Contributing to the UK English UM Preview Language pack.

As those of you who have worked with Exchange 2010 will know, it is possible for those using Exchange UM to have their incoming voicemails transcribed to text and shown with the messaging in their inbox.

The only issue is that currently we have support for voicemail preview in the following language packs:

1. English (US) – (en-US)
2. French (France) – (fr-FR)
3. Italian – (it-IT)English (Canada) (en-CA)
4. Polish (pl-PL)
5. Portuguese (Portugal) (pt-PT)
6. Spanish (Spain) (es-ES)

As you can see, English (UK) – (en-GB) is not supported for preview. Simply put this is because there are very many flavours of English in the UK and getting a single pack to correctly understand all of them to a suitable level of accuracy is a huge technical challenge.

With that in mind Microsoft needs to collect sample data (i.e. voicemails) to work with so as to improve the algorithm. So, if you would like to assist in the development of a English UK language pack which supports voicemail preview feel free to follow the steps below:

Voice mail collection is controlled with a setting on the UM Mailbox Policy object. This means that the UM administrator can choose which UM-enabled users’ voice mail is collected. This is important because there may be users that do not want to (or should not) have any of their voice mail collected: perhaps they receive voice mail with financially sensitive information.

To turn on collection for a UM Mailbox Policy, use the Exchange Management Shell (PowerShell) and set the AllowVoiceMailAnalysis property to true.

For example:

PS> Set-UMMailboxPolicy “some UM Mailbox Policy” –AllowVoiceMailAnalysis $true

The caller can prevent collection when they leave a message by pressing # instead of hanging up, and then choosing to mark the message private. This is also true if you are using the Protected Voice Mail feature.

For more information about language packs and Exchange UM see the link below:

Client Language Support for Unified Messaging

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638119.aspx

Installing the prerequisites for Exchange 2010 SP1 UM role – can’t install UCMA

Just a quick tip, as this seems to have caught a few people out (including me!)

When installing Exchange 2010 SP1 UM role there is the need to install the UCMA 2.0 Runtime which can be downloaded from the Microsoft site using the link below:

UcmaRuntimeWebDownloadX64.msi

So when the software downloads, you double click the MSI and install it. What is perhaps not so obvious, is that you haven’t actually installed anything yet! You have only copied the files to the location specified which in my case was:

C:\Microsoft UCMA 2.0 Runtime Installer Package\amd64

So at that point you need to run the SetupUcmaRuntime application in that folder to actually install UCMA, at which point Exchange setup will find the prerequisites and let you install the Exchange UM role!

Hope that helps!

Cheers

Nathan