Introduction

Effective April 9th, 2018 all new UCx appliances are shipped with the UCx Release 6 Software installed. All UCx appliances held in partner inventory on UCx Release 5 software can be field upgraded to Release 6.  UCx Release 6 introduces many product enhancements, a new hardware appliance and several new exciting features for customers looking for a full-featured, value packed IP based unified communication system.

UCx Release 6 Contents

Changes to UCx Appliance Servers

With Release 6.0, E-MetroTel introduces the new UCx250 appliance.  This new UCx250 appliance is positioned as a replacement for the two low end UCx appliances - UCx20 and UCx50E.  In addition to this change, some of the other appliances will see enhancements and/or price adjustments, as detailed below.

Platform Updates

• Update to Asterisk 13 (the current LTS release of Asterisk)
• Enhancements of the UCx management GUI required for compatibility with Asterisk 13
• Self-signed certificates compatible with Google Chrome version 58 and higher
• Support for the UCx250 appliance

Platform Enhancements

• Dashboard GUI enhancements
  • Updated user interface of several applets
  • Communication Activity applet - automatic refresh of all values (active calls, channels, phones, trunks, queue calls, etc.)
• Call Monitoring (ChanSpy) enhancements
  • Mandatory password
  • New ability to exclude extensions
• Nortel Settings - New configuration options
  • Choice of what to display for First Line for Calls Without Name
• Nortel phones
  • Automatic labeling of BLF keys programmed from a phone (See Internal Autodial)
• Firewall - default configuration enhancements
  • Updated default Firewall Rules (new component rules added and obsolete rules removed)
  • Updated default Port Definitions with new capability to update defined ports to match current system configuration
• Asterisk API - new rights added for AGI, Call Completion, Advice of Charge and Security events.

MDSE Enhancements

The new features and enhancements available in Release 6.0 for MDSE are:

• New versions of Erlang OTP 20 and Elixir 1.5.2, for improved performance.
• Digital set caching for faster initialization during restarts. This enhancement caches digital phone type and set ID during the first initialization of phone. On subsequent restarts the phone type and Mac address information is retrieved from cache instead of querying the phones. This speeds up initialization of large number of phones.
• Software enhancements for issues reported through static analysis tool.
• Other improvements include:
  • Using TDS resource to playout DTMF instead of sending it in the voice channel.
  • Analog set recovery after asterisk restart
  • Pbxlink recovery enhancements
  • DSP connection link recovery enhancements in a UCx cloud configuration

Event Reporting

A new Event Viewer page added to the Support tab that shows system and application events.

Remote MGC Cabinets

Added support for remote MGC cabinets, i.e. cabinets that are not co-located with the UCx Server (See pages MG - Media Gateway Configuration and MG - UCx Server Configuration).

Security

The host access controls - Deny / Permit - were added also for Nortel phones.  With these options, administrators can configure which host(s) and/or subnet(s) have the right to register as each Nortel extension.  This option could be used for example

• to restrict the use of Nortel extensions to a local subnet (deny = 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0, permit = 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0)
• to restrict the use of a specific Nortel extension to a single physical phone that has a fixed IP address assigned (deny = 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0, permit = 192.168.1.25/255.255.255.255)
• to restrict the use of a specific Nortel extension to a local subnet (for an office phone) and a remote subnet (for hotdesking from a home office) (deny = 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0, permit = 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0&34.27.59.0/255.255.255.0)

The rules to configure these Permit/Deny options are consistent with any other Permit/Deny options in our GUI and in Asterisk (SIP, IAX2, Asterisk API, etc.)

UCx Hospitality Connector

A connector for Property Management Systems (PMS) that support the Mitel PMS interface.