Well... they told me to roll with it on the feature description. Here's the quick run down:
1. Support for Active Directory and Exchange 2000. Obviously this is the lion's share of the work over the last year or so. We are using SQL on our local box to hold most of the information necessary for Unity and a much smaller number of items are being stored in the directory itself. There will be support for both Ex55 and Ex2K/AD but not both at the same time (obviously... that would be a mess!). This is being done via a two part setup that I think folks will like. Part one is the basic Unity install which is the bulk of the setup. Part 2 is where you select what back end you're hooking up to (ex5.5 or Ex2k/AD). And yes, you can point this at an Exchange server OFF BOX. You can still install Exchange on our server if you want (i.e. for POV systems) but in most cases folks are going to want to point us off box. Having SQL on the box and using it to store all the directory data we need eliminates the need to have Exchange on our server.
2. AMIS support. Not my favorite message transport protocol in the world, but it's supported by most of the big boys out there.
3. Major revamp of networking support. Much, much nicer with SQL. Check out the Networking Overview document on my web page (on the 3.0 tools page at the bottom) for more detail on this than you can shake a stick at. This is huge and central to scaling Unity for larger sites… you’d do well to spend some time reviewing this document (40 pages but lots of pretty pictures).
4. Multiple extension support. Each subscriber can have up to 10 extensions each. Very handy for lots of applications including fitting nicely with the new networking scheme.
5. Support for more than one Call Manager server/cluster attaching to Unity at a time. Lots of requests for this one.
6. Support for Call Manager Bravo (the next major release of CM). Yes, we'll still support Encore.
7. Lots of fringe benefits from the SQL work including supporting more users per box and more users in the organization and being able to scale easier moving forward. We’ll also be offering the UMR (pronounced “oo-mer”) – the Unity Message Repository. In the case where our primary Exchange server hits the dirt (i.e. the guy we’re connected to directly either on our box or off) voice mail messages will be stored in SQL until we can hand them off. Users can get at these messages in this temporary store while the system is in this state. Lots of requests for this type of functionality and we’ll be building on this moving forward.
8. The Event Notification Utility is back in fighting form for the 3.0 release. This guy monitors the system for various error conditions (i.e. watching the event logs for specific error entries) and can page you, call you , send an email, even be configured to restart the system automatically if Unity become unresponsive.
9. The usual array of minor fixes, improvements to the prompts/conversation etc…
Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)
