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Can you copy Private Distribution Lists in Unity?

jhatfield
Level 1
Level 1

I have a scenario where a group of 22 executives all exchange messages frequently among one another.

They would like the ability to address messages to each other using only a couple of digits every time. We utilize a 10-digit dialplan that mimics the E.164 for scalability. I can accomplish this by creating a personal distribution list for each user that an exec wants to message. For example PrivDL 1 is Bob Smith, PrivDL 2 is Jane Doe, etc. 21 PrivDLs per user, each referencing a single executive. Bob Smith would be every execs PrivDL 1, Jane Doe would be every execs PrivDL 2, etc.

Since a personal DL is stored in the subscriber settings in Unity, is there any way to extract a users PrivDL and replicate it via a script to the other 21 users?

The client has Unity 4.05 in a VM environment. TIA

5 Replies 5

lindborg
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

No, there's no supported way to extract private DL and their members for application to multiple users. I've gotten requests to replicate a single PDL around between users but never an entire set of PDLs like that.

It could be done with a stand alone app with simple DB calls but this would be custom work.

Is the feature to replicate private PDL's on the roadmap, this would make a lot of Audix/New Unity customers very happy

No, this is the first I've heard of such a request and there's nothing that's been entered into PERs which means no one has officially requested this of product management.

You can, of course, just share public DLs with IDs associated with them for addressing purposes if you have a group of users that want to address one another instead of using private lists that "replicate" around. Right off hand I'm not even sure how you'd design "replicating" private DLs in the first place.

If you have a small group of users that want to message one another, seems like a better featurae would be to make public DLs have the ability to be accessible only to a limited list of users - then you have one set of lists to keep up to date and you're done as opposed to making one set of changes that then need to be replicated around to several mailboxes' private lists.

private lists are designed to be per user so mangling them to be some sort of shared entity is a difficult thing to pull of cleanly.

As always, thanks for weighing in on this.

The heart of this matter is desired end-user functionality. In the current environment, there are many (30+)differing groups of executives. These executives are typically divisional and regional, and they rarely message outside of their own group.

At the end of the day, those execs don't care if this desired functionality is easy for the administrator to manage or not. If the CEO asks me if he (and his team) can address messages to their top 20 underlings using 1 or 2 digits - I have to say yes, the system can do that.

If I went to a Public Distribution list, I would need to use a unique 3-digit number to address a message. 3 is less than the 10-digit extension, but not as easy for an exec to remember as 1 or 2 digits within their group. They have over 4000+ users on the unity server today.

It sounds as if other vendors' voicemail platforms can do this today, I don't know if they require building individual PrivDLs for each user or if it's automated. Maybe someone with other-vendor experience can weigh in here...

Just checking around with folks the only thing close to this I've heard of is more like personal "shortcuts" for addressing commonly used folks in your address book. So you can create short 2 digit IDs that you link to full subscribers in the directory. Audix used to have something like this (the feature was dropped out of their Modular Messaging product I'm told). Each user had to setup their own list of shortcuts, there was no way to share them or replicate them or anything of the sort.

So more or less it's the same as the private list stuff in that each user would have to create a private dl with a 1 or 2 digit ID that contained the user or users they want to address to by that ID. Sounds like Unity is at least on par with what Audix offered here.

Scanning docs for Nortel, Avaya, old Octel systems, Centigram and such I'm not seeing anything different than this and certainly nothing like "shared" or "replicated" shortcuts like you're asking for. Which isn't to say someone somewhere doesn't do something like this, but I haven't heard of it and several former employees of competative products also haven't heard of it. If someone has, do let us know...

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