Just following up on my post about Nokia E60 and E61s talking to Cisco CallManager Express, I asked the guys at the Cisco stand at Networkers a few weeks back, since they were demoing just these phones. When I mentioned "SIP" and "CallManager Express", though, the guy's face fell and he said "um, er, I really don't know, sorry." It turns out that the demo they had was using the (as yet unavailable to mere mortals - "out in November" they reckon) software from Nokia that lets the phones talk SCCP instead of SIP. I'm rather disappointed that a) this is considered the "solution", and b) it's taken a year to get the frigging software ready. Oh, "apparently" somebody had made the Nokia phones talk to Call Manager 5.0 via SIP "but it wasn't very straightforward". For CallManager Express on the other hand, it seemed like nobody had made it work directly.

Meanwhile, I can make a client like the free X-Lite work, but only if it's on the same subnet as the router running CCME - this is because CCME 4.0 in IOS 12.4(9)T only lets you identify SIP users by MAC address rather than IP address:

voice register pool  6
 id mac 0011.2233.4455
 number 1 dn 6
 max registrations 36
 username somebody password somewhere
 codec g711ulaw

If you try doing id ip 1.2.3.4 instead, you'll be told Failed: CME mode only accept mac address! Fine. This is as far as I can get while I'm at home sick with a cold, so next time I'm in the office I'll try one of the Nokias and see if they work like X-Lite did.

[update: I now have the Nokia phone registering directly with Cisco CallManager Express.]