Using Unified Messaging on Cisco UC500 Series Devices

Good morning!

Among Cisco products and solutions for small businesses, you can find the integrated devices - so called UC500 series. These devices can be described as "all in one box", i.e. in one physical device the functionality of several devices is presented. UC500 series devices, depending on the modification, usually have the functionality of a PoE switch, router, firewall, wireless access point and IP PBX, consisting of CUCME and a built-in CUE voice mail module. Thus, UC500 is the optimal solution in terms of price-quality for small offices.

In this post, I will tell you how to use the Unified Messaging feature on those devices. This feature allows you to receive and listen to voice mail messages using a regular E-mail client (MS Outlook, The Bat and others). This is done by connecting via IMAP protocol to the UC500 (in our example, we will use the UC520), or rather, to the built-in CUE voice mail module.

As you know, Cisco recommends to configure the UC500 series devices through the Cisco Configuration Assistant (CCA) GUI. Enabling the Unified Messaging functionality is done in the Applications menu. Select Smart Applications > Smart Applications Manager in it:

In the new window select Unified Messaging and click the Configure button:

Next, enable the Unified Messaging functionality:

After performing these operations, you can see that Unified Messaging is running on this device:

You need to verify that the CUE correctly interpreted the Unified Messaging enable commands from the CCA. To do this, use the CUE administration web interface (the default settings for the administrator account are cisco / cisco).

Check that the Enable Integrating Messaging mode is enabled in the CUE module (Voice Mail > Integrated Messaging > Service Configuration):

Next, configure your email client for integration with the UC500 via the IMAP protocol. Let's give an example of creating a new account for MS Outlook (it is assumed that IP phones, user accounts are already configured in the UC500, and voice mailboxes are activated). Let's create an account for the user John Doe (jdoe), CUE's IP address is 10.1.10.1:

Actually, we can start checking. Send a voice message through the CUE voice mail module. Observe that the indicator of a new voice message lights up on the user's phone, and a new E-mail message appears in the mail program with an attachment in the form of a .wav file. The audio file in the attachment contains the sent voice message. Now it can be opened and listened to.