Exchange UM has a lot of great features… well beyond just voicemail showing up in your inbox. Although getting voicemail to your inbox is important, Exchange UM can do a lot more. When you’re first enabled for Exchange UM a new tab is added to Outlook under Tools->Options. Click on Voice Mail and you’ll see this page where you can set various options including what folder to read when using Outlook Voice Access and the default number for “play on phone” (more below).
…unless you’re using Outlook Anywhere (RPC/HTTPS), in which case you’ll get an error saying Outlook could not contact the Exchange UM server. By default, Exchange UM sets the InternalURL property and sets a pointer in the Autodiscover service. Unfortunately, Exchange UM doesn’t set the ExternalURL property. Powershell also doesn’t display that an ExternalURL property even exists if you run “get-UMVirtualDirectory”.
So, as you would expect, the Voice mail options and “play on phone” functionality work great via Outlook Web Access, but not in Outlook Anywhere. To fix the issue, you need to set the externalURL property for Exchange UM via powershell. Use this Powershell command in the Exchange Management Shell:
Set-UMVirtualDirectory –Identity https://
“CASserverfriendlynameUnifiedMessaging (Default Web Site)” –ExternalURL
The other feature this enables is the “play on phone” feature (and potentially dialing out via the Exchange Auto Attendant, but that’s another article). “Play on phone” allows the user to send a voicemail to a phone. Depending on the dialing rule configuration this can be limited to internal extensions or sending the voicemail externally (ie. to a cell phone). This is great when listening to a message on your PC doesn’t make sense, at a client or any other public location. Clicking “Play on phone” will bring up another window with a box that will allow you to enter a phone number. Exchange UM will dial out to the number then play the message and allow the user to interact with the system.
