In his blog, “Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging”, GregK discusses some of the differences between Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging and Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging.

Unified Messaging (UM) can perform name lookups based on information derived from who is the calling party and who is the called party. When a missed call notification is sent out it can include the caller’s name based on information it receives from the lookup. Also, when a caller leaves a voice message, for a UM-enabled user, the caller information can be derived based on the existence of the calling party’s name in Active Directory or in the called party’s personal Contacts.

Greg describes the differences between how Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging supports Caller ID Resolution and how Caller ID Resolution is handled in Exchange 2007 UM. He notes that most people would prefer to see Caller ID resolution display the names of the callers as opposed to displaying their phone numbers. Prior to Exchange 2010 UM, Exchange 2007 Caller ID information was displayed based on the following factors:

• Resolve extension against the called person’s dial plan.
• Resolve SIP address against SIP proxy address.
• Resolve against the called person’s personal contacts.
• Resolve E164 number against MsRtcSip-Line.

Greg notes that Exchange 2010 added Active Directory lookup heuristics on multiple attributes, but that those attributes were not indexed and could not be queried by Exchange Unified Messaging. So, to make it easier for suffix searches, Unified Messaging copied the reversed phone number to a Dual Tone Multiple-Frequency (DTMF) map attribute. Dual Tone Multiple-Frequency is commonly known as touchtone.

Continue reading Exchange Server and Unified Messaging

In his blog, Aaron Tiensivu discusses one of the new features of Exchange Server 2010, that of “Speech to Text”. 

As everyone knows, this is a feature whereby a caller’s voicemail message is left through an answering service and then it is converted into text. In this case, Exchange Server 2010 now provides the capability to send that converted voice mail message into an email message.

In Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft introduced voice mail as part of their new Unified Messaging methodology. Unified Messaging gave the end users the capability to have all their communications, be it voice mail or email, all come into the end users inbox to be managed from one location. Now with Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft extended that capability to include a text transcription of any voice mail message.

This ability to be able to read a text transcription in addition to being able to listen to voice mail can help a user to determine if they have heard the voice mail correctly. This can be very helpful when a caller has left their own phone number or an important address and time for a meeting on their voice mail message. I know that there are many times I have had to listen to a voice mail message a couple time straining my ears to verify that I have heard some important unintelligible detail of the message. Sometimes it has been frustrating to the point that I need to contact the caller just to verify the initial communication.

Continue reading Using the Email Transcription Service in Exchange Server 2007

Some Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2010 roles require Internet Information Services (IIS) to function.   On these servers Exchange will install a series of IIS virtual directories.  In this post I will describe the Exchange Server virtual directories and their purpose.

/owa – This is the directory for OWA (Outlook Web Access on Exchange 2007, and now called Outlook Web App on Exchange 2010), which is the web browser version of Outlook that is usually accessed by remote workers.  The /owa directory is for access to Exchange 2007 or 2010 mailboxes.

/Public – This is the directory used by OWA users when accessing any Public Folders in the organization.

/Exchweb – This directory is used for OWA access for Exchange 2003 or 2000 users but is not usually accessed directly by the end user.  The OWA session will automatically refer the connect to this virtual directory when necessary.

/Exchange – This directory is again used for OWA access.  When an Exchange 2003 or 2000 mailbox user access the /Exchange virtual directory they are proxied to their mailbox.  For Exchange 2007 or 2010 mailbox users they are redirected to the /owa directory for their mailbox access.

This is useful during the transition from legacy Exchange versions to 2007 or 2010, because users can continue to connect to the /Exchange directory and the result will always be that they connect to their mailbox, as long as the server does not run the Mailbox Server role.  In other words, the /Exchange directory only works for legacy mailbox users if the server is a dedicated Client Access Server (though it can also contain the Hub Transport Server role without a problem). Continue reading Overview of Exchange Server Virtual Directories