Unity Connection Single Inbox

[pedroferreras]

Hi, i have a unity Connection 8.5 server and i'm planning to configure "Single Inbox" with Exchange 2010. My question is : do i need to configure SMTP Relay  (Smart Host) to get this feature working?,  i'm not clear if i need to configure it when defining the Unified Messaging Service.

Thank You.

[David Hailey · Accepted solution]

This is something that doesn't appear to be straightforward from a documentation perspective...especially as it relates to Single Inbox.  Here is my input:

SMTP relay (smart host) is not a factor in defining the UM service or even getting the basic functionality working (i.e., voicemail for Single Inbox user is synced with Exchange).  With that said, you would need to determine whether you will deploy Single Inbox along with the ViewMail for Outlook (VMO) desktop application.  If your answer is...

1.  Without VMO, messages that are synchronized into Exchange are treated simply as emails with .wav attachments.  So, a copy of the message with attachment will reside in Exchange.  When users take action (such as reply, forward, etc) then Exchange is the sole transport.  Unity Connection will leverage EWS to get the Single Inbox basic functionality to happen but it won't be involved in any additional routing of that message.

2.  With VMO, users can send new voice messages and reply/forward voice messages within the Outlook client and they are then synced with Unity Connection.  From a VMO perspective, my experience thus far indicates that SMTP is used for this to happen.  So, first you would need to allow the SMTP connection into Unity Connection (i.e., configure Unity to accept SMTP connections from either untrusted hosts or defined hosts).  Then Unity Connection is going to need to send that message off to the SMTP smart host (i.e., it is email and you have to specify message actions for email/fax messages when you configure the UM service) so it can actually be delivered.  The next configuration for Unity Connection would then be to define the SMTP smart host you want to use.  Last, you would need to configure the actual SMTP smart host to accept relay from the SMTP domain of the CUC server (or cluster) in order for the relay to actually work and have messages delivered as expected.

I've actually touched on this topic this week at Cisco Live and would welcome correction, clarification, and/or additional information that would help firm this up.  As I said upfront, this seems to be a bit of a gray area as far as initial documentation on configurations for Single Inbox is concerned.

Hailey

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[maratimer_2]

"For Exchange 2003 you need to create a connector with the address space of the destination domain and have it route to the unity server", from an earlier post which directed me to this post. 

Customer does not use Viewmail, so we are looking for an alternative to get this working.

We have UC 8.5 SU1 and we have created a connector on the exchange side with the addresses of all of the unity servers, but we still can not get this to work.  Each user has the SMTP address for their exchange account configured in Connection. 

We have 65,000 users so were hoping that we did not need to add the unityconnection.com SMTP domain as an email address to each users AD exchange addresses, which I know works, but is this the only way to achieve this? 

[blwegrzyn]

This workaround is not enough.

The email client will cache both unity and real email address.

We dont want the users to have 2 email addresses.

Vm message should have the FROM populated with the original user email address, not connection hostname and domain.

[David Hailey]

This has since been addressed.  See the following:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/8x/unified_messaging/guide/85xcucumg020.html#wp1304540