Telephony, Design and HCS Dial Plan Overview¶
VOSS Automate provides automation and standardization to Unified Communications Manager and other elements such as IOS devices, Cisco Unity Connection, and Cisco Unified in a repeatable way.
Bulk loaders can be employed to provision and onboard customers. Central to this goal, the routing architecture and associated element configuration meet in a configurable model that is used within VOSS Automate.
In this guide, the model is referred to as the HCS Dial Plan Model and HCS Dial Plan or simply Dial Plan Model and Dial Plan.
Important
Only the VOSS Automate Provider solution supports the HCS dialplan tools.
The main purpose of the Dial Plan Model is to create a pre-integrated baseline configuration of Unified Communications Manager applications. The Dial Plan Model can then be integrated into the platform and the service provider infrastructure with minimal effort. The Dial Plan Model configures not only the end customer equipment like Unified Communications Manager or on-premises routers, but also the interaction with aggregation layers using products such as Cisco Session Management Edition, or Session Border Controller for those functions. The standard configurations are provided, but the service providers must customize parts of the model for a particular environment.
For the end customers, the dial plan is designed to handle a significant portion of the corporate dialing schemes. It includes a standardized model on how to handle intrasite, intersite, and PSTN calls, generally using a site + extension methodology. It also spans advanced routing requirements of elements like central versus local breakout for PSTN calls and also handles the different numbering requirements across multiple countries.
The intersection point between the dial plan and VOSS Automate comes in the definition of standard telephony services that abstract Unified Communications Manager configurations into simpler choices that correspond to the feature plans a service provider wants to offer, and end customer to consume. For example, the partitions, calling search spaces, and translation patterns are predefined based on a choice of simple outbound, inbound, call forwarding, and time of day settings, which in VOSS Automate are exposed as service types. These services are combined into feature packages and templates that define a user or lines telephony services.
Given the central role to the architecture and the provision workflow, this document outlines the key architectural elements that define the Dial Plan Model, the mechanics of how the model is constructed, and the resulting service configurations in VOSS Automate. In addition, the model can be customized to fit different infrastructure requirements and customized service types.