Exchange Unified Messaging Essentials

Unified Messaging (UM) is an idea that seems simple on the surface but is complex in practice. The benefits of having access to all your voicemail, fax, and email messages in one place are pretty obvious: You can spend less time switching between the telephone, fax machine, and computer, and you can gain access to all of your communications from wherever you happen to be. In the real world, how does Exchange Server 2007’s UM implementation stack up to the unification promise, and what do you need to know to implement UM in your own environment? To answer these questions, you’ll need to learn some phone lingo and have a good basic understanding of what Exchange 2007 does and doesn’t provide.

I’ll look at what Exchange UM does, review its components, and discuss how a PBX works with Exchange, including setting up Exchange as an automated attendant. I’ll then describe Outlook Voice Access (OVA), a telephone-based client that offers users access to their mailboxes and calendars. . . .