Cisco CallManager Express (CCME) Integration with Asterisk PBX

This site is intended to illustrate the procedures needed to setup Cisco CallManager Express and integrate CCME with Asterisk's PBX voicemail and auto attendant.

Since this is a living document, feedback, questions, corrections, and additions to this site's topic are greatly welcomed.  Please do not hesitate to send me an e-mail and I'll try to reply in a timely matter.  The submission of scenarios, tips, and additions will be credited back to the owner of the submission. 

For my IP PBX I am using a Cisco 3662 running CallManager Express 3.2, running an interim IOS 123-12.12 T3 because the fix for bug CSCeg52696 is not yet available in a ED or GA release.  I selected the 3662 based upon it being the only router that I had available to do this project. In addition, it allowed me to have 120 IP phones (ephone) and 288 virtual ports (ephone-dn) and the price was right; free.  If you click on the version link, you can see the hardware that I have on the 3662.  In addition, my migration page explains my reasoning for the hardware that is installed.

The type of phones that I use with CME are: 7902, 7940, and 7960.  I will be adding in the future the 7920 wireless phone.  Once I have the 7920 phone configured, I'll update the site reflecting how the procedure went.

The Asterisk server which is being used as my voicemail server and auto attendant was chosen because of four reasons:  Cisco would not support Unity Express on the 3662 platform, I did not need to learn TCL scripting to program the auto attendant on CME, I needed additional hardware to implement a voice out server to create the prompts need to have an employee directory, and finally all the items needed to implement Asterisk were readily available. 

The Asterisk box is a Crystal Ria with dual P3 850mhx processors, 512mb of RAM, 20GB of HD space and running Redhat Fedora Core 1.