$3,000 for Obsolete Paper!

My current project is to replace an older Comdial PBX with a Cisco CallManager Express.  The goal is to expand capacity and features for one of our busier doctor's offices.

When I started unpacking all of the boxes from Cisco I found that my CUCME phone licenses were shipped individually in the typical Cisco licensing cardboard envelope.  At that point my thought was, "crap that's a lot of PAKs to register".  The good news is that none of the envelopes contained PAKs, but the ones for the phones didn't even contain unique licenses.  The paperwork inside those envelopes was generic and included a phone guide for the 7940 and 7960 phones with CUCME 3.0.  Considering that I ordered CUCME 8.6 I would think that these envelopes have been sitting somewhere for a very very long time.

What really irks me about this is that these envelopes have nothing to prove that I purchased the licenses so I really just spent $3,000 on shipping paper from Cisco to me so that I can put it in the trash for them.  Perhaps it's inefficiencies like this that Cisco's leadership could eliminate to make their product pricing more palatable... or at least send me current documentation.

Rant: DRM for PDFs

Any device, any where, any time.  That has been the credo of many technology leaders including Cisco CEO John Chambers recently as they tout mobility and BYOD.  Unfortunately Cisco doesn't follow what it preaches when it comes to its course documents.

Last week I took an online Cisco class through a training partner.  Thankfully I have a Windows side on my laptop.  Cisco's DRM (FileOpen) requires Adobe Acrobat Reader and the FileOpen plugin.  Although both are available for my Linux side, the older version of Acrobat Reader required was no longer functional with Ubuntu 12.04.  Personally I would rather have the PDFs on my iPad, but that's not an option at all.  Offline access is also not available since the DRM software phones home each time the file is opened. 

All in all, it makes me nostalgic for the 40lb stack of dead trees that Cisco used to give each student.   At least I could use those books the way I needed to for studying.