Voice Mail Preview (confidence is low)….. but funny

Exchange 2010 has a brilliant feature called Voice Mail Preview. This gives Exchange Unified Messaging the ability to take an incoming voice mail and convert the audio to text enabling you to check the content of a voice mail without listening to the audio that was recorded.

Or that’s the idea.

Microsoft are yet to release a Language Pack for en-GB (or British English!) which includes Voice Mail Preview (see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638119 for details).

I have recently upgraded our environment from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010, the decommissioning process had been running well in that running with the Exchange 2007 servers powered off all features appeared to be working. The final part of the decommissioning is to uninstall the Exchange 2007 servers.

After uninstalling all Exchange 2007 servers and then testing features all seemed fine until one of the end users mentioned that her voice mail had turned American.

I checked by calling my own Voice Mail which confirmed that I now had an American lady speaking to me and also suddenly Voice Mail Preview started working. The problem with this was the American lady was having trouble with my British accent:

On checking the EMC I could see that all the dial plans had reverted to en-US (US English). From the drop down list no other language packs were available. Strange I thought as one of the steps in my migration was installing the en-GB lang pack.

On attempting to install the en-GB language pack I received the following error:

Error: Unified Messaging language packs are already installed for the following cultures: ‘en-GB’. The installation can’t proceed until the following language packs are removed from the list: ‘en-GB’

A quick Bing for information brought back the following post for Exchange 2007:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvrunifiedmessaging/thread/158d2a68-fb56-4c15-b3fb-dae78a646fb4

Digging through the registry I found the following key :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\UnifiedMessagingRole\LanguagePacks

Which contained the following entries:

"en-US"="cef60964-21ae-47e0-93c6-611aa8941b7f"
"en-GB"="d0ff1f64-221f-42ba-81bd-a06e3b6c8a91"

I backed up the key and deleted the en-GB key. The language pack installation then continued successfully and I was then able to amend the UM dial plans in the EMC back to English (United Kingdom).

I do hope that Exchange 15 has en-GB as a Voice Mail Preview option!