Lucent Technologies Octel Unified Messenger, Planning Manual

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Octel Unified Messenger Concepts & Planning Guide
3-2 101-1620-005
Introduction
This section introduces the concept of a voice mail domain, as well as the
various methods that subscribers can use to address voice messages.
Voice mail domain
An Octel Unified Messenger voice mail domain is a group of OMD voice
servers that share the same set of properties, for example, PBX settings.
Any changes made to a voice mail domain’s properties are updated and
replicated automatically to all voice servers in the domain. Voice mail
domains provide the ability to store and retrieve properties that belong to
a set of servers working together to give integrated call answering.
A voice server has configurable properties, which are maintained by the
system administrator using administrative utilities. Many of these
properties are configured identically for all the servers. An example is the
dates of public holidays. It would be unacceptable to have one server
announcing that the office is open for business, while another server is
simultaneously claiming that the business is closed in observance of a
holiday. It would also be unacceptable to require administrators to ensure
that these properties are configured identically in several voice servers
because of the workload involved, and the risk of error.
The group of voice servers in a voice mail domain can be seen as a single,
“virtual” server for that domain. This virtual voice server allows any Octel
Unified Messenger subscribers in the domain to call in using the
telephone user interface, access their mailboxes, and retrieve their
messages. Also, the virtual voice server can call the telephone of any
subscriber who runs Octel Unified Messenger PC client applications to
play back voice messages.
An organization can create multiple voice mail domains, for example, one
in each major geographical site. Figure 3-1 shows a typical
implementation. It consists of two voice mail domains, one in San
Francisco with three voice servers and two Exchange servers, and one in
London with one voice server and one Exchange server.