Problem with sending VM's to Email

[mkendrick]

We have several people setup in our office so that it send a copy of voicemails to their email. This way the people can see on their Blackberrys that they have a VM on their office phone.

We have maybe only 8 people setup this way for forward VM's to email and they all work great except for one user who has intermittent issues. This user it seems to work fine for awhile and then its like switch is thrown and VM's no longer get forwarded. All other users still continue to work.

What seems to kick start it to work again is for me to go into my Exchange 2003 server and simply restart SMTP services on it. I believe at one time when i did this it actually sent out some VM notices to his email so it’s like they are getting stuck in their somewhere.

The only difference for this user could possibly be he is the President of the company so he is member additional security groups so he can access more resources on the network then the others but he is NOT a member of the Administrators group or anything. Another possibility is he is he has a large mailbox (5.5Gig). I just asked the other guy here with a large mailbox (11Gig) and he says his stops working intermittently as well. Would having a ridiculously large mailbox cause something like this?

Any ideas? I'm a novice at both Shoretel and Exchange so please be as specific as possible.

Thanks alot!

[mkendrick]

additional info

Ok, now that I’m looking into this further it seems that the forward to VM function only works if someone has Outlook running on their machine at the time the VM comes in. Can someone confirm that to be true? If so then my guess is that’s why sometimes it works and sometimes not, I had not realized this was a client level thing and was dependant on Outlook running.

Can someone confirm? If that is true then is there a way to set it up to forward VM's to email even when the clients machine is turned off?

[eazeaz]

VM - Outlook

The email that contains the shoretel "player" where you can play the actual voicemail indeed only comes into outlook when outlook is running.

If the guy has a blackberry and has outlook closed, he will not get these messages. This often causes confusion.

VM "notification" emails can be turned on. This message just tells you that you got a voicemail. You can set it to attach the actual voicemail as a wav file. These come in all the time regardless of outlook running or not.

Shoretel designed the voicemail integration piece to have outlook actually pull the email from the shoretel server directly. That is why when you look in your email settings, there are two accounts.

I think a better setup, would have been for the messages to have been forwarded via smtp to your real outlook server (like the notifications) and use mapi pointers back to the shoretel server itself.

Starting at version 8, we have actually stopped using the outlook integration piece. We turn on notifications for all the blackberry users, and people just check their voicemail through the PCM. It is just too sloppy when some things work only when outlook is open.

[mkendrick]

eazeaz,

Thanks for the clarification on how that was working. I was in fact confused on how that worked. I think partly because I was thinking to myself how silly and useless that would be if it worked that way at the local level and had to have Outlook running and not the server level!

We are indeed wanting this primarily so our Blackberry users can see when they have voicemails on their office phones when they are out of office. Getting a notification email in the Blackberry would be good enough so they could call in and hear message, but getting a copy of the VM as a wav file would be superior!

Ok so I uninstalled the Outlook integration piece from mine because that’s useless and I want to have it send a notification from server side so I don’t have to have Outlook running. But i’m having a hard time finding/understanding the info I need in the Sys Admin Guide that is in my Shortel Director software. I’m in the section “Voice Mail Delivery and Notifications” and it states in order to edit these options: “You can get to this edit page by clicking the Voice Mail Delivery and Notifications link under the Personal Options tab on the Edit User page.”

I cannot find that section on mine. I must be blind or something is different in my Shoretel Director Software. I went to “Individual Users” found my name and clicked it. Then clicked “Personal Options” and there is no section called “Voice Mail Delivery and Notifications” that I can see.

Looking at my software it looks like I have Shoretel 8.1 (Build 13.23.4801.0)

Looking at the top of the PDF instructions its does say it’s for ver. 8.1 IE: “This preface provides information about the ShoreTel 8.1 Administration Guide.”

Where am I erroring? Am I in the correct area? Thanks!

[eazeaz]

VM

Until you understand the whole deal a bit better, I would leave the integration in place. Removing it can cause other "unexpected" behavior.

The voicemail notifications are a Per User feature. You can set via director, or they can set in the pcm

in director go the same place you were, but drill into:


Mailbox Options:
Escalation Profiles and Other Mailbox Options

you will see an option for:

Deliver Message as Email:


Normally you would select "TEXT ONLY".

Delivering the voicemail as a wav file sounds cool, until the file is big, and it takes longer to download and play then it does to call in (especially if you program a speed dial button).

The Mobile Call manager removes some of this pain, allowing some of this functionality to be ran right from the handset itself...........

For the notification emails to work, you have to setup the shoretel server for SMTP, and make sure that the shoretel server can talk to your exchange server over port 25 (no firewall, etc) inbetween.

[mkendrick]

Ok that makes more sense; I found the options in the "Escalation Profiles and Other Mailbox Options" section. My documentation must not be updated as it showed it somewhere else.

The "Text Only" option would work just fine for us I think. I set my account up that way and checked to see that there was SMTP setup in IIS and there was but it didn't work for me. I'm assuming that I’ll need to play with the SMTP setup to get that working.

I appreciate the assist; I at least feel I’m going in the right direction now. Which is a lot further along then I was.

Thanks!

[mkendrick]

eazeaz, Just wanted to update you that i was able to get that SMTP connection setup and now the ShoreTel server sends out those notifications so we are good to go. Your assistance was much appreciated. Thank you

[eazeaz]

VM

Glad to hear it worked out for you.

Now if we could just get shoretel to make the VM integration work properly (regardless of outlook being opened or closed).............

[pnguyen]

Where did you put the smtp settings?

[bkuhn]

On your VM server:

Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager

Expand the local computer
Right click default smtp virtual server
Select properties
Select delivery tab
Select advanced
Our SMTP server is listed under smart host

[Tim W.]

Sooo we have 11.1 here and the customer is having issues with voicemails to go to his exchange it works fine if they send to hotmail, yahoo, just nothing on there exchange?

[ccm399]

Depending on the exchange version and setup you will probably have to add the Shoretel server IP address to the SMTP connector in Exchange.

Hope this helps.

[Tim W.]

Thanks buddy....

[Alex_TAC]

ccm399 is correct - ShoreTel requires anonymous relay permissions on your Exchange server.

[BobbyDigital]

Hey Tim, is this what fixed it for you? We have the same issue at one of our customers. I can get the Shoretel server to send emails to gmail, hotmail, whatever, but it wont send them internally. All internal emails are stuck in the Queue folder under Mailroot.