One of the technical details of last weekend’s move from Unity to Unity Connection 7.1 is that the integration with Call Manager is no longer through CTI ports (Skinny protocol) but through a SIP trunk. This was a design choice; CTI connectivity is still available.

There is a bit of a move at PSU University Park to get Call Manager out of the center of the voice network. That is to say, Call Manager doesn’t need to be the core entity to which everything connects. As the “SIP Core” is planned out and the pieces designed, we are able to see how some generic SIP routing devices can be the glue to hold together SIP-connected components: PBXes from the whole Penn State system, including the Call Manager cluster at University Park; Unity Connection; trunking providers and PSTN gateways; standalone analog gateways; adjunct applications like Contact Center; video conferencing over SIP; and more.

Unity Connection is now directly connected to Call Manager via SIP trunk, but can easily be attached to a SIP core in the future, where it could also provide voicemail services outside of the Call Manager domain. My opinion is that this is a really good thing, because Unity Connection is a high-quality voicemail system. (Compare to Asterisk’s “Comedian Mail.”)

Shared voicemail between PSU campuses? Voicemail services for analog users? Yes, please. (Note, Unity Connection has a “multi-tenant”-type system that could allow extension overlap, but for a true unified voicemail system, you’d probably have to renumber per E.164 standards to get rid of overlap and simplify.)

High per-user licensing costs are one hindrance to making this progress, but compared to the costs of implementing and maintaining multiple voicemail systems, the numbers don’t look so bad.

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PS. Voicemail seems like something that could go away any day now–not from our service offerings, but from public interest. We probably thought the same of FAX every year for the last several, but it hangs on, and in spite of voicemail-killing technologies like SMS (which the students seem to prefer quite a bit over voicemail for notifying each other that they tried to call), voicemail is hanging on, too.