Unity 2.4.6 & 3.0 Coexist

[jknuth]

I have a customer who is going to be replacing their Audix with Unity at 3 seperate location. The design includes the PBXLink and analog ports on the Unity servers to interface to the Lucent G3. Unity will be DualPBX for future CM integration. At the start all 3 sites were going to upgrade to Exchange 2000 and consequently Unity 3.0 was quoted. Now one of the sites is not playing nice and is refusing to move toward Exchange 2000. I think my question is obvious. Can I have a 2.4.6 Unity/EX55 and 3.0/EX2000 coexist. What about AD integration. Customer wants this to look like one happy Exchange family with forward/transfer/etc among all users. Is this possible and what would I be losing.(The more problems the better... more fuel to convince the 5.5 site to move ahead.<br><br>Thanks<br><br>Jeff<br><br>

[Anil Verma]

No, Unity 2.4.6 and Unity 3.0 will not be able to Coexisit in the same environment and talk to each other.
Unity 2.4.6 does not have any AD connectivity.

You can have Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2K coexist in the same AD environment, setup the AD connectors and have all sites on Unity 3.0.

If you want them all to talk, you will really need to understand networking as done in Unity 3.0. Check out the 3.0 documentation that is now available on CCO.

[jknuth]

So... If I understand this correctly. I can move to Unity 3.0 with 2 of the Unity boxes tied to the Exchange2000 network and all is well. I can also have the 3rd Unity server running 3.0 and tied to Exchange 5.5 but to have full transfer/forward/dial by name/etc i would need to do some serious Unity networking? I will read Jeff's networking document asap but just a quick question. The Exchange 5.5 site has 400 users. Is this going to be a extremely difficult task? Thanks again. Jeff

[Anil Verma]

First you will need to do some fancy legwork on the Exchange 5.5 system to talk to the Exchange 2K systems, just to make sure that outlook etc works. You will need to work with the Active Directory Connector. Possibly setup a two way connection.

What you could do is have all the three Unity's be Exchange 2K servers, and let one sites mailusers be homed on the Exchange 5.5 server. Tricky but possible. This would introduce the E2K server into all the locations. We do advise that Unity should not be the first E2K server into any location which is converting over from E5.5. So you would end up having two E2K servers in the one site that has E5.5 mailing.

You do need to look up the networking overview document to make sure that Unity can address the folks and do seemless transfers etc.

You might need to contact an expert Unity Sales Engineer from Cisco.