Office365 Voicemail and Exchange Messaging in Action

Several posts ago, I did a short review of Exchange online and Lync online. During that time we discussed another soon-to-be-revealed post, reviewing the capabilities of Office365 and Unified Messaging. So, let’s get right down to it!

First – What does it get you?
1. Obvious – voicemail through Exchange – using SIP gateways configured to connect to UM online.
2. Faxing – Yes, you can have an on premise fax solution, with SIP capabilities or compatible with exchange, along with a gateway. However, most providers doing Exchange 2010 UM integration for faxing support Microsoft SIP, some are even Virtual Machines.
3. Outlook voice access – Perhaps the most critical to some of us!!!
4. Missed call notifications.

Configuring – If you’ve configured Exchange UM on premise, you have an immediate advantage. Very simple:

Note that we can set the dial play URI type, this includes SIP URI, and the preference of most, E.164.

So, we have configured our UM dial plan. Now let’s get our gateway in place. The gateway will be the interface between either your standard POTS based PBX or another IP PBX. There are many gateways out there that can do SIP/TLS in a supported fashion with Microsoft.

Now, configure your respective gateway based on the new UM IP gateway configuration – The following will be generated for configuration:

Note here is where Microsoft is giving you the SIP forwarding address. This will assist you in configuring your SIP gateway. Seems easy enough, but depending on the device you use and your unique situation, as well as the general IT principle, nothing is ever as easy as it looks. Fortunately, we can troubleshoot!

Now, let’s not forget we have to set an auto-attendant up. For SIP and E.164, keep in mind you must configure this for the E.164 extension type. See the configuration options below:

Also – If you are using E.164 or telex you will need at least one UM Hunt Group:

Get stuck? Well you can check call logs, and user logs right from the Exchange online console:

Very familiar look and feel, however the architecture of this is key. It’s great to show you what it is capable of doing, but to get it functioning is based on your situation. However, the one thing that doesn’t change regardless of where you are, is that  you must understand the concepts and technologies that power this experience. For many of us, telephony integration into systems is new because we are systems, but there are also some of you out there that decided to learn core infrastructure. With systems and infrastructure knowledge, you begin working toward understanding the Microsoft Lync, and Exchange PBX solutions, and how online ports those into hosted integration.

Hope this was a helpful post, more to come soon!