Exchange 2007

[fieldj]

I just finished setting up a test env. to test exchange 2007 and unity. Things went very well. I found that the only thing that doesn't work is trying to setup exchange 2007 as a partner server. Everything else worked. Here is what is did in the test env.

1) Setup AD

2) Setup Exchange 2003 SP2

3) Setup CCM 4.2(1) sr1a

4) Setup Unity 4.2

5) Setup the phones that connect to CCM and have a Unity UM mailbox.

6) Tested things.

a) leave a message

b) WMI on

c) check message with phone

d) WMI off

e) Open OWA and mark message as un-read

f) WMI on

g) delete message from OWA

h) WMI off

7) I then executed 3 commands to update the schema for exchange 2007. I tested things after each command. I will use step 6) for the rest of my testing. The 3 commands are: setup /pl . setup /ps . setup /p

8) The schema is now updated for exchange 2007. I now rebooted all server in the test env. and tested again to make sure everything was still working after a reboot.

9) I now installed exchange 2007 on a new test server

10) Ran through the testing again and everything still is working

11) I reboot the test network again and everything is still working.

12) Ran the permission wizard and selected the new exchange 2007 server and all the storage groups and databases. The wizard finished with no errors.

13) I then ran the message store wizard leaving the exchange 2003 as the partner server and the wizard finished with no errors

14) Moved 1 mailbox from exchange 2003 to exchange 2007 and tested voice mail. Everything worked fine. I was shocked!!! This is very cool.

15) I tried to make the exchange 2007 as the partner server but with wizard died. This is not surprising.

Summary:

I seems from the limited testing i did that you can add Exchange 2007 and everything works as long as exchange 2003 is still the partner server. Please let me know if anyone else is getting the same results as me. My next test is to format unity and start over with exchange 2007 already in the mix. If anyone has other scenarios to test let me know and i can give it a try. I am certain that Cisco doesn't support this in production yet but my testing so far seams very promising.

Jim

[Markus Schneider]

BTW--Cisco Unity 5.0 (the next major release) will support Exchange 2007, to my knowledge, but definite the 4.2 line will not. It will tend to get far because unity is still in a way just a MAPI client to the exchange server, so in as far as those things stay the same, it should work.

[fieldj]

Will cisco support me if i upgrade the schema in my domain as long as i don't have exchange 2007 linked to unity?

When is Unity 5.0 going to be released

[Markus Schneider]

Well, with Unified Messaging environment, the customer pretty much owns the mail store and active directory, so as long as Unity and all of its subscribers reside on supported message stores, there won't be a support issue. We would not (unless explicitly stated at a later time) support it in a voicemail-only environment.

I'm not sure of the 5.0 release time frames, unfortunately.

[srichardson]

Unity 5.0 is due to release April/May 2007 with support for Exchange2007. Thank you for your post. You answered the question I had about whether or not Exchange2007 schema updates would mess anything up with the Unity 4.X installation.

[jones_amy]

Can anyone tell me when unity 5.0 is going to be release? I see april/may timeframe but does anyone know the date?

[russellh]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for your post regarding your testing. I'm about to test the same scenario. One thing I was wondering, if the mailbox you moved from the Exch2003 server to the Exch2007 server was able to receive a VM, how is the routing occuring? I know you left the E2003 server as the partner server but without the mailbox being on that server, I'm a bit confused. Is this something that E2007 is able to handle so that Unity is none the wiser? It might be my lack of knowledge of the wizards and the functions they perform at different steps.

Thanks,

R

[fieldj]

The Cisco Unity server sends the message to the partner server. That partner server has a routing group that connects to the Exchange 2007 server. When the partner server recieves the voice mail it knows where the mailbox for that message resides and is able to route it to the appropriate back end server. If you make sure that you can send email from a mailbox on the partner server to a mailbox on the e2k7 server the you should be fine. When i installed the first e2k7 server i chose to install the mailbox role and hub transport role. During the setup of the hub transport role you are asked to specifiy the bridgehead server. I choose the partner server as the bridgehead server. The setup the links between e2k3 and e2k7.

[Mark Baltz]

If you have the opportunity to do some testing with CM 5.1, you can configure Exchange 2007 server as your unified messaging server, and remove Unity altogether. The two caveats are that MWI doesn't work (solved by 3rd party app: http://www.geomant.com/mwi2007/) and faxing isn't supported because Exchange supports T.38 while CCM does not. You can find more details here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996831.aspx

[Tommer Catlin]

Be very careful with this. Unity is much more robust and can run circles around Exchange UM. Exchange UM is very basic voicemail and can read your email/cal/cont, etc. (think unity connection). But it fails horrible with AA and other features Unity has and can do. It's not a 1:1 comparission.

Just wanted to pass this along.

Cheers

[febinattingal]

Hi,

I planned to integrate cm 6.1 and exchange 2007 directly through sip trunk.Please give me the documents to configre ccm and exchange 2007.

Thanks in advance......

[alfred.thyri]

Hi Jim,

We completely changed from Exchange 2003 to 2007 about 2 weeks ago. I ran partner wizzard on our Unity Server (4.2(1)) - and everything went well.

I ran the wizzard, after all the users were moved from MXS2k3 to 2k7. Maybe that could be the reason for your dying wizzard ;)

Alfred.

[jbarcena]

Be really careful about this configuration, if something begins to malfunction you WON'T get support from us (TAC). I strongly recommend you to go back to Exchange 2003 and once Unity 5 is out then upgrade your Unity and then integrate with Exchange 2007.

[alfred.thyri]

I know, that this is an unsupported configuration. We still have a powered off MXS2k3 for backup...

The funny thing is, that our Unity is throwing less errors in the log than with MXS2k3.

Is there already a release date for Unity 5?

[letmeinnn]

Hi I have one question ... are you running windows 2003 sp2 on your exchange 2007 config ... i want to upgrade my exchange 3k server to win3k sp2 but have been holding off..., want to also up the unity server aswell but am waiting till the cisco blessing ... when ever that will be :)