 meetings of 2 etc. This service must be activated within 90 days otherwise you risk loosing days of the service.

The Hosted version requires that you have a dedicated server, virtual or otherwise, to install the WebEx Meeting Server software on. You don't have the concept of ports but rather "Meeting Server users" of which you get 1 Meeting Server user per CUWL Pro User, allowing everyone to take part in meetings. This is obviously better but you will have to host and maintain your own WebEx Meeting Server.

One other very important note is the audio minutes. Within the WebEx Meetings (both hosted and on-premise ) functionality you get unlimited VoIP minutes, meaning that all the users can join a WebEx meeting, user their USB headset / computer speakers and participate in the conference. WebEx also has the to dial in on the phone for free however someone has to front the bill for this and Cisco sells you this service in the form of audio minutes. If you do not pay for WebEx audio minutes your participants will only be able to participate using the computer audio. If you want a freephone number and particpants to be able to dial in you must purchase audio minutes, which are sold in minutes per month, here is an example top level part: L-WBX-AUDIO-5K. Audio license subscriptions must run in line with the WebEx data subscription.

References:
Cisco UC Licensing version 9.0
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/voicesw/ps6882/ps9156/product_solution_overview0900aecd806cc7a4.html

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