In this series of blog posts I am looking at creating a Unified Messaging lab for Exchange Server 2010 (and 2013). Earlier posts have looked at the installation of the PBX (AsteriskNOW) and the configuration of the Exchange Server.
This post will look at the configuration of the user’s settings. For each user there are two settings to configure. The first are the related settings on the telephone and the second is the configuration of the unified messaging properties on the Exchange mailbox.
The first set of settings are covered in detail in Part 4 of the blog but in brief they involve choosing a unique extension number that has the same number of digits as the dialplan (all extensions must be unique within the dialplan) and creating this extension within the PBX and configuring a phone to use this extension. Once you have done the steps in Part 4 of the blog you should be able to ring any of your extensions and pickup the call.
If you ignore the call or press any “reject” button on the handset you will find that Asterisk voicemail answers the phone. So this part of the blog series will go into the steps to configure Asterisk to forward voicemail to Exchange Server (and this is the same for Exchange Server 2010 or 2013).
Configuring Unified Messaging Mailboxes in Exchange Server
For each user you need to associate their mailbox in Exchange with their extension number. You can do with the Enable-UMMailbox cmdlet or the Enable Unified Messaging wizard in the Exchange Management Console.
For the wizard, right-click the mailbox under Recipient Configuration and select the Unified Messaging Mailbox Policy that you created earlier. Then either choose a PIN or have the system generate on for the user automatically. The user will get an email informing them of their PIN either way. Click Next.
If the user already has the Business Phone attribute (or Telephone number attribute on the General tab in Active Directory Users and Computers) populated in Active Directory then the option to automatically generate the mailbox extension will be available, and the extension will be shown (greyed out) in the field to the right. If this is incorrect, or a full phone number was not specified, then only the manual option will be available.
The Exchange Management Shell cmdlet to do the same is:
Enable-UMMailbox username -PinExpired $false -UMMailboxPolicy 'policy_name'
or, if you want to specify the extension number:
Enable-UMMailbox username -PinExpired $false -UMMailboxPolicy 'policy_name' -Extensions '8001'
As each mailbox is enabled for unified messaging, the mailbox will get an email telling them the access numbers for voicemail (the dialplan subscriber numbers), their number (which should be the same as their telephone extension number) and their PIN.
On the mailbox, if you look on the E-mail Addresses tab you will see the EUM address, and this should read ext;phone-content=policy. You can add additional extensions (EUM addresses) here manually if you wish.
Configuring and Using Outlook Voice Access
Now that you have the extension configured on a phone, the same extension configured against the mailbox, a dialplan with subscriber access number configured, SIP trunks to Exchange and an Outbound Route for the subscriber access number you should be able to ring the subscriber access number from your physical handset.
Upon dialling from the phone configured with your extension number you will hear the Exchange chimes and be asked to setup your Outlook Voice Access for the first time. You will need your PIN number to complete this, and this will have been emailed to the mailbox at the time the mailbox was configured for UM.
Configure Asterisk to Forward Calls to Exchange Unified Messaging for Voicemail
Asterisk defaults to forwarding calls to its own voicemail extensions and so edits need to be made to extensions.conf (or linked files if using FreePBX) to route calls to Exchange Server for voicemail.
In this blog series we have FreePBX installed, so we need to edit /etc/asterisk/extensions_override_freepbx.conf rather than extensions.conf. The first change is to copy the [macro-vm] section from /etc/asterisk/extensions_additional.conf into /etc/asterisk/extensions_override_freepbx.conf. [macro-vm] is approx 150 lines long and ends with “;–== end of [macro-vm] ==–;”.
Then we need to make some changes and additions to the macro-vm section. The first set of changes will comment out the code the directs calls to Asterisk voicemail and the additional lines will dial the Exchange Server trunks and add SIP Diversion headers so that Exchange knows which mailbox to answer the call for.
So first, locate the following lines and comment them out. The numbers in brackets at the start are the approx. location in extensions_override_freepbx.conf where you will find the line:
(86) exten => s-BUSY,n,VoiceMail(${MEXTEN}@${VMCONTEXT},${VM_OPTS}b${VMGAIN})
(92) exten => s-NOMESSAGE,n,VoiceMail(${MEXTEN}@${VMCONTEXT},s${VM_OPTS}${VMGAIN})
(97) exten => s-DIRECTDIAL,n,VoiceMail(${MEXTEN}@${VMCONTEXT},${VM_OPTS}${VM_DDTYPE}${VMGAIN})
Each of the above lines can be commented out by placing a semi-colon (;) at the start of the line.
Return to the s-BUSY block (starting at line 84) and add the following after the line that you just commented out:
exten => s-BUSY,n,SIPAddHeader(Diversion:<tel:${MEXTEN}>\;reason=no-answer\;screen=no\;privacy=off)
exten => s-BUSY,n,Dial(SIP/xxxx&SIP/yyyy) /* xxxx/yyyy here are the two trunk names, one for each TCP listening port */
exten => s-BUSY,n,Hangup
This code adds the Diversion header to read tel:extension. Note that the tel:ext block is surrounded by greater and less than signed (triangle brackets if you will) which have a habit of not being displayed on web pages.
Also note that you need to use the names of your two trunks connecting to Exchange that you will make in the final part of this blog series (Part 8). You will make one trunk connecting to port 5065 and the other to port 5067. The Dial() command tells Asterisk to dial both trunks at the same time and direct the call to whichever answers first. Therefore if Exchange is listening on 5065 or 5067 the connection will work. For ease of configuration, if you pick the names for the two trunks now you can add them to the config file here and then when you create the trunk in Part 8 you just need to use the same names. I used ToExchangeUM5065 and ToExchangeUM5067 in my lab. Then I replace xxxx with ToExchangeUM5065 and yyyy with ToExchangeUM5067.
The s-NOMESSAGE block (at line 92) needs the following added after the line that has been commented out:
exten => s-NOMESSAGE,n,SIPAddHeader(Diversion:<tel:${MEXTEN}>\;reason=no-answer\;screen=no\;privacy=off)
exten => s-NOMESSAGE,n,Dial(SIP/xxxx&SIP/yyyy) /* xxxx/yyyy here are the two trunk names, one for each TCP listening port */
exten => s-NOMESSAGE,n,Hangup
Again, change xxxx and yyyy for your two different trunk names that you create in the next part of this blog and make sure that the Diversion: header includes triangle brackets around tel:ext.
Next you need to do the same for the s-DIRECTDIAL block:
exten => s-DIRECTDIAL,n,SIPAddHeader(Diversion:<tel:${MEXTEN}>\;reason=no-answer\;screen=no\;privacy=off)
exten => s-DIRECTDIAL,n,Dial(SIP/xxxx&SIP/yyyy) /* xxxx/yyyy here are the two trunk names, one for each TCP listening port */
exten => s-DIRECTDIAL,n,Hangup
As you can see, the three blocks of inserted code are all the same apart from the s-WORD value at the start of each.
One block of code is missing through from the FreePBX defaults. If you call an extension and it is busy Asterisk runs the code starting s-BUSY, but if the call is ignored then Asterisk attempts to find and run code starting s-NOANSWER and as this is missing it will route ignored calls to Asterisk voicemail. To route ignored calls to Exchange Server add the following block of text:
exten => s-NOANSWER,1,Noop(NOANSWER voicemail - Exchange UM)
exten => s-NOANSWER,n,Macro(get-vmcontext,${MEXTEN})
exten => s-NOANSWER,n,SIPAddHeader(Diversion:<tel:${MEXTEN}>\;reason=no-answer\;screen=no\;privacy=off)
exten => s-NOANSWER,n,Dial(SIP/xxxx&SIP/yyyy) /* xxxx/yyyy here are the two trunk names, one for each TCP listening port */
exten => s-NOANSWER,n,Hangup
exten => s-NOANSWER,n,Goto(exit-${VMSTATUS},1)
This new block is again a copy of s-BUSY (or the other two) and just the s-WORD bit changed to s-NOANSWER. For completion the Noop line (line 1 above) is also changed to NOANSWER so that the correct text is written to the Asterisk console and log files.
No other changes are needed in extensions_override_freepbx.conf. So save the file and restart Asterisk by using amportal restart from the console.
There is now one more thing to do. That is to create the SIP Trunks to Exchange Server. This is detailed in Part 8, and once you have a way to connect to Exchange Server you are able to route voicemail requests to Exchange and complete your unified messaging lab.
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