End User Templates in Cisco Unity Connection

Steps for User Template Configuration

When we’re creating a user template with Cisco Unity Connection, the template is divided into the user template basics and additional parameters. We’re going to be focusing on the most common parameters, such as the user’s password or a Personal Identification Number. We can assign administrator rights, set up message settings and actions. We could modify how the user is going to interact with the TUI, and we can enable message notifications on other devices, such as sending an e-mail, or you get a call on your cell phone when someone leaves you a message to notify you that you have a message.

And here are some other parameters to consider – message actions – the default message action is for voicemail, e-mail and fax to accept messages. We can enable this with the user template, but this doesn’t specify that user’s address to receive the e-mail for example, so the actual addresses need to be configured at the user level. But we can enable or disable their operation at the user template level. Transfer rules are enabled by default and they play a prompt that says something like “wait while I transfer your call”. We could also set up caller input. Default settings for caller input allow the caller to press the * key on a telephone keypad to access the log-in menu, they could press the # sign to skip the greeting or press zero to be sent to the operator. We can configure mailbox settings, set up a quota for a user’s mailbox, we could configure the send-message settings. For example enabling or disabling broadcasting and what’s the order for spelling a name, would it be last name and then the first name. And also we can manipulate greetings, and by default we use the system default greeting, which says something like “John Doe is not available please leave a message”. But we can set up that greeting that the caller will hear when they are being asked to leave a message.

User Template Basics

Now that we’ve talked about the theory a bit, let’s see how to actually create a user template. To do this we navigate under Templates and select user template. And when we’re creating a new user template we can give an Alias to this template, give a Display Name, and then, under Display Name Generation, we can say how we want names to be displayed. Do we want the first name of user first, or the last name of the user first? If there is a fax server that’s going to be used, we can specify a fax server to be used by users that are assigned this user template. We could set up the Partition to which a user is going to be assigned, their Search Scope to say where they can search as they’re browsing the cooperate directory looking for another user. We select the Phone System used by the template. We can select Class of Service to which the user should be assigned. And also we can select an Active Schedule, which determines when the standard greeting is going to be played versus the closed greeting.

Continuing with our basic template settings, you can also specify a Time Zone to be used. If you have an office that’s scattered around different time zones or different countries, you could say that you want to use a specific time zone, or you could say you want to use the system default time zone. You could set up a Language to be used, and languages, they can be adjusted on the system level, or a specific call handler that gets invoked could have a language set, and the call handler could cause the specific language to be used to interact with the caller.

Password Settings

A Cisco Unity Connection user needs a password and we can specify parameters for both a voicemail password and a web application password. The voicemail password – this is the PIN, this is the Personal Identification Number. The web application password is used when you have another application outside of Cisco Unity Connection interacting with Cisco Unity Connection. And if you’re integrating a Cisco Unity Connection with an LDAP directory, and you change the user’s web application password in Cisco Unity Connection, you need to make sure that you update that in the LDAP directory as well. They need to match. You can lock users assigned this template by saying Locked by Administrator. You can say that the User Cannot Change their password. You can say that they must change their password at the next log-in. You can prevent the password from expiring. As the best practice though Cisco recommends that you do expire the passwords, and that you do have a minimum credential length of at least six characters. And parameters such as these are defined in the Authentication Rule, which we can assign when we’re setting up the password parameters for a user template.

Administrator Roles

A user can be assigned a specific role in Cisco Unity Connection. Maybe a helpdesk user needs to be able to unlock user accounts and view user accounts. We could take a user that works at the helpdesk and assign them the helpdesk administrator role. There are a variety of other roles such as audio text administrator, greeting administrator, helpdesk administrator we mentioned, remote administrator, mailbox access delegate account, system administrator technician, user administrator. And it’s recommended that administrator roles be assigned directly to user accounts, since there’s probably not going to be that many user accounts that get assigned a specific administrator role. Instead of trying to do this via a template, we just assign them directly to the end user.

Message Settings

As part of a user template we can also set up message settings parameters. One such parameter is the Maximum Message Length – how long can a message be. The default is 5 minutes or 300 seconds. We could adjust that. We can give the caller an option to edit their message or re-record their message or delete their message after they leave it, or they could add to the message. We could say what language the caller hears. We could use the system default language or we could inherit the language set on the call handler that’s processing the call. We could also set the unidentified caller’s message urgency. A call comes in, the destination mailbox is not defined – what do we do with the urgency of that message? Do we say that messages are never marked as urgent, or maybe all messages are marked as urgent. This might be useful for sales or technical support calls. Or we can ask the caller whether or not their message should be marked as urgent.

Phone Menu

On the following image we see how to manipulate the phone menu – the options that a user has when they call into Cisco Unity Connection.

Unity Connection Phone Menu Configuration

For example, we can select the Touchtone Conversation Menu Style as either Full or Brief, full being more comprehensive instructions. Conversation Volume could be set to Low or Medium or High. The Conversation Speed, the speed at which prompts are played – that could be set to Slow, Normal, Fast or Fastest. The Time Format could be set to 12-hour or 24-hour formatting. There’s a checkbox for Use Voice Recognition Input Style. You can check this box when users would prefer to use voice recognition as their primary way to interact with Unity Connection, as opposed to using touchtone. And the Touchtone Conversation Style impacts what users hear when they listen to and manage their messages. There is an Enable checkbox for Finding Messages with Message Locator. This allows users to find voice messages from other users and from unidentified callers when they are checking their messages over the phone.

Playback Message Settings

We might be able to improve the TUI, the telephone user interface experience, by manipulating the playback message settings. We could adjust the volume, the speed of the playback and when we’re about to listen to a new message we could hear information such as the message count totals, the E-mail Message Count, the Fax Message Count and the Receipt Message Count. And when we’re playing the saved messages, we could have Cisco Unity Connection announce the total number of messages that have been saved. We can also check a box to say that users are going to hear a menu like this when they log on to a Cisco Unity Connection. The menu’s going to say press one to hear voice messages, press two to hear e-mails, press three to hear faxes and press four to hear receipts.

We can select the order in which new messages are played. Is it going to be based strictly on newest to oldest? Or is it going to be sorted by message type? And before playing each message what do we want to hear? We could have information about the sender, their recorded name. And if they don’t have a recorded name, Cisco Unity Connection could play out their primary extension. We could include information such as the message number, the time the message was sent, the sender’s caller ID and the duration of a message.

Message Notification

In the main message notifications settings the Enabled checkbox allows us to enable a specific notification device, whether that device is a home phone, a cell phone, a pager. We can specify a delay before we initially try to send the message notification to a specific device. And if the user still hasn’t listened to the message after a period of time, we could say if we want to repeat the notification. We could say that for a specific device, maybe like a pager, we only want urgent messages sent. We could say we want all messages sent – maybe all voicemail messages but not fax messages. There are a lot of options we could play with. And we also have to say of course what is the phone number of this device so Cisco Unity Connection knows how to send message notification to that device.

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