[cisco-voip] Is this Unity's death knell?

[Jeffrey C. Ollie]

On Sun, 2007-08-26 at 23:17 -0500, Jonathan Charles wrote:
> http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/features/unifiedmessaging.mspx
> 
> Speech-Enabled Auto Attendant
> 
> The Attendant answers calls using an automated operator with
> customizable menus (for example, "press 1 for sales") and global
> address list directory lookups (for example, "who would you like to
> contact?"). Callers can interact with the Automated Attendant through
> touchtone menus or their voice using speech recognition.
> 
> I think the integrated speed recognition is pretty cool, and as soon
> as you play with Outlook Voice Access, Unity looks kind of sad in
> comparison...

The "cool" features may be nice to give to your "C" level users, but the
killer for me would be letting the in-house Exchange admins handle the
voicemail/auto-attendants on their (existing) highly-available Exchange
clusters, rather than depending on my single Unity server.  That way I
can also stop being an Exchange administrator myself (which I have
neither the training or temperament for).

One thing I noticed from [1]:
        Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging has been tested for use with
        Cisco Call Manager version 5.x. If you have Cisco Call Manager
        5.x on your network, you will be able to connect Exchange 2007
        Unified Messaging servers directly to Call Manager without the
        requirement of an IP/VoIP gateway. Many of the features that are
        included with Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging are fully
        functional with Cisco Call Manager 5.x. However, the Message
        Waiting Indicator (MWI) feature does not work and faxing does
        not work because the T.38 faxing protocol is not supported by
        Cisco Call Manager.

T.38 faxing I think I could do without, but I think I'd be in danger of
losing my job if MWI stopped working.  However, according to the
document that you can download from [2] there's a third-party
solution[3] that enables MWI.

[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2516dac1-dfdc-47eb-8e6f-18b1537a57b2.aspx
[2] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=68b43d3c-7c84-4c2f-bfd7-98754970d70e&displaylang=en
[3] http://www.mwi2007.com/

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