Convert Unity UM to VMO

[kseraphine]

Hi

A customer of mine currently has a Unity 4 server we initially setup for unified messaging with their exchange system. The company was purchased and their email was taken over by the new corporate exchange system which exists on the other side of their WAN. They are going to rebuild the, now uneeded, local exchange box forcing me to somehow convert unity to voicemail only. Is there a way to do this without rebuilding the box from scratch? The customer's windows Domain isn't going anywhere so I was thinking I'd uninstall Unity from the server, and reinstalling using the vmo procedure.

Any reason why this won't work?

Can I do a Dirt backup and restore to avoid recreating the Unity accounts?

Thanks for the advice.

[lindborg]

Sure, you can use DiRT to do this. Assuming the new Unity server is going into an entirely new directory that will work fine - if you're going to have it in the same AD directory, that wont work since it'll bind to the AD accounts for the users on the fly instead of creating new accounts for VM only use like you want.

[kseraphine]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I'd like to keep the server in the same AD directory and use the current user accounts if possible.

The customer is going to be getting exchange from a trusted domain in a different forest. Their new exchange accounts will be connected to different user objects in the trusted domain. The customer will continue to use their local AD domain accounts for local file/print but their local exchange is going away.

I thought I could:

Do a Dirt Backup

Uninstall Unity

Uninstall Exchange from the local exchange server (thereby deleting the local exchange mailboxes)

Install Exchange on the Unity server and create a new exchange system in their local domain.

Install Unity in voicemail only mode

Restore the Dirt backup to (hopefully) creating new exchange mailboxes and linking them to the correct user objects.

It would be much easier to install Unity in its own domain like you suggest above but I'd like to avoid that if possible.

Thanks

[lindborg]

I'm not sure I understand whta's going on with the AD accounts here - if they're going to create brand new AD accounts in a new forrest for their corporate network access, that's fine then. You can't have Unity using the AD account for a user to point at their voice mail Exchange account and also have it point at a corporate email Exchange account - there's only one mailbox that can be pointed at by a single AD account.

So long as this is understood - that should be fine. Just make sure you understand how DiRT binds to existing accounts in AD - the help file covers the details of this.