Unity in a Multiple Tenant Environment

[admin_2]

Greetings;<br><br>My CM cluster is supporting multiple businesses. Each business has a partition and calling search space. Now I am offering unity voice messaging and would like to know if there is a method for 'partitioning' unity 3.1 to support multiple organizations.<br><br>Thank you very much for your help,<br><br>Regards,<br>Christopher <br><br>

[#2]

Not exactly. I know Jeff has been working to compile a comprehensive list of what needs to be done, but true multi-tenant functionality isn't 100% there yet.

However, it's possible to wing it to a certain extent, such as building templates that make sure zero goes to the correct operator, using routing rules or call forwarding to get to the proper main greeting, and so on.

It really depends on how much you need to do, and how "invisible" the other tenants need to be.



Scott Morgan
Cisco Systems TAC

[#3]

Scott, thank you for taking the time to reply.

I'd love to know what procedures are 'on the list'. Will this be shared in some form when Jeff wraps it up? When I can make 3.1 work I'd love to apply them.

[#4]

The list we're working on is for tenant support in future versions of Unity. Unity 4.0 will have a few additional items added to make handling multiple companies on one Unity box easier:

Notably you will be able to have multiple directory handlers that can have custom lists of folks associated with them via public distribtuion lists and the like. This will let you setup departemental directories, building directories, seperate company directories etc... Much nicer than the single handler that just lists everyone.

Some changes are also getting into 4.0 that will allow you to dictate where subscribers go when they exit their inbox conversation (currently it's hard coded to bail out to the opening greeting call handler). Some other small changes along these lines will allow multiple opening greetings to work a bit smoother.

However, 4.0 will not strictly segement the directory for different companies (whole big mess of work invovled with this). As such subscribers in company A can address messages to subscribers in company B and the like. You can manually "lock down" all the call handlers in each companie's audio text trees to prevent outside callers from getting to users in other companies directly if you have a nicely patterned numbering plan (you can do this today) but this isn't trivial by any means if you have large audio text trees for multiple companies to deal with.

Segementing directories and supporting overlapping numbering plans etc... is on the radar for future versions but I can't give you any kind of estimate on when this type of thing is going to get into the product line.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Technical Lead/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[#5]

Jeff,

Thanks for all of the great information about Unity 4.0. I understand that there are some 'creative' ways to virtually partition unity 3 by using call routing and other tools. Can you please recommend any type of articles that might shed some light on this?

Thank you very much,
Chris