Unity 4.0.5 annoying problem

[rdassow]

In Unity 4.0.5 UM for Exchange, the TUI runs you through 4 minutes of warnings and such if your Exchange mailbox limit is nearing its limit.

We have many users who ride the line near their mailbox limit, and with this new TUI "feature" in 4.0.5. somtimes it takes them 4 to 5 minutes just to get to checking voicemail.

How can I disable this in the conversation?

[lindborg]

First, 4 to 5 minutes? C'mon... I know you're frustrated and angry, but lets keep it real. The prompt that plays is about 20 seconds long. If you’ve actually hit your limit (1 or 2) or gone beyond it then part of your conversation isn’t going to fly (i.e. you can’t send, forward or reply to messages) and you need to take action (this is why we give you the option to remove messages in your deleted items folder and such).

Second, we can’t over ride the full mailbox checks for limit 1 or 2 – if we don’t do it, Exchange will do it for us (i.e. messages you attempt to send after you reach limit 1 or 2 will get bounced – we cannot “over ride” Exchange’s full mailbox settings).

Third, this feature is not new, it was not added in 4.0(5). It’s been in there for some time. We’ve never been able to ignore the limits set for us in Exchange. We’re somewhat smarter about warning about them now rather than having errors pop up when we attempted to send messages on behalf of a mailbox that had reached limit 1 or beyond.

The best I can suggest is to bump up your mailbox limit 1 – if we can’t send messages we _must_ check for it and tell you this.

[lindborg]

And just to follow up, since I'm not sure what limit warning you're talking about, if you mean the "your inbox is almost full" prompt, this is the 3rd limit in AD that's called "Issue warning at (KB)" in the AD "Storage Limits" page on the "Exchange General" tab on the user properties. Usually these will default to the "mailbox store defaults" unless you have individual users that have them over ridden.

Regardless, this is the limit Unity uses when determining to play the warning message as opposed to the "your inbox if full..." message. You can change the limit warning to the same limit as limit #1 (no send limit) to get rid of the message entirely if you don't want it.

I'm assuming you're on E2K here, you didn't say - but here's a KB article with more details on the storage limits from MS:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;319583

Be aware, changing the limits in AD takes a while to replicate through to Unity. So if you change it and then test Unity right away, it'll still be using the old limits.

[lindborg]

Bill also nicely points out that with the warning message (i.e. you have not actually reached limit 1 or 2) you can "#" through the message. You don't have to sit there and listen to the entire thing.

If you've hit limit 1 or 2 you cannot # through those warning messages - you have to take action on the fact that you can't send and (possibly) receive messages in your mailbox.

So, you can either remove the warning limit (i.e. make it the same as limit #1 in AD) and/or you can tell folks they can "#" through the warning message if they get it.

[kechambe]

Technically you can disable the status (limits) check with Exchange.

It can be controlled at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>Software>Active Voice>MalEx>1.0

"DisableStatusCheck"

The only reason I am point this out is because it happens to be exposed in the registry. If it were hidden I wouldn't bring it up. But be warned that this is a 'use at your own risk' hack. It was only added to temporarily workaround some E2K problem during original development of the 3.0 line and has received 0 testing since then. If the conversation for storage limits is going to cause the sky to fall and you would rather messages get deleted (without warning) when users are over their limits and you don't expect any support you can try it out.

If it were me I would go with the options Jeff has laid out.

Thanks,

Keith

[pdepalma]

Jeff,

We've experienced the same thing, although it doesn't seem the warning from exchange to outlook is synchronized with the time when Unity gives the warning (maybe from the replication factoid you specified below). Anyways...

From a customer perspective, it would be very very very nice if you gave us an option here...perhaps instead of forcing the subscriber into the 20 second message (which most of the don't know how to # out of no matter how much you tell them, and which they accidentially delete everything in their deleted items folder), you can let us turn off that status message. Or maybe have unity system place a canned "status" VM in our inbox telling us our mailbox is full as not to disturb the journey into the TUI.

with my Unity *UM*, I always # out of it, and closely manage my deleted items folder from exchange only deleting very old or large items out, as I always find myself trying to fish out an old message from there. I don't need Unity to. I understand that Unity needs to know, but we don't need to know from Unity, just exchange.

I have to say when converting users to UM, this is just an extra thing to make the end user experience rougher. I always get complaints on this.