Don't worry... we play nice with sales folks, too.

The short story is voice mail only means you can only access your voice mail messages over the phone. No TTS of email, no VMO plug in for Outlook (gives you the ability to send voice mail from the desktop and play/record messages using your phone in Outlook).

When you get a UM license the key comes programmed with text to speech licenses (so you can access email and have it read to you and/or fax it if you have fax licenses as well) and VMO licenses that so you can install voice mail forms in Outlook at the desktop.

The actual inbox where the messages are stores really doesn't matter. You can go ahead and use voice mail only with an existing Exchange mail user account if you want, they just don't get the UM features. Messages are always stored in Exchange regardless. As such if the customer already has an Exchange network, you should use it no matter what configuration they want to install in. Makes it easier to migrate from VM to UM later if they choose to do so (this happens a lot).

The DRT is really not intended as a fully featured backup plan. It doesn't include Exchange data (i.e. messages), it's only a Unity specific information backup and restore mechanism. You'll still want to look into a good tape backup system (or consider using the one built into Win2K which is entirely adequate for small systems).


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)