Did you know there's an oft-overlooked feature included in Cisco Emergency Responder that supports mapping locations for remote workers' phones? Whether a Jabber client or 8865, CER and CUCM work together to support these phones through the CER off-premises user (OFP) portal.
Interestingly, most organizations have never heard of the OFP feature!
The good news is, using CER's OFP feature to take advantage of self-service address creation is simple if you follow a few rules.
Validate Support for Your Phones
Validating support for your phone models begins with the CER release notes. Within the CER product support page, click the Documentation tab and type "release notes" in the search bar. Navigate to the release notes specific to your version of CER and confirm your model phones support the off-premises feature.
Create the OFP AXL App User
Your CER deployment should have an existing application user that monitors the CTI ports and route points. The OFP AXL user will import devices, device ownership info and monitor device registration changes. Create a new application user such as "cerofp", assign a password, and add the required groups: Standard CCM Admin Users, Standard TabSync User, and Standard RealtimeAndTraceCollection.
Create the Application Server in CUCM
Navigate to System – Application Server, click Add New, select CER Location Management as the type, enter the IP address of your CER publisher and the OFP application user credentials.
Configure OFP on the Phone
Non-supported phones can still work with OFP — users can configure their address within the OFP portal, but the device will not prompt them on screen. For supported phones, a legal disclaimer notice is pushed to the phone advising the user to set their current location before placing calls.
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