Unity Connection Greeting Message Migration

[ssturial]

How can we migrate the Octel greeting messages over to a new Unity Connection system?

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[Tommer Catlin]

I have not seen a tool to do this anywhere.   Depending on which Octel unit you have, you might be able to pull out the WAV files.   If you can, then you can upload these PER user or PER call handler.  There is no bulk way to do this.  The Java Applet on the greetings page of each User or Call Handler, you can upload a WAV file.

Most customers i have dealt with for migrations from a legacy voicemail platform to Unity, I work with them to create and document all their current AA or call handlers.  Write out the scripts, the trees in Visio and then go over what is still in use and what should be reconstructed in Unity and re-recorded.  Alot of companies have old menu trees that need to be updated or some possibly deleted. (or not created on the new system)  Its not unlikely to find an old voicemail system that is 15 years old with call trees that have not worked or never worked, but are still built for some reason. (staff turn over in the telecom department, etc)

Its better to clean out, re-record and document everything.   Do it right the first time rather than trying to push or pull junk from an old system to a new system. 

Most customers are irked they cant migrate the voicemails or greetings or AAs from old systems, but that is how it is.  The quality is just not there and the time to do is not worth it.    I have had some play the greetings into a laptop MIC to record to WAV file... the recording sounded horrible.

my 2 cents

[David Hailey]

FYI: Octel greetings are recorded in a proprietary audio format and stored on the system.  In other words, converting that format to a standard codec-based greeting would be rather intricate.  I have seen some interesting Octel tools out there but NONE that can migrate data over to Unity or Unity Connection (or really any other 3rd-party platform for that matter).

Hailey

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[lindborg]

Just to be clear this type of tool would be heavily frowned on by the legal department.  Yes, we have plenty of former Octel engineers on staff (and Centigram and Active Voice etc…) – and not to put too fine a point on it, it’s almost certainly possible to use such proprietary insight into competitive systems to make some pretty slick migration tools.

This is viewed as unethical to a high degree and would most definitely be a career limiting maneuver here.  It’s come up more than a few times, trust me.  So there will never be such a tool from any competitive platform unless they agree to it.  I wouldn’t hold your breath…

If they offer a way to dump info such as directory data and WAV files out to a flat file with an open format I’m happy to look but I’m reasonably certain that won’t be the case with any of these products.