Unity, Exchange, & a Third Party SMTP Mail Server

[admin_2]

I have a customer who wants unified messaging but does not want to use Exchange as their primary email platform. Is there a way to forward voicemail messages to another smtp mail server and keep the functionality (MWI on and Off) of unity? We do not want to use Internet Recipients because there is little functionality (No MWIs). My idea is to use the "send a copy to" feature in Exchange to send a copy of all voicemails to the smtp mail server. This looks like it would work to me, but there is one limitation, the user can only delete voicemail messages using their telephone. Is this the best approach or is there a better way to do this? <br><br>

[#2]

I’m afraid there’s no good way to pull this off.

You can, of course, copy or forward messages anywhere you want going into the Exchange administrator. Unfortunately with no way to keep the email store they’re using and your Exchange inbox synchronized, this just can’t work. You can push messages one way or the other but what you really need is a way to copy messages AND synchronize the read/unread/deleted state of the messages between stores. Such tools aren’t out there that I know of.

If you move messages, you lamp will never go on, notification will not work and, of course, you can’t get at your messages from over the phone since they aren’t in Exchange for us to get at. Clearly not a workable solution.

If you copy messages, as you noted, you’ll only be able to delete messages out of your Exchange store from over the phone. The bigger problem, however, is the read/unread state of messages will not be kept up to date when folks are reviewing messages via the desktop and/or via the phone. MWIs and Notifications, as a result, will be useless. You’ll have to review your messages twice every time... once over the phone even and once from their email client, which is more than just annoying. Further, you have problems keeping the address books between the systems synchronized… this will be an ongoing headache for the admin trying to make sure accounts exist (or are removed) on both separate systems and manually creating “copy to” information for each user in Exchange pointing to their email system.

Unity is a Unified messaging system and it’s designed to work for sites using Exchange and (soon) Lotus Domino. There’s simply no way to shoe-horn it into a site not wanting to use one of those backends without losing significant functionality.


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