Unity Connection and MS Exchange integration re: retention policies

[JoeyOAG2013]

Hello all.  We currently use Unity Connection 8.5 (I'm not a Unity admin, but I believe that is the correct version), and when a voicemail is left for a user, the resulting wav file is sent to the user's Exchange mailbox via SMTP.  I have been tasked with making sure that emails containing voicemail attachments are deleted after 14 days.  From my limited knowledge of Unity Connection, I know we can set aging limits for the voicemails themselves, but I don't believe this will have any affect on the emails already delivered to the users.  MS support has informed me that their voicemail-specific retention policies only work with MS Unified Messaging, and that our only option is to route these emails into specific subfolders that have a retention policy applied to them.  They also informed me that there is no way to set this up through scripting; we will have to set up each of our 400+ mailboxes manually, not to mention every time we have a new hire.  We are an extremely small team, and this is not practical.  We also have concerns about whether the MWI will work if the emails are not in the Inbox; if it does not, this is a deal-breaker. 

What I am looking for is advice from those who are in similiar situations as to the best way to go about dealing with retention policies when the voicemail wav files are emailed to the user.  After a couple of weeks of digging, I am no closer to an answer.  I can usually find a wealth of information with a good search, but either I'm not using the right terms (again, I'm not a Unity Connection guy), or we are attempting to do something that's not considered a standard practice.  Any help you guys can offer would be greatly appreciated!

[Bradley Gruesbeck · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Thanks for the question.

You will need to clarify a couple of details to make sure that the soultions will fit your requirements.

Are you using the Single Inbox feature or are you performing SMTP relay?

-The difference here is where the Single Inbox will retain a copy of the voicemail and will synchroize a copy of the vm to the exchange side. If you setup SMTP relay (depending if you have the message actions set to accept and relay versus just relay) Unity Connection will use SMTP to deliever a copy of the voicemail to the exchange mailbox. SMTP relay won't allow the exchange copy to toggle the mwi and if you delete the voicemail message on Unity Connection you could still have a copy of that message in exchange.

It sounds like you're using the Single Inbox feature (due to your comment about MWI), so you'll want to use message aging policies to help manage files.

Mailbox Size Quotas and Message Aging in Connection:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/8x/administration/guide/8xcucsag190.html#wp1077659

You'll need to know a few details first before you get this working the way you want.

1. Unity Connection does have the idea of an 'Inbox' and a 'Deleted Items' containters. Message aging will want to first look at messages in the Inbox container and then move them to the Deleted Items containter before they're purged from the system. You can bypass this however I would recommend that you set up the aging policy to move the read messages from the Inbox to deleted items after 7 days, and to permenatly delete after another 7 days.

2. Message aging has no affect on new (unread) messages. You need to make sure that people are managing the mailboxes (at least toggling them from unread to read) because the way the Unity Connection has been written helps keep the system from deleting messages that have never been played.

Good Luck,

Brad

[JoeyOAG2013]

Thank you very much for the reply, Bradley.  We are indeed using Single Inbox.  If applying the message aging properties in Unity Connection will move emails from the Inbox to the Deleted Items folder, then apparently we are worrying about nothing.  Going by the way you explained it, it looks to me like we were previously given advice with the assumption that we were using SMTP relay.  We were told that once the emails were sent to Exchange, there was nothing Unity Connection could do about them.  I believe what we're going to do is apply the aging policy in Unity Connection today, and then give it a couple of weeks and see how it's working.

I work in a legal office, and we are doing this to comply with our discovery standards and procedures. The fact that aging won't have any effect on unread messages might possibly be an issue, but I think we'll just need to explain this to our attorneys and hope that they understand the implications.

Again, many thanks for the help!

[Nishad Ismail]

Hi Brandley,

I have same requirement ,I need to get my Voicemail in Outlook as an attachment ,

When i configure the Outlook IMAP account am getting Voice mail on that ,But my normal Exchange account am not getting the voice mail ?

Can you please provide me the configuration example

Regards ..

  Naash