Designing Voice and
Unified Messaging Solutions
Cisco has been providing voice mail solutions for the IP telephony market for a
while now. In earlier releases of Cisco CallManager, a voice mail solution was
included as a free co-resident option on the Media Convergence Server (MCS)
Server Platforms.This product, uOne, has now been discontinued, and a migration
plan has been put in place by Cisco to move over to their new voice
mail/unified messaging solution which is called Unity. Based on this, this section
will focus solely on Cisco Unity, making the assumption that either the migration
to Unity from uOne has taken place or you are using other solutions. (Examples
of solutions that integrate with Cisco CallManager can be found on the Cisco
Web site.)
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Figure 7.4 Cisco CallManager Administrative Reporting Tool
212 Chapter 7 • AVVID Applications
In keeping with Cisco’s strive to make their IP telephony and application
solutions as open and standards-based as possible, members of the Cisco AVVID
Partner Program provide Unified Messaging Solutions that are in the process of
being integrated into the Cisco IP telephony solution.This essentially means that
it is possible to purchase the IP telephony solution from Cisco, yet buy (or integrate
an existing) unified messaging solution into your CallManager network.
Some of the vendor’s solutions will be discussed later in this section. As it happens,
one of these integrated solutions was a product called Active Voice Unity,
which Cisco purchased in late 2000, and which was subsequently integrated into
the Cisco fold in early 2001. Cisco Unity 2.46 was the first version released by
Cisco, currently we have in the 3.x range.One of the advantages of using the
Unified Messaging Solution with Cisco CallManager is the simplicity of the
CallManager configuration itself (see Figure 7.5).