I we been playing around quite much with the Exchange UM role lately and the more i use it and play with it, the better it gets and i starting to miss not have it deployed in our own production environment yet.

If you haven’t tested the Outlook Voice Access (OVA) in 2010 yet send me a email and i will get you a account in my demo for you to play around with for a while to get a feeling of it.

To start with, Exchange UM is really great to have when you are on the move and need to check something right away and its a real lifesaver in cars.

But what more do i find so great about it? Well my personal favorite is that i can set up “Find me” rules for my voice mail.

So lets say I don’t want to give out my mobile number to everyone since i use the same number both private and for business. People have my business card with my office number, and that should be enough. UM in Exchange 2010 offers a really great way to solve this problem.

From my personal options screen, which I can reach from Exchange 2010 Outlook Web App (OWA), I can create a Call Answering Rule for lets say Bengt. When Bengt calls my office number and I don’t answer, UM will pick up the call, find the rule that I created, and follow the instructions in the rule. UM will play the special greeting I recorded: “Hello, Bengt. I’m not at my desk at the moment. If you want to try to reach me on my mobile phone, press 1. If you just want to leave me a voice message, press 2.” If Bengt presses 1, UM will ask him to tell his name, and then ask him to wait while it tries to find me. It will place Bengt on hold, and make a call to my mobile number (or any other number, like my home or wife’s mobile number, which I placed in the rule, where no one can see it). If I answer UM’s call on my mobile phone, it will play Bengts name and ask me if I want to speak with him. If I say “Yes”, UM will take Bengt off hold, and connect him to me. The end result is that Bengt called me on my mobile phone, without knowing the number. This is an easy way for me to increase control of my communications and still let people contact me regardless of me having to stay near my office number.

Doesn’t that sounds great but how do you do it?

Well you need to be Exchange 2010 UM enabled and the administrator have to do some outbound dialing rules (witch i will cover in a later post) for UM to actually be able to make a call to your mobile.

Then its as simple as creating a mail rule in Outlook

But you will now use OWA instead. So just open a browser and then log on to your OWA, then go to options (alternatively you can just add ecp to the url instead of owa so it will look something like this: https://mail.contoso.com/ecp )

Then just go to the Phone page / Voice mail tab and from there you can create your rules by clicking New Rule and then give it a name and start to add some of the following conditions

So i rule i would like to have is VIP customers

I don’t like early mornings but i often stay up late so its ok if they call late…

…as long as they pay for it that is.

I can then add some more choices like a press 2 for the regular service desk

So i now have a rule that looks like this

And this will now be played by the Auto Attendant voice to caller in the VIP Customers 1 group if they call me and reach my voice mail during the times i specified, but since this is my VIP customers calling i would like to add a little personality to it and let them hear my voice telling this instead of a “robot”.

If i click the Call the Play on Phone… OVA will let me put in a phone number and then call me on that number so i can record a personal message.

Personally i see much more use of this now compared to UM in Exchange 2007.

Please post a comment of what rules would you create and how do you see that you could use this to maximize your communication by taking control of it?