voicemail restore

[westsounder]

Hi
How would you restore the voicemail of a user that has been removed from Director?

Here is the hypothetical:
Userx has left the company and now litigation has requested their email and see that voicemail is a component of outlook. Since council have subpoenaed all items in the mailbox, they now want voicemails.

How do I as an administrator of both Email and Voicemail answer? Are the restored files unrecognizable since UserX has been purged from the system?

Please discuss!
dtd

[Forum]

The voicemail itself was never part of outlook or exchange, it was just a link. link no workie

Sounds like you may need to invest in a call recording solution.

Charles

[westsounder]

Right, but anything IN the mailbox can be demanded in discovery.

So I am looking for a way to archive and restore voicemail.

[Jason Learmouth]

The only thing in the mailbox is a pointer to the voicemail, which is not stored in the mail store. Voicemails are not IN the email box, they are on the ShoreTel server.

The voicemails are stored on the ShoreTel VM server associated with that user in Director. They are in the ..\ShoreLineData\Vms\Message, this folder stores *every* message on that server and does not show which user(s) have that message in their VM box. The file names are are the message ID.

The folder ..\ShoreLineData\Vms\SHORETEL has a list of folders named after the extension number that stores a .DAT file which links back to the individual messages and keeps track of the users VM box. You can use the cfg (ref Maint Guide) tool to get a list of message ID's that are in a users VM box. Gettting those messages on a separate media would be a manual task of copying files from the Message directory mentioned above.

If you want an archive of messages then you should archive the Message directory, but retrieving a particular message based on the info in Outlook would be dificult. There is no way that I know of to pull a message based on a statement like, "user X recieved a VM from caller ID xxxx-yyyy on DDMMYY, give me a copy of that message."

[westsounder]

The folder ..\ShoreLineData\Vms\SHORETEL has a list of folders named after the extension number that stores a .DAT file which links back to the individual messages and keeps track of the users VM box. You can use the cfg (ref Maint Guide) tool to get a list of message ID's that are in a users VM box. Gettting those messages on a separate media would be a manual task of copying files from the Message directory mentioned above.

This is what I was asking for. Now we are getting somewhere. I agree and understand that the VM is not an exchange object. What I am saying is that since it is listed in the mailbox, a compel to comply order could force you to produce the voicemail, same as an attachment. I am hypothesizing on the legal mumbo jumbo however.
;D

[Jason Learmouth]

I won't get into the legal side, but with VM aging and auto delete in ShoreTel now there may not be a copy of the VM even if there is an archive in the mail store indicating that there was at one point. It sounds like you need to have a documented policy on VM archiving that is inline with your regulatory obligations.

Regards,
Jason

[westsounder]

I won't get into the legal side, but with VM aging and auto delete in ShoreTel now there may not be a copy of the VM even if there is an archive in the mail store indicating that there was at one point. It sounds like you need to have a documented policy on VM archiving that is inline with your regulatory obligations.

Regards,
Jason

yes, that as well.

[Goose]

Voicemails recovery is not the most simple thing. The process I would use for this, would be to restore the VMS folder from the server for the date in question. (We are backing up the entire Shoreline Data folder right..?) Once this is done you will see all voicemails are saved in the messages folder with no noticeable rhyme or reason to the naming. This is where you will find the messages once we determine who they belong to.
Next we will go to the shoreline data\vms\shoretel listed here you will see all the user extensions. If you open the folder named after your users extension, you will then see the mailbox.dat file. This file is what tells the user what they have in their mailbox. Open this folder in notepad and you will see a whole mess of binary code. What you will also find is some file names. Here is where you work begins. Pull out all names of the voicemail files (ie..17IMBP6HE example pulled from my mailbox). This will then give you a list of voicemails that existed in the users voicemailbox on that particular day. You can now take this list to the messages folder and pull these messages out.

[JasonC]

West Sounder, if you are looking for a way to save the voicemails for the future, you can have the Shoretel director send .wav files of the voicemail. You can send them to the user directly, or have an archive box for the user that the wav files go to.