Thanks for the reply Rob.

I agree that the RTMT doesn't require server-grade hardware, but the fact remains that you are required to have yet another computer running an app in order to receive email alerts. That's an unecessasary addition. UC is supposed to be targeted to small-to-medium businesses; you know, a simpler system compared to Unity.

My complaint stands: UC has the ability to send email to users regarding voice mail messages, yet Cisco does not see fit to use that mechanism to send alerts to administrators.

That's unconscionable to me!

I assume then you'll be pinging your account team and asking that they press for this in the PERS system - that's the ONLY way features like this (i.e. those not tied to revenue directly) get engineering time allocated for them.  This may seem like a horrendous and disasterous oversight to you but I just checked and there's not a single request for it in the system.  Not one.  Product's been shipping for a few years now (since 2.x).  Which means there is zero chance this will get done instead of other functionality tied to requested feature - that's how it works.  Clearly other sites are not as shocked as you are by this - I'd like to see this done myself but it's not as cheap and easy as you may assume.

The OS services are done from a Call Manager installation (true even if you install stand alone Connection) - there are actually two seperate instances of Informix running on the system - one handling voice mail functionality (Connection) and one handling OS services (and Call Manager functions in a co res install).  Events (errors similar to the Windows event log among other things) are handled on the OS side of the house.  Connection was able to add event triggers for voice mail updates in the Connection DB no problem - hence the email triggers on voice mail changes (and MWIs and pagers etc...).  Getting events triggered from across the other DB instance on the CM side is not nearly as straight forward or cheap.  The RTMT tool connects to that DB (hence it's ability to trigger on events there).

Yes it can be done - and I'd vote it should be done - but it's not free and that means it needs field justification beyond the assumption that its just "obvious" this warrents work.  I've been doing this 20 years now and I can tell you product folks with a thin set of new features they're salivating for don't give them up for "obvious" system functions without a fight. Please make the feature request.

Thank you for the in-depth response.
I shall make that request.

It's certainly true that feature requests are rarely as easy and inexpensive as we end users might perceive.

One of the reasons that I find this so odd is that there *is* an SMTP server setup page in the Unified OS Administration.
The documentation is not clear as to what that is used for, since it's my understanding that Connection uses the SmartHost field in to identify the SMTP server for Connection's needs.
Being that it's under OS administration, as opposed to Unity Connection administration, one would expect it to be used by the OS.