Cisco Web Attendant
Cisco WebAttendant is designed to replace traditional manual attendant consoles.
It is a Web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) that allows the user to receive
and dispatch calls from any IP phone within the network.WebAttendant works
on a client server architecture that allows the IP phone in use to interface directly
with the CallManager to direct calls and to monitor the status of lines, much like
a traditional receptionist console.
Another added benefit of WebAttendant is the ability it provides system
administrators to perform system maintenance from that same easy-to-use Webbased
GUI as opposed to the interface of the legacy PBX systems.WebAttendant
offers many of the same features offered by traditional PBX systems such as hunt
groups and multiple attendant consoles.
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42 Chapter 2 • New World Technologies
WebAttendant is included as part of the basic package when purchasing
CallManager 3.x. It has the ability to scale to meet the size of almost any IP telephony
infrastructure. A single WebAttendant console can monitor up to 26 calls
at a time.A single CallManager cluster utilizing WebAttendant can support up 32
hunt groups with 16 members per hunt group. Also, a cluster can support up to
96 WebAttendant consoles.That means up to 512 (96 consoles x 26 calls) calls at
one time.
When designing your infrastructure to include WebAttendant, make sure to
take into consideration all the design limitations discussed in the previous paragraph,
such as number of hunt groups (32), number of members within those
hunt groups (16), as well as the maximum number of simultaneous conversations
possible (512).Your design should never reach the limitations of the
WebAttendant system—if you are approaching these design limits you should
consider utilizing multiple CallManager clusters.
NOTE
One of Cisco’s partners, Arc Solutions (www.arcsolutions.com), is also
producing an attendant console software package. While similar to
WebAttendant, it offers a more feature-rich and scalable platform.