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Cisco Personal Assistant 1.4 Installation and Administration Guide
OL-4590-03
Chapter 1 Planning for Personal Assistant
Understanding Personal Assistant
Cisco IP Telephony Terminology
Personal Assistant and other components of the IP telephony network, such as Cisco CallManager, use
terminology and concepts that might not be familiar to you. The following sections explain these
concepts and how Personal Assistant uses them:
Personal Assistant Interceptor Ports, page 1-3
CTI Route Points and Media Ports, page 1-3
Partitions and Calling Search Spaces, page 1-4
Cisco CallManager Clusters, page 1-4
How Personal Assistant Uses Directories, page 1-5

Personal Assistant Interceptor Ports

The Personal Assistant interceptor ports identify the phone extensions that Personal Assistant will
intercept from Cisco CallManager. You configure these ports in Cisco CallManager as CTI route points
and identify them in the Personal Assistant server configuration. The route points configuration allows
Personal Assistant to intercept the calls.
You can use wildcards when creating the route points so that one route point covers many extensions.
For example, the route point 1XXX covers all extensions from 1000 to 1999.
When you configure the interceptor ports, you should also set up the call forwarding configuration for
interceptor port error handling to allow calls to go through to the extension if the Personal Assistant
server is unavailable. The way you configure interceptor port error handling will differ depending on the
version of Cisco CallManager that the system uses (see the “Why You Need Interceptor Port Error
Handling” section on page 1-23 for additional information on interceptor port error handling).

CTI Route Points and Media Ports

When you assign a phone number to a Personal Assistant server, you must define the extension as a
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) route point in Cisco CallManager (see the “Setting Up the
Personal Assistant Number” section on page 3-8). The number you assign as the CTI route point is the
phone number your users use to access Personal Assistant.
A CTI route point is a virtual device that lets the Personal Assistant server receive multiple calls
simultaneously.
When a user calls the Personal Assistant server phone number that is defined as a CTI route point,
Personal Assistant assigns the call to an available media port on the server. In Cisco CallManager, you
add one media port for each simultaneous Personal Assistant session you require (see the “Adding Media
Ports for Personal Assistant” section on page 3-10). For example, if you need 24 simultaneous sessions,
add 24 ports. Then, in the Personal Assistant server configuration, you enter 24 as the number of media
ports (see the “Server Configuration” section on page A-16).
If all media ports on a Personal Assistant server are in use, subsequent callers receive a busy signal
unless you have set up load balancing (see the “Setting Up Personal Assistant Server Load Balancing”
section on page 1-13).
Note If you use Personal Assistant to create an automated attendant, you also create a route point for the
attendant phone number. The attendant uses media ports in the same manner as Personal Assistant.