Unity Connection Single Inbox/Unified Messaging Office 365 Documentation Ideas/Pit Falls

[Atheeth Sishtla]

Hello All,

              I am the member of the Unity Connection/ Applications TAC (Technical Assistance Center) team at Cisco, we are in the process of looking for ideas, or pointers from our customers concerning Unity Connection Product space escpecially connected to the Single Inbox /Unified Messaging feature integration with Office 365

We would like to come up with documents, which are primarly focussed on troubleshooting & feature explanations.

Please let me know your thoughts, I would really appreciate your ideas or any suggestions pin pointing any pit falls, or areas which need improvment.

Thanks Once Again.

-

Atheeth

[Bryan Moorman]

I'm in the process of setting up Unified Messaging between a Unity Connection 9.1 server and Office365 (Exchange Online).  I would love to see an updated document with screenshot on how to setup the integration, because the documents that I'm finding either through Cisco or Office365 community or on Cisco's website are not working.  

[Tim Schroeder]

We're setting up a large CUC system integrated with Office 365. The big problem we're facing is that when using Single Inbox, voicemails arrive in the users Inbox with a FROM address of <user>@cuc.domain.com.  These messages cannot be replied to (because cuc.domain.com does not resolve to the users email account), plus they clutter the user's cached contacts with duplicate email addresses.  i.e. "joe.smith@domain.com" as well as "joe.smith@cuc.domain.com.  Suggestion: CUC should set the FROM address equal to the user Corporate Email Address, as configured in Unity Connection Administration.  I am currently reviewing the following threads and considering how they might alleviate this issue, however I don't yet know how they apply to Office365 versus plain old Exchange.  If we can't find a workaround, we will dump Connection completely.

http://supportforums.cisco.com/blog/150386/unity-connection-851-single-inbox-unified-messaging-forwardreply-outlook-fails-ndr

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/11238701/unity-connection-single-inbox#3396913

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/unified-communications/unity-connection/guide_c07-728014.html

[Bradford Magnani]

Hi Tim,

There's nothing on the Unity Connection side configuration-wise that will change the FROM address.  The following section explains what you already suspect: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/9x/unified_messaging/guide/9xcucumgx/9xcucumg020.html#pgfId-1313072

Also, that only applies to the on-prem Exchange deployments, there hasn't been any new developments on this front with Office 365.

Brad

[Tim Schroeder]

The part that isn't clear to me is whether the Exchange recipient policy as described in Step 9 will accomplish.  Can you tell me which of the following outcomes will result:

a) The "From" address of the email as it appears in the users Inbox will be changed from "joe@cuc.domain.com" to "joe@domain.com"

b) The "From" address of the email as it appears in the users Inbox will remain "joe@cuc.domain.com" but replies to that address will actually be deliverable.

Obviously, "a" is better, and will avoid cluttering the users cached contact list with multiple copies of the same contact.  I can't help but wonder why Cisco would not have avoided this by allowing the use of a "Reply-To" feature that has been around in SMTP since, what, the 1980's?

[Bradford Magnani]

You'll achieve b).  The other link you mentioned in your first post (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/unified-communications/unity-connection/guide_c07-728014.html) is what the marketing team put together which actually "masks" the from address as the corporate domain.

Single Inbox isn't SMTP, it's using Microsoft's EWS protocol, so that may have played a role in why the functionality is the way it is.

[Tim Schroeder]

Result "b" really isn't good enough because of the cached contacts. We'll have 2 of every contact - one real one, and one odd-looking CUC contact.  Why can't CUC just send the actual domain name when sending the email to Exchange?

[Bradford Magnani]

I'm not sure what the technical reasoning was behind the product team not providing this feature.  It was submitted as a feature request but I do not see any progress on it.  Since the marketing team released that white paper about how to mask the address, they likely decided that was the workaround.  You can engage your Cisco account team and have them look into specifics - we're limited with that sort of information here in TAC.