Introduction to Cisco Visual Voicemail
About Visual Voicemail
The Cisco Visual Voicemail application is an alternative to the audio voicemail service.
After pressing the Messages button to start Visual Voicemail, users can view a list of their messages and play their messages from the list. Users can also compose, reply to, forward, and delete messages from their Cisco Unified IP Phone display without having to dial into their voice mailbox.
Visual Voicemail uses the following:
- A MIDlet. The MIDlet is installed when you install or upgrade the Cisco Unity Connection server to the release required by Visual Voicemail.
- A phone service that points to the MIDlet. You install this phone service on the phones in the Unified Communications system.
- A voicemail port on the voicemail server. When users start Visual Voicemail, it automatically uses a port to open a line and call the voicemail server.
Considerations Before You Configure Visual Voicemail
Before you configure Visual Voicemail, consider the following:
- The installation of Visual Voicemail requires coordinated actions from the Cisco Unified Communications Manager administrator and from the Cisco Unity Connection administrator. The administrators need to plan to install Visual Voicemail in a coordinated way, and communicate regularly with one another.
- Decide whether you want to replace the audio voicemail service with Visual Voicemail, or whether to enable users to choose which service to use. For more information about this topic, see How Visual Voicemail Interoperates with Audio Voicemail.
- Decide whether you want to implement security for Visual Voicemail. If you configure security for Visual Voicemail, the traffic between phones and the voicemail servers is secure.
When you implement security, you must sign a Certificate Trust List (CTL) file. To do this, you need at least one security eToken. If this is the first time that the CTL file is being signed, you need two security eTokens. You will need to order the eTokens before you install Visual Voicemail.
For more information, see the “Configuring Security for Cisco Visual Voicemail” chapter.
- Ensure that traffic is allowed on the required ports before you install Visual Voicemail. For more information, see Ports Used by Visual Voicemail.
- Install Visual Voicemail during a period of light usage of the voice messaging system.
- Advise users that they might encounter an error message during the outage window when you install the Visual Voicemail service.
If users press the Messages button on their phones before the installation of the Visual Voicemail service has completed, the following error message is displayed: “Error, contact administrator.”
- Due to memory limitations on the 7900 series phones following phones, you cannot run any other MIDlets on phones on which Visual Voicemail is installed. Before you install Visual Voicemail on 7900 series phones, uninstall any other MIDlets from the phones.
Ports Used by Visual Voicemail
The usage of voice mail ports by Visual Voicemail is similar to the usage of ports by the audio voicemail service.
When users start Visual Voicemail, it automatically uses a port to open a line and call the voicemail server. On Cisco Unity Connection the call times out after one minute.
You might not need to buy new voicemail port licenses for Visual Voicemail. Use Visual Voicemail with existing voicemail ports before you make a decision to buy new port licenses.
Note While creating ports in Cisco Unity Connection, make sure that the ports used for Visual Voicemail should have both Answer Calls and Allow TRAP Connections options enabled.
For Visual Voicemail to work successfully, network traffic must be allowed on certain network ports between the phone VLAN and the voicemail server. The following table lists the ports and the protocols required:
|
|
|
80 |
HTTP |
All deployments. |
443 |
HTTPS |
Secure deployments. |