Cisco Unity Family Overview

Cisco Unity is a feature rich voicemail solution for unified communications architectures. In addition to voicemail, the Cisco Unity product family offers the ability to do automated attendant, Integrated Messaging, or Unified Messaging (UM) depending on the Unity product. The Cisco Unity product family is available in three different form factors: Unity Express, Unity Connections, or Cisco Unity. This blog will cover some of the differences of the three different products.

Unity Express offers voicemail only for individual offices, while Unity Connections offers voicemail and integrated messaging for small to large business. Cisco Unity delivers voicemail, integrated messaging, and unified messaging for medium to large businesses. This blog series will focus on the Cisco Unity and Unity Connections platforms, while mentioning Cisco Unity Express at time. Cisco Unity Connections and Cisco Unity allows E-Mail clients to access voicemail as .wav file attachments using an IMAP connection to the Exchange server running on Cisco Unity (integrated messaging). Cisco Unity has historically offered much tighter E-Mail integration with the view mail for Outlook (VMO) or View Mail for Notes (VMN) client applications, but these applications are also available for Cisco Unity Connections with version 7.0.

Cisco Unity and Cisco Unity Connections are application servers which can be installed on the same media convergence servers (MCS) that Cisco sells for Cisco Unified Communications Manger. The application relies on an information store (IS) database to maintain all configuration data related to the subscribers (users), call handlers (automated attendant), and other system attributes. The voicemail messages are stored in the message store (MS) database.

The Cisco Unity Connections product uses the same appliance server model as CUCM (Linux and IBM Informix Database server [IDS]). The information and message stores of Cisco Unity Connections are both stored on the same IDS database. Cisco Unity Express (CUE) uses a proprietary Cisco database on the hard drive of a CUE network module for both the information and message store. Cisco Unity uses a Microsoft SQL server or Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine (MSDE) database as the information store and a Microsoft Exchange or IBM Domino server as the message store. MSDE can be used for systems with less than 32 users. The message store for Unity can be on the same Windows 2003 server as Unity (onbox) or a separate server (offbox). Cisco Unity is built to leverage unified messaging and the existing E-Mail based messaging infrastructure. The Cisco Unity 5.0 message store can be Microsoft Exchange 2000, 2003, or 2007. Read the Unity 5 release notes related to using Microsoft Exchange 2007 as a mailbox store. There are some serious limitations with Unity 5.0 and Exchange 2007. The Exchange 2007 support in Unity 7.0 is better than Unity 5.0.

All Cisco Unity platforms use the concept of ports to accept calls to or from the Cisco Unity system. A port in Cisco Unity is not a physical analog voice port or a logical B channel in a PRI, but an logical IP session. The number of ports used in the system is licensed by the user, but the maximum number of ports available to the system is based on the Unity product, version, and hardware platform on which it is installed. Cisco Unity 7.0 supports up to 200 ports per server, while Cisco Unity Connection supports 144 ports, and Unity Express supports up to 24 ports. Cisco Unity 7.0 and Unity Connection 7.0 scale up to 10,000 voicemail users per server.

We’ll continue the Cisco Unity Conversation in the next blog.

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