Not Good Enough

Cisco Unified Communications Manager v6 (formerly called Call Manager and then Unified Call Manager) can synchronise its user list with Active Directory (it’s actually a one way synchronisation), and can authenticate users against Active Directory. It does this using LDAP. That’s no surprise and pretty standard. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow you to specify any search filters. You specify the base DN (or multiple base DNs) and that’s it. It seems that if an account in AD has a first name and last name CUCM adds it to its directory. The account doesn’t need to have a telephone number, it can even be disabled. Note that you can only synchronise accounts – CUCM ignores Contacts.

Didn’t anyone at Cisco think that their clients might possibly want to filter their imports? Did it not occur to them that the structure in AD might not reflect the way clients want to import users into CUCM?

It’s just not good enough!

Opened up SQL 2000 Enterprise Manager the other day to look at a performance problem (which turned out to be someone purging WSUS of old updates). Anyway, I went to look at Process Info (under Management –> Current Activity) to see what was happening. Process Info displays details on various SQL process IDs (e.g. Open Transactions, CPU, Physical IO, Memory Usage). It also lets you sort by various columns – which can be quite useful. I say “can be”, because, unfortunately, Enterprise Manager seems to do an ASCII or alphanumeric sort, rather than a numeric sort:

Process Info sorted by CPU

What bright spark went to all that trouble to provide all this information in Process Info, and then didn’t do the last bit to allow us to sort it in an intelligent manner. I mean, it can’t be that hard.

It’s just not good enough!