Cisco Unity Connection features and the buffet

Connection features – what do you need?

Using specific features are like choosing your food at the buffet. The nice thing about going to the buffet is that you get to eat what I want, and when you want it. As it goes with features... some organizations have a need for a specific feature, where others have a completely different set of needs. The features in Cisco Unity Connection continue to expand with a number of new features that you can choose to deploy (or not) based on your needs. I have had a number of questions on competitive products, features, and options with Cisco Unity Connection over the past number of weeks, which I would like to address in the next couple blogs.

We all know that there are many products out there to fill needs of the organization. The question always comes in to play with every design decision at to which is the best fit for my organization? In many cases, this decision is based on some of the features that we discussed previously, such as redundancy and scalability. In other cases, these decisions may be based on features and options.

 I would like to focus in this blog on some of the new options and features that have been implemented in the latest release of Cisco Unity Connection. Keep in mind, that this is not an exhaustive list, but a review of the some of the newer features.

Three features I would like to present here are new to Cisco Unity Connection. These are Unified Messaging, distribution list access lists, and message recall.

Many organizations have requirements for a unified messaging solution where voice messages can be visible from the users Exchange Inbox. With the current deployment of Cisco Unity Connection version 8.5, you can configure access to Exchange, MeetingPlace, or MeetingPlace Express to access emails and calendar information for text to speech. In this case, users are able to hear the voice messages as well as calendar events. With this new feature, voice messages are first delivered to the user's voicemail on Cisco Unity Connection and replicated immediately to the user's mailbox on Exchange (2003, 2007, or 2010). Voice messages are then available to the user from Cisco Unity Connection or the user's Inbox on the Exchange server. These same users are then able to retrieve their messages using the phone or ViewMail for Outlook (Exchange).

This feature, which Cisco terms as Unified Messaging would be more correctly called Synchronized Unified Messaging, meaning that a message updated in one delivery location is updated in the other "synchronized" location. Keep in mind that not all messages are synchronized when using this feature. These include broadcast, sent, draft, and unaccepted dispatch messages.

Another interesting feature that is available in the current release of Connection is Message Recall. This feature allows users to review a list of the messages that they sent and remove a message that was previously sent, provided that the recipient has not yet accessed the message. This feature can be enabled for specific users or all users as needed, allowing users to remove a messages that were mistakenly sent to other users on the system.

The last feature I would like to discuss is the distribution list access list. This feature provides a second layer of control for sending or addressing voice messages to a specific distribution list. The first layer of control uses the concept of search scopes and partitions, while a distribution list access list provides an optional second level of control. In this way, certain users are provided the ability to send and address messages to specific distribution lists, while disallowing others from accessing the same distribution list.

Again, many features continue to expand and improve with the Cisco Unity Connection. There is something on the feature buffet that will fill just about any diet of business requirements in your organization.