VMO & OUTLOOK 2000 & WIN 2000 PRO

[admin_2]

We are running Unity 2.3, although we have seen this problem on our customer sites (various vintages of Unity). <br><br>THE SYMPTOM: When you double click on a VMO message (with playback set to PHONE under VMO Options) the phone will ring. You pick the phone up and speak (so Unity knows you have picked up), and wait for a long period of time - up to 1 min - before the message begins to stream. This will occur typically the first time you play a message after leaving your desk for awhile (eg - first thing in the morning etc). This issue does not occur on other machines attached to the same Unity box (eg running 95/98/NT). <br><br>We have 2 separate machines with the same SW versions of WIN2000 Pro and Outlook 2000 exibiting the fault, the other 15 machines in our organisation are fine.<br><br>I would suspect that this is related to WIN 2000 P, have you seen this fault, it is easy to replicate ?<br><br>Is there a known fix ?<br><br>

[#2]

Well… talking with the QA folks and poking around the bug database, I do see several Win2K related bugs with TRAP (Telephone Record and Playback) for VMO (and the SA/AA media master TRAP which uses the same engine). Most of them, however, result in a flat-out connection failure due to authentication differences between NT and Win2K or differences in the rights scheme for the registry. Nothing, however, exactly matches the description here with a delayed connection time on the first attempt.

There’s a report of something similar on a specific laptop from one of the field test sites but they were having other problems with the box, wiped it clean, reinstalled all the applications stuff and it went away (it was running NT4).

A number of us are running Win2K clients here at AV with no trouble, however we’re running Unity 2.4.5.

Keep in mind that 2.3.6 was released pretty early in the Win2K cycle, so the amount of exposure it got in the labs and field test with Win2K client machines was pretty low. There WERE a number of Win2K specific fixes for both the client and the server side related to SA/AA/VMO between 2.3.6 and 2.4.0, but I can’t tell you for sure that this specific problem was addressed since I don’t find any description that matches yours.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice
jlindborg@activevoice.com
http://members.home.net/jlindborg

[#3]

We are running Unity 2.4.5 build 73 with Call Manager 3.0(7) and the clients are Win98 with Outlook 2000. We are having VMO playback issues over the phone that are similar. The PC speaker works fine for playback, but when the phone is the selected playback device, VMO hangs for about 20 seconds before playback. Then, if you play the message again, it plays instantly. This issue only occurs on two laptops out of the 15 involved in the pilot. We reinstalled Outlook and VMO but the problem continues. Unity and Call Manager settings are basically the same for all clients. Is there a fix for this short of wiping the image on the client?

[#4]

We were never able to find out the exact problem at a couple of sites that reported similar sounding problems on their laptops. We were able to demonstrate that the NIC drivers were holding up the show but never why or how to fix it.


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

[#5]

We have a Xircom NIC card in one laptop and a Cisco wireless NIC card in the other. Would you think that reinstalling the NIC, or installing a different NIC card would fix the problem? We have other laptops functioning perfectly with the same cards, so I'm not sure what approach might fix this problem. Due to the fact these are two different NIC's with the same problem, I'm tempted to think the problem might be higher up. I'm curious, how can you tell the NIC drivers are the problem?

[#6]

The lap tops we saw problems with were all using docking stations, but I supposed that's to be expected. We thought there might be an issue switching between the user's home config and their office config or something but could never prove it out.

specifically we were able to show that the call was being made from the TRAP client and not showing up at the Unity box for a period of time. The list of suspects in between those two guys is pretty short...


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