Well - asking for a view into the future is tough - we can only talk about comitted features on comitted products - there are, of course, lots of plans for many features - which of those will get out to the field and when is the question. So I hope you understand we can't just offer speculation out here in a public forum (i.e. where our competitors can plumb feature ideas and get a roadmap of where we're going before we go there). Understood this is highly desirable information, though.
What I can say - yes, expanding clustering is being worked on. This is considerably more involved with Connection than Call Manager - we have orders of magnitude more data to shuffle around. CM's "master/publisher" approach works ok for their model where their DB doesn't change a whole heck of a lot - Connection's db changes constantly (i.e. you get new messages, your notification triggers fire and need to be remembered, your last login time is tracked, you rerecord your greeting or voice name etc...). With CM when the master is off line it's not a big deal to lock it down, with Connection this does not cut ice. Suffice it to say that the amount of data to sync. between servers for Connection dwarfs that of Call Manager so it's a considerably more complex issue to just toss in X servers instead of limiting it to pairs. But yes, the high availability/high scalability problem is high on the engineering priority list.
As for UM features without the UM configuration - understood that folks want the benefits of being integrated with AD without the hassles of being integrated with AD - that would be really nice. Not suprisingly our friends from across the pond are less thrilled about this idea - hence their hobbling of the MAPI interfaces and limiting the AD extensions in 2007 etc... they may be slow and not terribly customer responsive but they do know how to lock down their install base to freeze our competitors while claiming they're not a monopoly ;-> but I digress.
In Connection 7.1 there will be the option to "store and forward" messages from Connection to any remote address - this allows you to have VM access includng MWI, notification and all that good stuff as well as have access to your voice mail messages in remote mailstores. However when you mark that message read or delete the message in the remote store it does not synch back to the Connection store. To get that level of functionality you either need to have your client directly peeking into our mailstore via IMAP (which is the seperate folder you talk about) or have us rummaging around and getting updates from your mailstore (which requires all kinds of pumped up access rights and interfaces which will vary wildly depending on the setup and involves headaches that folks want to avoid with current Unity installations). There's no magic bullet I'm afraid.
Yes - various methods for providing "unified" message interface without the type of super-user access needed with Unity today are being worked with specific vendors - what these will be and when they'll see the light of day is not something we can discuss out here I'm afraid.
Sorry for the rambling reply but there is no simple "yes" or "no" answer to your futures question.
