Oh Cisco, bless your cotton socks.
I added a load of phones to CallManager today, and used the Bulk Administration Tool (BAT) for the first time. The phones imported happily, but I realised I’d managed to miss out some fields, like the caller line text; the phones will display the caller’s number and their name, assuming I set it. The BAT hadn’t added those fields (or rather, I hadn’t), so they weren’t present.
I knew bulk updates were possible, as I’d seen Update Phones on the Bulk Updates menu. As far as I knew (being relatively new to CallManager) you could bulk update everything from a CSV file. I was kind of right. Sort of.
You see, the bulk update feature for phones doesn’t quite work the same way as the bulk import. Import allows you to add and specify ALL fields of the phone’s settings, and uses templates to fill the gaps you don’t specify. The update feature, however, allows you to bulk update features of all the phones, but with a couple of caveats. Firstly, you can select them by a query (i.e. all phones with MAC addresses starting 002E), or from a list of names, or directory numbers.
That’s fine, assuming you’re making the same change to all phones, such as changing call search spaces, or setting all the descriptions to be the same, but if you want to change lots of things to lots of different things (such as the names on the phones), then you can’t use the update tool.
No, you have to use the Insert Phones feature for that. Of course! It’s all so obvious!
There’s a little tick box sitting at the bottom of the Insert Phones page which says ‘Override the existing configuration’. In other words, overwrite everything I’ve already set!
So here’s what I did to fix up the issues I’d found:
- Exported ALL the phones I’d added to a CSV
- Edited the CSV file, and cleaned up the data. I fixed a few other bits that had gone screwy in the process
- Uploaded the file back to CallManager as an All Details file. I didn’t bother stripping any fields out.
- Go to Bulk Administration | Phones | Insert Phones
- Select Insert Phones All Details, choose the file I uploaded, and tick that Override the existing configuration.
- I then set it to run immediately, and submitted.
- A few moments later, my phones we all updated.
So, a bulk update, is actually a bulk Insert… depending on what you’re updating mind.