Unity Connection Voicemail distribution

Last week I was looking into a solution to fork voicemail to multiple outlook inboxes.  The reason behind this was that a general voicemail inbox for two people needed to go to both of them.  Natively, the voicemail would just sit on the phone itself since it didn't have an account associated.  Thus the problem as you can see. 

I sat around and did some testing.  Accept and Relay worked fine but you can only relay it to one inbox.  The work around here is to send it to a distro list so multiple people can get the voicemail attachment.  This works great if your exchange admin is around or is willing to make a distro list.  With red tape and other obstacles, I wanted a way to do this myself without needing someone else and thus my resolution assuming you are not forwarding something to the same domain.

So below are a few ways to handle this problem.  I will start with the extremely easy and preferable way since you can just make one change and be done.

In the above image, if you select a user/general mailbox and go to edit --> message actions you will come to this screen.  I set voicemail to accept and relay then typed in the relay address I wanted the voicemail to go to.  Keep in mind that your policies needs to permit whatever email address you put in here should it go outside the network.  This method is the easiest and most preferred as you can simply make a distro list and push it to that address and be done in 5 minutes.  This would require your exchange admin to help you since he/she has to make the distro list for you.


This image shows you a screen from Edit --> notification devices.  From here you can go to HTML and send the voicemail to an address or SMTP and send the voicemail to an address.  The only problem here is that it cannot be in the same domain as the Unity connection email domain.  So forwarding to something like gmail would work great here.  If you really wanted, you could then auto-forward that email from gmail back to another user elsewhere within the domain.  Pain in the butt? Yes it is, but it is a work around.

These methods are usable at the very least and can solve a problem if needed.  Honestly, option one is the easiest possible method and should be used.  I can see option 2 usable for users that need external access too if they ain't at their laptop or don't have their corporate email on their phones (who doesn't these days...).  It's a solution I thought worth keeping note of since I didn't know about it until someone on the CSC forums showed me.