UM Dial Plans | Planning for Unified Messaging

The UM dial plan is the basic Unified Messaging administrative unit and used for telephony extension-numbering. 

The UM dial plan, plus the extension number, provides the unique identifier for each UM-enabled user. The UM dial plan also controls the numbering scheme and the outbound dialing plan.

The UM dial plan is an Active Directory container object that is a logical representation of a Telephony dial plan that you configure on a PBX. The UM dial plan establishes a link from an Exchange Server 2010 recipient's telephone extension number in Active Directory to a UM-enabled mailbox.

Before you can use Unified Messaging, your Exchange environment requires at least one UM dial plan to be created, assigned to a UM server, and associated with a UM IP gateway.

When you configure UM dial plan settings, you have to define at least the extension length. Additionally, you can configure other UM dial plan settings:

• Access numbers for subscribers (OVA phone number) or your UM -enabled users dial to access their mailbox via a phone.
  
  
• Default greetings that is used when subscribers call into the UM server.
  
  
• Dial codes for dialing external phone numbers and international numbers.
  
  
• Features such as whether subscribers can transfer callers to other users and whom callers can contact.
  
  
• Time limits for calls, messages, and idle timeouts.
  
  
• Default language for OVA and voice prompts.
  
  
• The audio codec format for voice messages, such as MP3.

Important

If you want to upgrade your existing Exchange 2007 UM environment that is connected to OCS, you need to create new UM dial plans for Exchange 2010 UM to make OCS UM-version aware. Until SP1, changing a user's dial plan means de-provisioning and re-provisioning a user from the UM system. SP1 changes that by enabling the Move Request to update the UM dial plan automatically.

Exchange 2010 SP1 will include secondary UM dial plan support, which means that you can assign two UM dial plans to your users, especially those who use two phones connected to different gateways.