Broadcast Message vs to All Subscribers

[k6lw]

Unity 4.05

Had an event this AM which required a voicemail to all subscribers. So I sent a very short voicemail from my mailbox at 9:50 (give or take) to the 1048 subscribers. It's now 15:00 and folks still haven't heard the message which is now OBE. I can't find any info on system broadcast messages in either the Cisco Unity Deployment Guide or the Cisco Unity Fundamentals. I turned that feature on for my mailbox, but am afraid to try it based on this mornings mess. Thoughts?

[mrmccann]

If you use broadcast messaging, you are guaranteed the message will be promptly available to subscribers right after you send it. You are not at the mercy of Exchange to deliver the message, since broadcast messaging feature (when used to send message to users on a local server) was implemented without any dependency on Exchange. One thing to consider - broadcast messages do not light the MWI. If you need the MWI to light, you'll have to continue using distribution lists.

Unity 4.0(5) Release Notes have information on broadcast messaging, and references on how to send a broadcast message:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/prod_release_note09186a008044e9e7.html#wp384701

With regard to the problem where not all users received the message you sent, did you send it to the All Subscribers distribution list? Did you confirm that the All Subscribers distribution list contains all 1048 subscribers?

[k6lw]

According to the Unity books, by default any time a new subscriber is added to unity they are also automatically added to the all subscriber distribution list. Yes I needed to light the MWIs. Exchange is coresident with Unity. Hard to believe that it took so long to notify everyone of the system outage. Is there any way to prevent subscribers from sending messages to the All Subscriber distribution list?

[lindborg]

Couple things here.

1. Yes, by default all users are added to the all subscribers list - however this is configured with the subscriber templates you use to create subscribers (you can have each template adding users to different lists if you want) so it's something that can be altered. If you have folks not getting messages you think should be, you'll definitely want to check the membership list of that DL and not just assume.

2. You can prevent users from sending to all distribution lists but you can't select specific DLs they can and can't send messages to at this point.

3. The MWI load on a large DL message is intense. Depending on how many MWI ports you have and the responsiveness of the switch it can indeed take a while for the notification engine to work through all users - there's no way everyone's light is going to come on quickly in a large installation based on a message to the all subscribers DL like that. In fact it's common for large sites to use the Public DL Builder tool to configure DLs to "bleed out" MWI requests for messages instead of dropping the hammer on the switch all at once.

[k6lw]

Thanks Jeff. I found the info on Broadcast Message in the 4.05 user guides. Which brings up a couple of questions:

1. I have four ports configured for dial out MWI but it appears that only two are ever used.

2. Any "enhancements" planed for a flood MWI activation? (For all integrations, Cisco and SMDI)

(This would allow the system Broadcast to rapidly hit all subscribers, and for us to inform users they have a messagee they need to hear.)

3. I still need the ability to "light" the MWI on multiple extensions using different interfaces but sharing a single mailbox. I tried the recommendations for modifying the ini files to support both Cisco and SMDI, but never got it to work.

4. What rationale is used in how the MWI notifies subscribers? It doesn't appear to be numberic, or based on the user id of the subscriber. (Idea being that watching the port monitor in Unity Tools would give us some idea as to how much longer until the MWI notifications or re-sync would be finished)

Lee.