Monday, April 06, 2009

Cisco Unity message to Verizon text tip

Recently I gave up my insanely priced Windows smartphone contract with Sprint and went to a straight voice and text package with Verizon. Now that I am lacking the ability to view my Microsoft Outlook Web Access the question is how do I know when I receive a Unity voicemail message?

I want to avoid voice message delivery since I find it both annoying and a drain on my cell minutes, but without a wireless data package I have no corporate email access. Unity now supports SMS delivery natively but is not implemented at our office. My work around is using Outlook rules.

A user can typically create rules in Outlook that allows identifying incoming messages by sender, subject line, etc. and then performing a function. I have simply created a rule to identify Unity messages by “Voice Message” in subject line, and then forwarding it via email to my cell phone number at vtext.com. Since the vtext service does not accept attachments, I do not receive the voicemail itself and am not billed for the data transfer to my cell, but do receive a text indicating I have a voicemail, including the caller id and name.

Not a bad solution and inexpensive too.

1 comment:

  1. Cisco Unity actually has other notification devices (other than SMS) that would acomplish this without having to set up an Outlook rule that forwards the message.

    There are three other notification devices "Text Pager 1", "Text Pager 2" and "Text for Cisco Unity Inbox", that allow you to specify an SMTP address for message notification.

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