Cisco Unified Communications Manager and LDAP Integration

Cisco Unified Communications Manager v6 (formerly called Call Manager and then Unified Call Manager) can synchronise its user list with Active Directory (it’s actually a one way synchronisation), and can authenticate users against Active Directory. It does this using LDAP. That’s no surprise and pretty standard. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow you to specify any search filters. You specify the base DN (or multiple base DNs) and that’s it. It seems that if an account in AD has a first name and last name CUCM adds it to its directory. The account doesn’t need to have a telephone number, it can even be disabled. Note that you can only synchronise accounts – CUCM ignores Contacts.

Didn’t anyone at Cisco think that their clients might possibly want to filter their imports? Did it not occur to them that the structure in AD might not reflect the way clients want to import users into CUCM?

It’s just not good enough!