Prevent a voicemail from being forwarded to another user

[pmaglinger]

Is there a way to prevent a voicemail from being forwarded to another user? From what I've read, I can use Windows Rights Management Services to prevent emails with attachments from being forwarded, but what about forwarding if someone is checking their voicemail from a phone?

Thanks!

[lindborg]

Any message marked private will not be allowed to be forwarded from over the phone.

I'm not familiar with the Windows Rights Management Service in this regard so I can't say what behavior it would have - but Unity is simply asking Exchange (or Domino) to forward the message just as an email client would - so if it's preventing the forwarding of attachments on the server side (which I assume it is) then it'll strip the voice mail WAV file out on a forward. Of course I'm not sure what the user will hear (i.e. if we get an error back from Exchange of if they think it got forwarded and no NDR or whatever is passed back). This isn't a scenario we've tested.

[pmaglinger]

Have you given any thought about adding a menu option on voicemail that would set a flag that would prevent forwarding of voicemail? Might be a good feature to add. It came to our attention because of Sarbane-Oxley requirements.

[lindborg]

I'm puzzled by your question - we _do_ have such a flag - you mark the message private and it can't be forwarded.

Can you explain in some more detail here (I'm slow - use small words and big pictures) exactly what you'd like Unity to do for you here in a perfect world?

[pmaglinger]

Forgive me Jeff. Because we couldn't prevent forwarding of voicemail through Outlook, I had completely forgotten about the Private option through the phone menu.

[lindborg]

ok - yeah, the Outlook client is kind of lame about not respecting the private stuff - not much we can do about that.

As a side note - in 4.0(5) there will be the option of sending private and secure messages - not only is the forwarding over the phone prevented but the message itself is encrypted and can only be listened to over the phone by a Unity subscriber on your network - if the message is forwarded to a non Unity user (i.e. someone off network) by any client, they wont be able to hear the message at all.

Might be of interest to you here...

[pmaglinger]

So what you're saying is that if someone recieves a voicemail message marked private in Outlook, and forwards it to someone who is not a subscriber (which would appear as a wav file attachment on the email), the person it was forwarded to would not be able to listen to it using Media Player?

[lindborg]

If someone sends a private and secure message over the phone then the WAV file attached to the message is encrypted. You can never play the message at your desktop (even using TRAP) - it can ONLY be listened to over the phone from Unity. If the user forwards it (or copies it to disk or whatever) it's useless since the message is encrypted and wont play otherwise.

[tabbott]

Can you point me to the documentation or release notes where the marking of private messages is documented? We were told that Unity cannot mark the message private. Also of issue is the respect of the private flag once the message leaves Unity for Exchange.

[pmaglinger]

The option is listed in the user manual. Your version isn't mentioned, but for 4.X go to http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/voice/c_unity/ug/ug401/ex/ug_ex.pdf and do a search for private. It mentions being unable to forward the voicemail. As far as what happens when it hits Exchange, I'll defer that to someone else.

[lindborg]

yes, the admin guide is a good place to start - it's part of the message options (mark it urgent, private, ask for a return receipt).

The message doesn't "leave" Unity, by the way - it originates in Exchange or Domino - we don't synch message stores, we use their natively - this is "unified message" as opposed to "integrated".

Excahnge's (or more to the point Outlook's) respect for the private flag is out of our hands - in all the recent versions of Outlook I've tested it only notes that the message is private but it will happily let you forward it anyway with just a warning. Older versions of Outlook were more strict about this, however you could always forward the content of a messageu sing copy/paste techniques or the like if you tried hard enough.

This is one of the reasons we introducde encrypted voice mail messages that can't be heard from any desktop client ever for 4.0(5) - some sites want to gurantee that voice mail messages don't accidentally get "leaked" outside the company - this is one way to enforce that.

[pmaglinger]

The encryption for private voicemail option that you put into 4.0(5) has our security admin smiling (and he doesn't do that often). Looking forward for the release and upgrade.

[tabbott]

It looks like only subscribers can mark a message private. Can an outside caller mark the message private?

[lindborg]

no, not currently - it's only offered for subscriber to subscriber messages at the moment.