With the availability of all Office Wave 15 products, Lync 2013 piloting has begun. Exciting times :)

So, this is a quick post about a new feature in Lync Server 2013, voicemail escape. What this does is, essentially providing a “too soon” timer for PSTN calls. Ok, you might say, why do I need such a thing?

Well, if an enterprise voice user configures simultaneous ringing on her mobile phone, and that phones battery died or she wandered into an area with no network coverage, her provider’s voicemail would answer. Now, even if she was sitting on her desk, she might never get the call, as the caller would always go to her voicemail. Voicemail escape defines a timer using the “Set-CsVoicePolicy” cmdlet, if a call is answered before that timer elapsed, Lync would ignore that answer and keep the call on premises.

Enable the VoicemailEscapeTimer:

Set-CsVoicePolicy -EnableVoicemailEscapeTimer:$true -PSTNVoicemailEscapeTimer:5000

EnableVoicemailEscapeTimer enabled the timer.
PSTNVoicemailEscapeTimer sets the timer (in ms) used to determine whether or not a call has been answered “too soon”.

Monitoring

The Lync Monitoring server shows those ignored answers with a SIP Response Code of 480 and a Reason of: ’Terminating call as it is answered earlier than the specified voicemail escape timer’

The Lync Server Logging tool (Component: S4, Level: All) shows the timer in the SIP INVITE packet as:

ms-vm-escape-timer: 5000

You may have to tune the timer depending on your setup and the providers you are using. I had to set it pretty high to actually see an effect.

so long,
tom