[Asterisk-Users] Voicemail and MS Exchange Synchronization

[Race Vanderdecken]

(a) Has anyone cracked this nut (or started on it)?


Been there, done that.

No, really. I was the architect on the Premiere Tech, no PTECH,
Orchestrate system. www.orchestrate.com (pardon the plug, but I am not
endorsing one way or the other.)

I also did the MAPI work for Persona, but that was a TTS and Speech Reco
that read email and faxes, but I digress.

Yes, your are going to go mad doing it. 

	First. 
	You need an email specialist. 
	He must know POP, SMTP, IMAP and MAPI. 
		MAPI is not a misspelling of IMAP; it is the Microsoft
Messaging API. 
	MAPI is how you can control the Exchange Server and Clients.

	You need to set up a "admin" account for the MAPI program to
have access to the Exchange server.

	That is the easy part.

	Then you create a program to watch all the mail coming through
the server. It will use the admin account and pass copies of messages to
Asterisk and insert messages from asterisk.
	
	I suggest using the MAPI API to Exchange and a socket API,
POP/IMAP, to asterisk.

	I built the aforementioned system buy using an UNIX email server
to receive messages. All incoming messages were sent to the UNIX mail
server. It had mail queues that could be intercepted, like an interrupt
call back routine, messages would arrive, be put into queues, and sent
for processing; convert email to speech via TTS, convert email to fax
and such.

	The basic premises was that when the voicemail server, separate
program and server (there where 200+ voicemail servers), received a
voicemail it would create an email, put the voicemail file in it, or a
link to the voicemail file, to the UNIX email server that would note/log
the voicemail and pass it on to the exchange mail box. 

	When the user deletes an email in Exchange a MAPI Message is
sent back to the Exchange Server and watcher program will see the
Exchange server delete it. Depending on the rules, the watcher program
deletes the email or the voicemail or both, and so forth...

	You could create an addition to asterisk to act as the watcher
program.

	That is the general idea and it does work. If you plan on doing
TTS you are looking at 5 to 6 seconds of real-time to convert 1 sec of
email to 1 second of voicemail.
	

(b) Anyone interested if we post a bounty?

	If anyone does take the bounty I am available to consult for
them. But I don't have time to create the entire work.
	
Race "The Tyrant" Vanderdecken


-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of George
Pajari
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2005 1:19 PM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Voicemail and MS Exchange Synchronization

We have a customer considering migrating from a large Nortel PBX with a 
third-party voicemail system to Asterisk but one of the features they 
really like is the automatic synchronization of voicemail between 
Exchange and their voicemail system -- delete a message from the 
voicemail system and it is deleted from their email inbox and vice
versa.

Searching has not revealed anything like this being developed for 
Asterisk and yet it would appear to be a critical component needed to 
migrate customers used to fully integrated "Unified Messaging" systems 
to Asterisk.

(a) Has anyone cracked this nut (or started on it)?

(b) Anyone interested if we post a bounty?

-- 
George Pajari, netVOICE communications    604 484 VOIP (484 8647 x102)
Open Source VoIP/Telephony Specialists  1 877 NET VOIP (638 8647 x102)
                  www.netvoice.ca  www.ip-centrex.ca
      www.digium.ca www.grandstream.ca www.sipura.ca www.snom.ca

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