Future of Unity!!! A Cisco Question - Jeff!

[brian-henry]

I have a customer who currently has one Domain/Forrest but the main corporate headquarters controls the Schema and each of the other locations across the country are only in charge of their local OU, Nothing more.

Will Unity in the future not have to extend the schema to have unified messaging?

The corporate HQ will not be extending the schema for almost 2 more years.

Each site across the country was EX5.5 and some had UM and do not want to give it up, however since coporate will not extend the schema and they are going to AD2003 and Exchange 2003, oops there goes UM.

If there is a way around this I am all ears!

Thanks!

Brian

[lindborg]

Short story is if you want to play with UM in AD you have to extend the schema – there’s no way to get around that at the moment and no short-term plans that I know of to get around that (although I don’t run this business unit so these things really aren’t up to me).

In Exchange 5.5 (back in the Unity 2.x days) you got data into the schema by hacking it into hijacked objects in the 5.5 directory – we did this the same as other UM systems did (and still do) since you don’t have a choice – the Ex55 schema was not (easily) extendable. This, of course, caused all kinds of problems down the road – in particular with the AD connection tools. If you search on the forums out here you’ll find sites that setup two way Ad synch connections and destroyed their Unity related directory data since the AD synchers did not recognize these hijacked objects and took their “best guess” and did it wrong.

Anyway – for UM on Exchange 2000 or later for the foreseeable future you will need to extend the schema.

[Ginger Dillon]

Hi -

Just saw this post and have a comment. They HQ is going to need to update the forest schema for Exchange 2003 anyway. If they haven't already done this, you might show them the updates that Unity uses for the User object, Contacts, Groups etc. Perhaps knowing the updates are also Microsoft approved for any ciscoescbu attributes might make them feel more at ease. If you'd like, I have a document that does describe the last Unity schema update and documents how we tested in an isolated test lab, then tested in an AD lab environment that represents our forest, and then applied into production. We presented this document to our forest's Active Directory Steering Committee. You may email me separately at kavang@saccounty.net.

Ginger

[brian-henry]

Thanks Jeff for your response. I know in the upcoming release of CM, that it will no longer need to extend the schema and was just curious if Unity was going to follow the same suite.

[lindborg]

Yeah, CMs use of AD is very light compared to Unity (i.e. all our networking functionality, ties to the mailbox, the need to know of users/locations/dls from other Unity servers on the network etc... etc...) makes it quite a bit harder for us to get away with that.

Schemes like using ADAM to keep extensions to a defined scope are more likely...

[brian-henry]

Jeff,

Do you think that if MS follows Oracle in the way that they currently handle their mail, which is just an oracle database that then it could move away from an AD tie in?

I thought I heard at some point that Exchange will go toward the route of using SQL as their main stay for mailstore instead of relying on the old mdb's. For one thing it would cut down on the backup software that is needed because it would be no more than a regular SQL database at that point.

Also I was asked by one of my current customers, which is pretty big and also an engineer from our company on this topic of hospitality like hotels.

I know that Unity links with Percipia for Management of check in and check out and I saw on Cisco of another product InLine 2020 that was used as the VM for a hotel install so they could recieve the same functionality as WakeUp calls, etc.. like the current hotels have plaus a lot more. I know you probably can't talk about it but will Cisco either Acquire or develop its own complete hoteling software? To keep adding third party this to tie to third party that sometimes leads to frustration for the IT staff once they have to manage it because it becomes of the old saying, its not my product that's broke it's the other software contact them!, you know what I am talking about.

Just asking and thanks for all the replies I get a lot of information from here that most people take for granted.

Brian

[lindborg]

Well, MS claimed they were moving away from the old Jet Blue based MDB style back end for Exchange as long ago as Ex5.5 - I'm a member of the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp. They promised a lot for the "Platinum" project all those years ago and none of it made it out of the pipeline for various reasons (only some of them technical from what I understand). Supposedly Yukon is their big step forward here and when Longhorn releases all joy and nirvana is supposed to break out. Again, when it gets here we'll work with it.

The AD extensions, by the way, are more for directory replication/networking/prsence/gateway issues than strictly for mailstore access - just so you know. Just monkeying with the mailstore is not really the complete solution here.

I'm a very small cog in a very big machine - I have no idea if Cisco is planning on acquiring any PMS type companies or the like. I can say, however, that all the sites I've installed with Percipia have gone very well and they've been real good working with us end to end - not the usual finger pointing fests that can break out with such arrangements. Thats said, I understand a branded Cisco solution from A to Z is nice - I can't say one way or the other as to any plans along these lines.