Connection has entered the enterprise messaging arena, oddly enough, competing with its sister product, Cisco Unity.
Like Penn State, a number of other large Cisco VoIP installations have deployed Unity to meet the enterprise needs but don’t use or want the Exchange-based unified messaging.
Some notes I got from commentary at CIPTUG today…
- 10,000 users per server (7,500 if IMAP enabled)
- Linux platform – same OS and voice layer as appliance-model Communications Manager
- Active/active failover instead of active/passive
- IMAP integration puts a mail folder appearance on your IMAP e-mail linked directly to Unity Connection. Same effect as Unity unified messaging. Hey, ASET offers IMAP now, free. Hmm.
Until now, Connection was not a contender for enterprise-level voicemail because it didn’t scale to our size. Now I think it’s worth a fresh look.