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Phone Control Workaround for Informacast Systems

PROBLEM

Phone Control and Broadcast functions do not work, or only work partially, on CUCM systems where Informacast is installed.

The phone may not be able to authenticate, or the control keypad GUI may come up, but the screen may show unavailiable. A screenshot test to http:\(phoneIPaddress)CGIScreenshot may bring back either a Cisco Error #4 (failure to authenticate) or an image for a broken JPG similar to this one:

SOLUTION

If Phone Control or Broadcast features are not working or only partially working, and the phones authentication URL is pointing to the Informacast server, then you may be able to resolve the issues in one of two ways.

Step 1) Make sure that Authentication request relay is enabled in the Informacast software.

This normally should be enabled by default, but in some cases it may not be. If you have access, log into the informacast system and browse to the Admin>Telephony>CUCM Clusters menu. In this example, we can see that Under the XML push authentication, it is configured to relay authentication requests to the publisher, although the publisher can also be specified in the “Next Authentication URL” field.

Step 2) Use the Communications Manager Application User specified in Informacast.  

If the Authentication relay settings appear to be correct but you are still unable to phone control or broadcast from Insight, then you will need to use the account listed in this field for the Phone Control section in the cluster properties of Insight’s setup page. 

If you look under this user account in CUCM (e.g. Informacast_AXL), you may see devices similar to these listed in the Controlled Devices List:

  • Informacast
  • Informacast1

If these or similar looking names appear in the list, then you should be able to initiate phone control and broadcast without having to add individual phones to the account’s Controlled Devices List. If these are not present, or if they are but you still cannot control phones, then try adding individual phones to the CDL to test further. 

**Note – if the user does not know the password for the Application User account being used by Informacast, it may be necessary to reset the password in both CUCM and Informacast before entering the login into the Phone Control section of Insight. If the user has any concerns that this may “break” Informacast, they should consult with Informacast support prior to taking these steps.

Updated on December 27, 2023

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