Implementing Cisco Unity Express

Unity Express is a richly featured voice-mail and auto-attendant application that is coresident in the router in either a Network Module format or Advanced Integration Module format. Having a local voice-mail application is ideal for smaller organizations as a standalone solution or to provide local voice-mail access in a branch office of a larger organization without having to send the traffic across the IP WAN if bandwidth utilization is an issue.

Cisco Unity Express supports up to 250 mailboxes (and 300 users), dependent on hardware platform. It can provide voice-mail and integrated messaging, but not Unified Messaging. There is no provision for a TDM interface to a legacy PBX voice-mail system (because the hardware is internal to the router), and there is no provision for redundancy. Unity Express is actually an embedded Linux operating system, with an Ethernet interface to the router platform. (This interface is not visible physically or in the router configuration.)