[asterisk-users] Will Asterisk work with Exchange 2007 UM?

[Colin Anderson]

I don't see anything in there that I'm not doing already (and have been for
over a year, with 200 users) with Asterisk 1.0.9, HylaFAX, and Exchange 5.5,
with the exception of the text-to-speech stuff which is do-able with
Cepstral / Festival and some scripts that hook MAPI on the Exchange server.
But who would want your email read back to you over the phone except as an
absolute last resort? Dumb. And, I am a *big* Exchange fan. 
 
As to Asterisk compatibility, the system requirements note that a SIP-PRI
media gateway is used to communicate with the PBX with the exception of CCM,
so it looks like Exchange is exposing it's API to SIP calls with some sort
of middleware. Call control on SIP is 5060 TCP and media stream is on UDP,
so SIP is SIP regardless if it's CCM or what have you. Looking in Technet,
the Exchange 2007 API is (typical of Microsoft) extremely well-documented;
API calls are hooked with "cmdlet's". A cmdlet is a .NET class that's
wrapped up in a shell executable that "does stuff" just as a Bash shell
script does stuff. So my thinking here is that certain SIP calls from the
PBX are recieved by this middleware, the corresponding cmdlet is executed on
Exchange, and the result returned to the PBX. Same-same the other way
around: User "does stuff" in Exchange (such as click on "Play on Phone" icon
in Outlook Web Access) and Exchange triggers the middleware (Windows
service, probably) to dial the SIP PBX to call the enduser and play back the
voicemail. Specific functionality such as "play back a voicemail" is most
likely sent in the SIP control envelope, and a media gateway is probably
programmed to take the SIP call, call the PBX on a PRI channel, and execute
whatever is supposed to happen through DTMF. So it should be possible to get
Asterisk to work with Exchange 2007, yes, but it would be a lot of work to
reverse-engineer what is actually going on.*  Hmm, I should see if the
Exchange 2007 DVD is in my MSDN subscription box. Sounds interesting. 
 
However, all of this functionality is do-able with Asterisk today and
Exchange integration can be as simple as pie, take the "Play on Phone"
functionality for example, which can be as simple as modifying Asterisk's
voicemail notification email to include a link, when the user clicks on the
link, it invokes a web script that drops a .call file to an Asterisk context
that calls the user and logs them into voicemail. 
 
* I have no idea if this is actually what is going on but I betcha I'm
pretty close. This is how Microsoft typically does things. 
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: Matt Birmingham [mailto:mattbirmingham at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 3:35 PM
To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Will Asterisk work with Exchange 2007 UM?



I'm sorry that I don't have an answer for you, but I too am very interested
in hearing what anyone has to say about this.  


On 8/25/06, blawrence at qwest.net <mailto:blawrence at qwest.net>  <
blawrence at qwest.net <mailto:blawrence at qwest.net> > wrote: 

I'm faced with the need to create forensic test data for an Exchange 2007
server with unified messaging. Microsoft has a list of tested PBX and IP
gateway products that are known to work (below) but I'd prefer to use 
Asterisk if possible. From everything I've read it appears that since
Exchange uses SIP over IP and Asterisk uses SIP over UDP this will not
work. I don't have a lot of experience with Asterisk but I was wondering if 
anyone knows of a plan to allow Asterisk to run SIP over IP or if there are
any SIP gateways that will make this conversion. Reading through the
Asterisk/Digium documentation and the asterisk-users list archive didn't 
turn up any clues. I apologize if this topic has already been discussed.
Anyone have any ideas?

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2007/productevaluation
<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2007/productevaluatio
n> 
/sysreqs.mspx#pbx

Thanks in advance,
Brian Lawrence

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