2Ring Call Accounting v4.4 – Release Notes

by 2Ring · May 08, 2015

2Ring Call Accounting v4.4 enables budget control for organizations that use Cisco® Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) – including Business Edition 6000 and 7000.

As always, we at 2Ring strive to minimize your configuration effort, and thus in an ideal case the user groups (such as departments) and limits/budgets are set and read from user attributes in MS Active Directory (MS AD). If it is not possible to use a common attribute, you can set your user groups and limits manually in the web UI of 2Ring Call Accounting.

To define user groups manually, you can use extension ranges and then set limits, e.g. Sales – 1XX – Limit $200; Engineering – 2XX – Limit $100; … To define user groups and limits, you can also use a combination of these two methods. This means that user groups can be based on user attributes from MS AD, but budgets can then be set in the admin interface of 2Ring Call Accounting.

Defining User Groups by Extension Ranges

Once user groups are ready and budgets are set, you need to create a Budget Control Rule that defines what should happen when a defined percentage of the allocated budget is used. The supported actions are 1) sending email notifications to the user and/or to his manager, and 2) limiting the user’s calling rights – no international calls, no calls longer than 10 minutes, no more external calls other than emergency calls, etc. This is done by switching the CSS applied to the user’s extension on CUCM, so it is up to what the applied CSS profile looks like.

All that’s left in this simple process is to get yourself familiar with the new Budget Control report in 2Ring CALL ACCOUNTING. It will help you stay on top of your team’s phone usage and it will also allow you to (un)lock phones manually. As with all other 2Ring CALL ACCOUNTING reports, you can subscribe to it to receive regular updates to your email.

Hint: You can also consider applying virtual currency to internal calls – calls to a service desk can cost more than calls to a financial department or vice versa..

Bugs Fixed

The Unified Installer prerequisites check now supports Windows 2012 and later

Image of graphic used to denote press release.