Ask the Expert: Installing, Integrating, and Troubleshooting Cisco Unity Connection

[ciscomoderator]

Welcome to this Cisco Support Community Ask the Expert conversation. This is an opportunity to learn and ask questions about integrating Cisco Unity Connection into your environment and troubleshooting the many features that are available with the Cisco Unity Connection voicemail solution with expert Brad Magnani.

Cisco Unity Connection is a voicemail and unified messaging platform with a comprehensive feature set and is based on the Linux unified communications operating system. With Cisco Unity Connection, you can access and manage voice messages in variety of ways, using your email inbox, web browser, the Cisco Jabber messaging integration platform, Cisco Unified IP Phone, smartphone, tablet, and more. Cisco expert Brad Magnani will cover and answer all of your questions about Cisco Unity Connection.

Brad Magnani is currently a member of the Applications TAC team in Richardson, TX. He has attended Cisco Live and has provided mentorship and technical training in the Bangalore and Krakow TAC centers. His areas of expertise for the past six years have been Cisco Unity and Cisco Unity Connection. Brad also has experience troubleshooting and working with various voice products, including Cisco Unity, Cisco Unity Connection, Presence, Communications Manager, and Jabber. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree in applied networking and system administration from Rochester Institute of Technology. He has achieved certifications for Unity Support Specialist and CCNP-Voice.

Remember to use the rating system to let Brad know if you have received an adequate response. 

Because of the volume expected during this event, Brad might not be able to answer every question. Remember that you can continue the conversation in the Collaboration, Voice and Video community, under subcommunity Unified Communications Applications, shortly after the event. This event lasts through March 28, 2014. Visit this forum often to view responses to your questions and the questions of other Cisco Support Community members.

[Bradford Magnani]

Hi,

If I'm understanding your issue correctly, you have 2 phone systems include the default "phone system" created.  When you're on the Phone Systems page and you click "Check Telephony Configuration" you get failures for the default "phone system" integration because you don't have any ports assigned to it.

That Check Telephony Configuration appears to do a check on all phone systems that are present, regardless if they're being used or not.  Selecting a phone system and running the test doesn't run it on the selected phone system.  So you can just ignore the errors for the default phone system if you don't have any ports assigned to it.

Hope that helps,

Brad

[Bradford Magnani]

The link you refer to is specifically talking about message flow when having an IMAP account created in Outlook pointing to UC for voice mail access and having VMO (Viewmail for Outlook) plug-in installed in Outlook, which is a very specific scenario that this section discusses, not related to Unified Messaging or the scenario you're talking about above.  You'll need to clarify what you plan on having configured first before trying to understand the flow of messages. 

Are you configuring UM and you want to know how a corporate user sends a voicemail to a non-corporate gmail account?

Are you going to have users who all have VMO plug-in installed in Outlook or without?

Are you configuring all user's Outlook clients with a separate IMAP account pointing to UC?

[clark white]

Dear Brad,

I want to do pure Unified messaging.

I just showed a link example  how the packet flow is shown for IMAP account created in outlook pointiing to UC, as the equivalent explanation i need from you for the unified messaging.

Are you configuring UM and you want to know how a corporate user sends a voicemail to non-corporate gmail account?  also to corporate users --

yes

Are you going to have users who all have VMO plug-in installed in Outlook or without?

yes i want all users with VMO, but i want to know what i will loose when VMO is not installed.

Are you configuring all user's Outlook clients with a separate IMAP account pointing to UC?

NO  i dont want this procedure as this is for IMAP creating a additonal account in outlook.

Thanks

Thanks

[Bradford Magnani]

Clark,

The release notes for VMO show in this matrix what you will "lose" if you don't install VMO: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/vmo/release/notes/902cucvmorn.html#wp253514

An important piece of information to understand is that if you have VMO installed, delivery path as far as voice messages are concerned are going to be sent through UC.  If you don't have VMO installed, your Outlook client is relying on the Exchange server to do all of the message routing. 

With VMO installed:

If a user with VMO installed sends a new message to another corporate user, VMO sends it to UC, UC then makes sure it's able to recognize the sender and receiver and if it has a match, it delivers the message locally to the UC database, lights the MWI, then syncs it out to Exchange via unified messaging over the EWS protocol. 

To answer your question about sending a message off-net, if a user with VMO tries sending a message to a non-corporate user (gmail, etc.) once the message is sent from VMO to UC, UC recognizes the recipient does not map to anything in its database. UC either relays the message to the SMTP smart host (you must configure this), or sends an NDR to the sender, depending on the option selected for the "When a Recipient Cannot be Found" setting on the System Settings > General Configuration page in Connection Administration. By default, Connection sends an NDR.

Without VMO installed:

When a user replies to or forwards a Connection voice message, the reply or forward also is treated like an email, even if the user attaches a .wav file. Message routing is handled by Exchange, not by Connection, so the message is never sent to the Connection mailbox for the recipient

Hope that helps,

Brad

[jack samuel]

Dear Brad

It's the default, until users record their own recorded name, the system will attempt to read the user's name on it's own (sounds sort of like a robot).

so according to your answer with the tick in COS also the system will attempt to read the username???

but unluckily it is not happening like that with me, when user setup first time system waits for the first and last name to be pronounced by the user it doenst move further.

Thanks

[Bradford Magnani]

If you want to prevent users from being able to ever record a recorded name, you just need to uncheck the box in the Class of Service "Allow User to Record Name".  When you go through self enrollment, the conversation skips the requirement of recording a name and proceeds to ask them to record a greeting.

There's also another Advanced setting you'll want to make sure is unchecked:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/8x/gui_reference/guide/8xcucgrgx/8xcucgrg110.html#wp1168437

System Settings>Advanced>Conversations "Require Users to Record Names at Enrollment"

With this option unchecked, the conversation says "to continue without a recorded name press #" so it does let the users proceed past it without recording one if they don't want to.

Hope that helps,

Brad

[hhtyson11]

Hello Brad, adding on to this question.  What is not backed up in COBRAS?  

[Bradford Magnani]

Hi Henry,

The COBRAS help document outlines everything it does not back up:

http://www.ciscounitytools.com/Applications/General/COBRAS/Help/COBRAS_Briefcase/COBRAS_Briefcase.htm#_Toc330199745

Hope that helps,

Brad

[Rob Huffman]

Hey Brad,

Hope life is treating you well my friend! I know you probably don't want to hear from a Flames fan after the sad collapse of your beloved Stars last Friday night (sorry couldn't resist!)

Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to help address these questions!

With Unity Connection there seems to be a parallel path to the CUCM "Jump upgrade" process described here;

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/9x/upgrade/guide/9xcucrugx/9xcucrug025.html

I have not seen many people comment on using this approach for their upgrades. Do you have any comments or gotchas??

Cheers!

Rob

[Bradford Magnani]

Mr. Rob...

I knew it would only be a matter of time before you said something - I don't want to talk about it!  It was horrible to watch.  Toothless Cammalleri came up big for you guys.

I'm assuming you're referring to the overall move from MCS to virtual and not the "jump" upgrade to 7.1.3?  I haven't seen many issues with the move to virtual during these migrations.  Most customers have realized how flexible COBRAS is and understand it may not extract all data, but the data it gets is sufficient to be able to do away with restoring a DRS.  Most of the issues that we see are related to a migration from an old version (7.x mainly) that had existing corruption (usually some sort of DB anomoly or defect) which carries over and causes problems.  As far as the migration, my experience is that they go pretty smoothly.

Hope that helps,

Brad

[Rob Huffman]

Thanks Brad,

You are most correct! The CUCM "Jump" upgrade does allow a supported version to be built on VM and then use DRS from MCS to migrate data then upgrade to desired 9.x version. The thing that I hadn't seen until recently was the "support" for the 7.x/8.x build on VM (as a temporary first step)  in relation to Unity Connection so this was somewhat new news for me :)

So, in your experience you are finding that the majority of users prefer to use COBRAS rather than this migration method. I will have to do some serious studying on this as well!

Thanks again!

Cheers!

Rob

PS: when you feel bad about that game just look in the standings

[skiNEwhere]

Hi Brad,

I get the error "The periodic task com.cisco.unity.UmssSysAgentTasks.MonitorSystemMailboxesTask generated either an error or warning alert" nightly. Is there a way to automatically purge undeliverable messages? If not, how would I do this manually?

[Bradford Magnani]

Hi,

Which version of UC?  You can first check under Tools>Task Management in Connection Administration and click the "Monitor System Mailboxes" task and you should see a history of all the task run results.  If you click them you should get more information as to what may be failing (undeliverablemessagesmailbox, UnityConnection, operator).  It may just be a matter of you logging into those mailboxes and clearing out old messages.

Hope that helps,

Brad

[skiNEwhere]

Hi Brad,

I received this input from that command. It's in the undeliverable messages mailbox. How would I delete those messages without setting up a phone? There is no way to auto purge?

Matt

[Bradford Magnani]

Hi Matt,

By default the system accounts exist in the "system" class of service which has IMAP and web inbox enabled.  The quickest way would be to login to https:\\yourucserver\inbox and login as undeliverablemessagesmailbox with the configured Web Application password for the account.  The other option is you can create an IMAP account in Outlook and point it at UC and login that way.  If you're not sure what the password is (only used for situations like this) set the "Web Application" password dropdown on the undeliverablemessagesmailbox user under Edit>Change password.

Hope that helps,

Brad