Voicemail with no exchange mailbox

[satcom2k]

I have a situation in were I need to provide voicemail capabilities to about 50 phones that will not be tied directly to any particular user. Option one would be to create 50 mailboxes within exchange and then assign those to the phones but I was wondering if there is a way to provide just voicemail (not unified messaging) to these phones. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Tommer Catlin]

You can create one mailbox for the 50 phones, then can share the one mailbox.

Basically, you will need to roll all 50 DIDs, or foward them to one voicemail box. Typically, you can do this with up to 10 as "alternate numbers" in the Profile on this one vm box. But if you CallManager, you can probably figure out a way to have any of the DID's roll Unity under some sort of translation pattern for voicemail and have Unity just pickup on the tranlated number.

You can also hide the mailbox in Exchange so your UM users will not get confused. Or just simply create something like "50 phone - VM ONLY" and it will show up in your GAL.

[satcom2k]

The only issue is that these will no have DID's tied to the DN's. The only way these number will be accessible will be via the "directory" as no DID's have been provisioned. Now I am not an expert with Unity but I did not think that you could have multiple mailboxes (subscribers) assigned to the same DN; each time I have tried this Unity has complained that the DN was already assigned.

[MikeTomasko]

If you're running CallManager you can create CTI Ports instead of phones and just set them to default call forward to VM. But that would just help you if you wanted to create VM boxes that wouldn't be tied to a phone. Not sure if that would help what you're trying to do or not.