Hi Robert.
Well, the short answer is there’s no clean way to fully integrate a Unity server with a GroupWise server and client.
The longer, more sticky answer starts with a clarification on what you mean by “integrate”.
If you’re looking at using Unity for voice mail only (i.e. not a unified messaging system) you have some options. Certainly Novell has some good tools to integrate their NDS with NT’s directory so you could certainly have that setup and have NT accounts automatically created on the Unity server which could then be associated with Unity subscribers in Exchange. This makes AA access from the desktop nice and smooth when the site is using Novell as their primary network since they don’t have to authenticate (i.e. their security token matches from their Novell login). Head out to Novell’s web site, they have bunches of info on their NDS for NT stuff and their support pages have PDF files with good details on the ins and outs of how this works.
Doing a true “unified” messaging model in this type of environment would be impossible, however. While Novell does have a synchronizer for Exchange 5.5, it works in much the same way as the Lotus connector does. It essentially sets up proxy email users on either side and shuttles messages across. It does not maintain the read/deleted state of messages across stores which means your notification and MWI triggers would be out of whack. For instance if you got a new voice mail in Unity, we stuff it in your Exchange account. The synchronizer would then copy that message over to your GroupWise account where you see it at the desktop. Since there is no VMO equivalent for GroupWise you’d see this as an email with an attached WAV. When you opened it and listened to it, Unity will not know this and we will leave your MWI on until you call in over the phone or access your Exchange inbox via Outlook. Not ideal. If you setup the connector to MOVE the message instead of copying it, even worse. Unity now has no record of your message, no MWI goes out, no notifications and if you call in over the phone we’ll say you have no new messages but you’ll see a new voice mail in your GroupWise inbox.
Further the message class of the messages themselves is many times not preserved when they’re moved across the connector (true for Lotus and GroupWise) so faxes, for instance, would not come across as faxes, they would be emails with attached TIF files. Finally, you’d have to delete messages over the phone if you didn’t have a separate client to access the Exchange store… if you didn’t do that your inbox on Exchange would eventually fill up.
Probably about as close as you could get would be to have the GroupWise client for email and the Outlook client for voice mail/faxes on every desktop. Probably a little cluttered and more expensive than folks would be looking for, but workable perhaps.
So far as I know there’s no way to get any message client to read two stores at once. You can get it to poll a POP3 account and “pull” messages over to your primary store but there’s no way to have a single client look at two primary stores (i.e. leave messages there and let you manipulate their state from the client). If someone knows of a snappy way around this, I’m all ears! I can’t imagine how it’d get around handing messages from different stores with potentially different directories, however… that’d be very tricky stuff. When you hit “reply” on a message it’d have to be very smart about which address book it presented to you as possible destinations.
Anyway… probably more information than you were looking for, but hopefully I answered your question in there somewhere.
Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice Corp
jlindborg@activevoice.com
