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Cisco Personal Assistant 1.4 Installation and Administration Guide
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Chapter 1 Planning for Personal Assistant
Understanding Personal Assistant

How Personal Assistant Uses Directories

With Pers onal Assistant, you must have a supported LDAP directory installed, to meet network
requirements. The directory contains records for each user in your organization, and includes
information such as name, phone extension, e-mail address, and office location. This LDAP directory is
typically called the corporate directory. Personal Assistant accesses this directory when a user asks
Personal Assistant to dial a number by telling Personal Assistant the applicable name.
Personal Assistant also uses the directory to maintain Personal Assistant configuration information and
some Personal Assistant user information (for example, the call routing rules and spoken name of a
user). For this information, Personal Assistant automatically uses the directory that Cisco CallManager
uses.
You can also use the Cisco CallManager directory as the corporate directory, but this is not required.
Many installations prefer a corporate directory that is independent from Cisco CallManager, and
Personal Assistant fully supports this separation. Or, your corporate directory might already be
integrated with Cisco CallManager. See the “Configuring the Corporate Directory” section on page 4-7
for information on identifying the directory to Personal Assistant.
The Personal Assistant system configuration includes a setting for unique user name attribute. This is
the name of the field within your directory that is unique for each user. Ask your directory administrator
for the name of this field if you do not know it. See the “Corporate Directory Settings” section on
page A-3 for information on updating the Personal Assistant configuration with this information.
Role of Personal Assistant in the Cisco IP Telephony Network
Personal Assistant interacts with many elements in your IP telephony network. Some network elements
need to be informed of the presence of Personal Assistant; other elements interact indirectly with
Personal Assistant and do not require such information. You should have a fully-functional
voice-over-IP network in place before installing Personal Assistant in your telephony network.