Cisco offers three voice mail solutions that consist of Cisco Unity Express, Cisco Unity Connection, and Cisco Unity.
It is my pleasure to address everyone in the network community during the month of April. In this series of articles I will begin with exploring Cisco voicemail solutions followed by focusing in on Cisco Unity Connection; its design, features and applications.
Cisco currently has three voice mail solutions that consist of Cisco Unity Express, Cisco Unity Connection, and Cisco Unity. Cisco Unity Express (CUE) is a router-based voice-mail solution. It works quite well for the small-to-medium size business.
So, which product is right for you? Well, if you’re currently using Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express, then CUE may be a good fit, since it can be integrated with Cisco Unity Express on the ISR router. This is a great cost-effective, router-based product that provides both call processing and voicemail for up 500 users with 600 hours of recording time when using the Cisco Service Module Services-Ready Engine (SM-SRE-700-K9) platform. The thing I personally like about this product combo is that it includes many of the features that are required for most small-to-medium sized businesses. For example, this one product can be used your platform for voice-mail, fax, integrated voice response, and automated attendant.
And why is that important?
A lot of small businesses are not interested in building a huge core infrastructure with multiple routers, gateways, and switches (this is not needed, and they usually don’t have the staff and trained engineers to manage these devices anyway!). This combo provides the business with one box (with multiple functions) to manage.
Also, when you are deciding on specific products for your business, you will want to consider the scalability and redundancy. Scalability is concerned with the growth and expansion of the organization. On the other hand, redundancy is concerned with backup and high availability. As the business grows, CUE allows integration with other Cisco Unity Express units, since it can also be integrated with the Cisco Voice Messaging Gateway. The Messaging Gateway allows users to send, forward, and reply to users on other Cisco Unity Express systems, creating a voice messaging network between locations. This is a great option to allow you to expand voice messaging beyond a single location.
CUE is not limited only to smaller businesses, but can be integrated in the enterprise organization, using a feature called Cisco Unified Survivable Remote Site Voicemail (SRSV). SRSV uses the Cisco Voice Messaging Gateway or Cisco Unity Connection version 8.x to provide backup and redundancy for voice messaging at remote locations that are using Cisco Unity Express v8.x. In this case, Cisco Unity Express provides backup voicemail and auto-attendant capabilities during the network outage. After the network restoral, synchronization of the voice message and user information can occur automatically with Cisco Unity Connection.
In the next blog, I will look a bit closer at the Cisco Unity Connection product, which provides more a lot features and capabilities required by enterprise-level organizations.
