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Cisco Unity Voice Mail Systems
Cisco SalesFew things can strike fear into the heart of the IT department like an attack on a company’s Domain Name System servers. ..... One of the premier unified messaging products is Cisco Unity. Cisco acquired Unity from Active Voice in 2000 in order to add a voice mail solution to Cisco's suite of IP communication products. Since that acquisition, Unity has seen a series of upgrades and improvements. Currently at version 4.0, Cisco Unity excels in delivering advanced voice messaging services and can interface with Microsoft® Exchange versions 5.5, 2000, and 2003, as well as with Lotus Domino.
Cisco recommends that you plan for a 10-15 percent increase in the size of your Active Directory database after implementing Unity. If you are one of those people who enjoy running ADSIEDIT every now and then, you will appreciate Cisco's naming standard: all attributes start with "cisco". Keep in mind that the Cisco schema extensions should only be run after Active Directory has been updated for Exchange 2000 or 2003 (forestprep
Simply put, unified messaging is the storage of multiple forms of communication in one central location. From this central location, messages can be retrieved and manipulated in nontraditional ways. For example, think about checking your e-mail and finding a voice message from an important client. Imagine being on the road and having your e-mail messages read to you in order of urgency. Consider retrieving a fax message by redirecting it to a fax machine at your hotel business center. All of these scenarios and more are possible with a unified messaging system.
Cisco provides excellent documentation on the exact number of schema extensions as well as on the potential impact on your Active Directory database size. For example, Cisco records and stores each user's spoken name in Active Directory. Depending on the codec you choose for audio compression, this could be 20KB per user. (See the "Codecs" sidebar for further information.)
Encino CCNA IT SupportMake a list of what you want to know, what you need to know, and what you already know about this subject. VoIP consultants - ..... Even though Unity is tightly integrated with other Cisco IP telephony products, it does not have a dependency on IP telephony and can be deployed in traditional PBX environments. An administrator simply needs to install one or more Intel Dialogic voice cards in the Unity server to allow it to communicate with the existing PBX. Cisco's Web site, provides step-by-step guides for integrating Unity with various vendor systems.
Unity comes in two flavors: Unity Voice Mail and Unity Unified Messaging. Since Unity Voice Mail is a standalone product that does not integrate with other e-mail systems, I will not cover it here.
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