I’ve been spending a good part of my time at work recently reading large amounts of Cisco documentation for Unified MeetingPlace, Unified Communications Manager (formerly Call Manager) and all the necessary parts and pieces that an enterprise needs to make those work. The most aggravating part of the reading has been finding that no one seems to ever do a “sanity check” on the documentation. For example, our technical engineers keep telling us that the MeetingPlace Network Backup Gateway runs on Windows 2003, even though the release notes for the most recent version say:

Network Backup Gateway must be installed on a 7800 series Cisco Media Convergence Server (MCS) with the Cisco version of the Microsoft Windows 2000 server operating system installed.

Also frustrating initially, very little of the pre-sales technical work seems to have been transferred to the post-sales technical group. Cisco claims to have made a serious effort is correcting this, but we haven’t had another conference call since our concerns got heard by the right people.

In a completely unrelated event, a coworker has joined the ranks of us bloggers, and she’s trying to write one entry every day. I also need to document my thoughts on the record US$100 million fine against McLaren for the Stepney-gate industrial espionage event in F1, but that really should be another post.