Remote User and Unified Messaging

[admin_2]

My company has about 60 persons that are constantly on the road. They do email via remote dial-up. I am tring to figure out the best method for these people to do Voicemail efficiently. Some do not care about the sometimes large voicemail downloads other do.<br><br>Is there a way to move the delivery of the Voicemail Emails to another folder under the inbox and still retrieve/reply to them via the phone?<br><br>Am I better off creating a 2nd exchange mailbox just for voicemail for those users that do not want to download them to there inbox.<br><br>Any suggestions?<br><br>Thanks<br><br><br><br>

[#2]

No, there's no way to move the voice mails into another folder besides the Inbox and still get them over the phone. The Inbox is the only folder we have ready access to and can monitor across the system easily.

Doing two seperate mailboxes for each user is cumbersome at best and breaks the unified messaging features when they're in the office (i.e. your Outlook client can't monitor two mailboxes on the server at the same time). I'm not seeing this as a very viable solution.

If it were me, I would look into configuration options with Outlook that allow you to get just the headers of the messages downloaded when accessing them remotely and letting the users decide which ones they want to download entirely. The Remote Mail feature allows you to do this pretty easily. Seems to me this is the best approach since you can also screen out other unwanted mail with big docs attached and the like.

If memory serves, there may even be a way to automatically screen out messages based on particular message class tags. I'll have to dig around on that one, however.

any reason the remote mail approach wont work for you?


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice
jlindborg@activevoice.com
http://members.home.net/jlindborg

[#3]

Yeah... I poked around a bit more on this today with my Outlook 2000 client.

If the remote mail thing doesn't paint your wagon, the offline folder option has some very robust filtering options that should do what you need here.

You can screen out messages that have attachments from syncronizing to you when you're working remote, which would work. If you want to get fancy, you can also filter out messages that have a particular message class or part of a message class, which is very cool. For instance you can say that all messages that contain "voice" in their message class don't get syncronized to the off line folder. Or you can get specific and say any message with a class of "ipm.note.voice.unity" don't get syncronized... this way you'd still get NDRs and the like but not actual voice mail messages.

for my money I'd still use remote mail when on the road unless I had a real need to get at my calandering info and the like. There may very well be times when I want to download voice mail to my box (i.e. it could be a forwarded message that also contains a document attachment or something). But if your users like the off line folder stuff better (definitely less work involved on their part) you should still be able to do what you need to here.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice
jlindborg@activevoice.com
http://members.home.net/jlindborg