Chesapeake NetCraftsmen

There is a lot of focus on Cisco Unity Connection these days.  In fact, my opinion is that it has  become the lead voice messaging solution in Cisco's portfolio and is being positioned ahead of Cisco Unity unless Unified Messaging is an absolute customer requirement.  With that said, I've spent a lot of time coming up to speed on Unity Connection and; in particular, the process of migrating over from the Windows-based Unity platform to the Linux-based Unity Connection appliance.  I recently gave a long presentation about Unity Connection, the COBRAS migration tools, and also why customers are choosing to "upgrade" from Unity to Unity connection.  

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I’ve read a number of threads about this topic online and am surprised to see that a lot of folks only tend to focus on the technical differences between Integrated Messaging and Unified Messaging.  I find this funny simply because there’s not much debate there…they are what they are.  I think you have to look deeper than that to figure out what you or your clients need, want, and/or are even capable of supporting.  So, let’s get the obvious out of the way.  What is the technical difference between Integrated Messaging and Unified Messaging?  In the most simplistic terms, there are really 2 key differences and they are the Message Store and the Email Inbox. 

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The UC team here at NetCraftsmen relies pretty heavy on virtualization to mock up various testing scenarios for customers.  A while ago, I mocked up a lab to simulate a Unity upgrade for a customer.  We do this to standardize procedures and head off any issues BEFORE production work occurs.  At the time, the customer had decided to upgrade a Unity 4x system to Unity 5.0(1).  Following standard practices, I installed the Unity 5.0(1) server as a virtual machine and associated the various service accounts (Unity Install, Unity Directory Services, and Unity Message Store Service) per standard protocol.  In addition, I associated the Unity Admin account to the Unity web administration interface (SA).  I haven't validated this on other versions of Unity other than 5x; however, I have replicated the issue.  Lastly, I use VMWare Server (currently, 2.0.1) in my UC lab.  My disclaimer is that your experience may vary based on the various applications you use.  Here is what I have seen...

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