Category: WebEx

The Cisco WebEx Meetings Server 2.5 has been released on October 17th. This version comes with a long-awaited Multi-Data Center (MDC) support, which is essentially High Availability and load sharing between two geographically distributed areas. Be warned, though, that a separate MDC license is required (read more about MDC Licenses in CWMS 2.5 Administration Guide). The other neat feature that could be attractive to multi-national companies is the IVR language selection for system access telephone numbers (13 languages are supported).

The ISO is available from CCO. Please refer to release notes for full information.

Update #2 07-18-2014: A hotfix cisco-webex-meetings-server-2.0.1.416.B.iso has been released for customers who are affected by the defect CSCup62113. The hotfix is available via special download only; to obtain access to it, please contact Cisco TAC.

Update #1 07-08-2014: Apparently, another outcome of the bug is that the Personal Conferencing accounts have been removed from all user profiles after users were temporarily deactivated in CWMS. There is a way to re-enable the old host/participant access codes if a user creates a new Personal Conferencing account (regardless whether the same or a new PIN is specified). The old Personal Conferencing host/access codes will not show up in the users’ profile or WebEx Productivity Tools in Outlook.

So I have upgraded our CWMS 2.0 environment to the latest maintenance release (MR4 or 2.0.1.407). Everything went well and the systems tested successfully post the upgrade. Time to remove pre-upgrade snapshots of your CWMS VMs (don’t ever forget to do this, as snapshots left behind do have an adverse effect on VM performance) and call it a night. Well, it turned out that the newest maintenance release is bugged and this time it is a big one. If you haven’t upgraded to the latest maintenance release, but plan to do it sometime soon, you’d likely want to reconsider. Read on…

So I have learned today that all but two of my 5000+ users were deactivated in CWMS with a status “disabled on LDAP” (which, of course, isn’t true). Users can still authenticate with the CallManager (with which CWMS synchronizes), so directory synchronization with LDAP and LDAP authentication isn’t a problem. Turns out, CWMS would disable any user whose record hasn’t been updated in the CallManager within the past few weeks (8 to be precise, as claimed by a Cisco TAC engineer). There is no patch or hotfix available at this point, but a workaround is as follows:

1. Make a change (any change) for the affected end user object(s) in the CallManager (you’d likely want to make the changes in bulk using BAT).
2. Synchronize the users in CWMS
3. Disable periodic synchronization.

I found it easiest to bulk update user objects using a query (Bulk Administration -> Users -> Update Users -> Query). I have made a copy of an existing Service Profile and saved it under a different name, then switched all of my users to that Service Profile using a query in Bulk Administration. Use Job Scheduler to verify that all records have been updated successfully.

Once the batch job completes successfully and you have confirmed that all records have been updated, proceed with synchronization of users with CUCM in CWMS.

Important: Do not forget to disable periodic synchronization!

Hope you did not have to go through this. I will update the post once a hotfix or an update with a fix becomes available. You can also save the bug CSCup62113 and add email subscription to receive updates on it in Cisco’s bug tracker tool.

If your organization uses Cisco WebEx Meetings Server with AD directory and AD authentication and you have configured the Directory Integration according to the CWMS Administration Guide, you may be due for a surprise within a few months of initial configuration with a number of users being turned inactive. “But why?!” you ask. Remember that setting about password aging that supposedly does not apply to AD authenticated users? I’m talking about this one:

Well, turns out that if initially synchronized users did not login to CWMS within the default 180 days, their accounts get deactivated. Naturally, one would want to re-activate the accounts and, if you are dealing with a large number of users, you would almost always choose to activate in bulk using CSV file. A word of caution here: activating a large number of users with CSV import also triggers AD Activation Email to be sent out to all enabled users (even if the option to automatically notify users is unchecked under Users -> Directory Integration:

.

You may want to modify the AD Activation Email template (found under Settings -> Email -> Templates) or, if you prefer WebEx Meetings Server not to reach out to end users, configure a Hub Transport rule on your Exchange server to automatically discard or redirect messages with “Action Required: Activate account” in the Subject line. Which is precisely what I have done:

[PS] C:>New-TransportRule -Name "Disable CWMS AD Activation Email" -SubjectOrBodyContainsWords "Action
Required: Activate account" -FromAddressContainsWords "cwms.ucpro.ca" -Comments "This rule disables AD Activation
 email from Cisco WebEx Meetings Server" -Enabled $true 

Name                                               State    Priority Comments
----                                               -----    -------- --------
Disable CWMS AD Activation Email                   Enabled  10       This rule disables AD Activation email from Cis...

I am not sure if disabling the password aging policy would prevent the active accounts from going inactive after 180 days (or some other value if different from default), but I recommend disabling the supposedly inapplicable password aging policy anyway.