UM: Start with or Migrate to?

[craig.watson]

Currently, we are looking at installing Cisco Unity as a voice messaging server only in its own internal domain. We are also looking at Unified Messaging in about a year after its deployed.

What I want to know is, since we have the time and resources and haven't put anything in yet, do you all think it would be better to go in with UM up front or migrate to it later? We are following the white paper for Installing Cisco Unity Voice Messaging in Anticipation of UM, but if it is better to just go ahead and install UM up front, we would. What does everyone think?

[jvmessina]

Well, if you have the budget for the UM licenses and you have a healthy AD and Exchange environment in place already this becomes an easy decision. Go with UM up front.

If you are in the process of or soon going to be making major modifications to your enterprise directory services infrastructure, perhaps your original plan to do VM first, UM later may be best.

I guess the answer to this depends on what the factors were that made you consider not doing UM up front at first thought.

Certainly if there is nothing preventing you from doing UM why go through the trouble of the migration if it can be avoided if UM is inevitable? Just my thoughts.

[craig.watson]

I guess more information up front would be handy in order to better form an opinion.

Our AD and Exchange environment is far from being up to par. Along with the "political" issues within the different groups who control each process of it, it was decided in the beginning to do everything ourselves and then migrate over to UM when we were ready, we had time to work with the other groups, etc.

What I have heard from other people is that migrating over to UM is not easy and if it can be done up front, to go ahead and do it then. What I don't have are any specific details, whether its one environment versus another, or if there are just specfic gotcha's that came up during the migration that could have been avoided if they had rolled it out first instead of doing a Voice-only implementation of Unity and migrated to UM later on.

What are some of the migration nightmares people have experienced going over to UM?

[Hin Lee]

Unity install into its own domain or into existing domain is identical in the steps. The sticking points are AD and Exchange. Please share this doc with your admins.

Permissions Set by the Cisco Unity Permissions Wizard

============================================================

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/products_installation_guide_chapter09186a008022b8c3.html