Cisco SPA Series IP Phone Personal Directory Management

Scripts & Utilities, ,

There is not an easy way to centrally manage the Personal Directory of Cisco SPA IP Phones and it has been a frustration for users of these popular handsets. I wrote a small application to manage the personal directories of Cisco and Linksys phones in 2011 which made things easier.

MDM Cisco SPA Personal Directory Manager

There is now a new solution which makes managing the Personal Directory on the Cisco SPA series phones very simple. It is a web service which also has a companion desktop application to enable Cisco SPA users to make calls directly from Windows desktop.

If you just want to go ahead and try it out, please register for an account by visiting:

https://ciscospa.mdm.co.uk/

Here is a quick video that shows how to set it up and the functionality it provides:

 

Cisco SPA Handset Compatibility

The web service and application is compatible with:

  • Cisco SPA 303
  • Cisco SPA 501G
  • Cisco SPA 502G
  • Cisco SPA 504G
  • Cisco SPA 508G
  • Cisco SPA 509G
  • Cisco SPA 512G
  • Cisco SPA 514G
  • Cisco SPA 525G

Key Features

  • Centralised Web Based Personal Directory Administration
  • Custom contact entries for each device
  • Unlimited number of contacts
  • Ability to group contacts into categories
  • Central administration of screen saver
  • Make calls directly from your Windows Desktop without having to use phone interface
  • Integration with Microsoft Outlook – call contacts from your Outlook address book.

Please give us any feedback that you have on the solution via this blog or through the main site. We really hope you enjoy using it. We will be replicating the functionality to work with Yealink phones in the near future.

Here are some screenshots of the solution:

Unable to Print to Epson Dot Matrix printers after Windows Updates

Technical Posts,

I received a call from a customer today who was suddenly unable to print to Epson Dot Matrix printers, after a LOT of troubleshooting I figured out that this is due to a Windows update.

Printers I can confirm that are not working after the updates are:

  • Epson LQ-300
  • Epson LQ-300+ II
  • Epson LQ310
  • Epson LX300
  • Epson LQ2180
  • Epson LQ2190
  • Epson LQ730K

Windows Updates have been issued for Windows 7, 8 and 10 and they are all having the same issue. The updates are:

There may be other updates which I am not aware of yet.

To get your printers working again, the quickest way is to remove the offending update. As you might not be sure which update you have installed. The quickest way is to run the following commands in an elevated command prompt:

wusa /uninstall /kb:4048952 /quiet /warnrestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:4048953 /quiet /warnrestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:4048954 /quiet /warnrestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:4048955 /quiet /warnrestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:4048957 /quiet /warnrestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:4048958 /quiet /warnrestart

Until Microsoft release an updated security patch you can temporarily block the patch using this tool from Microsoft:

Microsoft Patch Blocker

Or if you are using WSUS then you can block the patch from there. This is really a difficult problem to resolve if you don’t realise that the problem is being caused by an update, because you would’t expect an old Dot Matrix printer that has been working fine for years to be impacted by a Microsoft Security Roll-up.

I don’t know if this is happening to other Dot Matrix Printers besides Epson at the moment.

Microsoft have updated the KB articles to acknowledge that these updates are the cause of the problem:

Microsoft confirmation of problems with Epson Printers after installing November 2017 security roll-up patches.

Update 21/11/2017 – Problem has been fixed by Microsoft

Microsoft have now issued an updated patch which will should download automatically via Windows Update, but if you want to grab it manually it can be found here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4055038/november-21-2017-kb4055038