Unity Connection 8.0 Intrasite-networking and SMTP Smarthost

Question

Hi,
Two Unity Connection 8.0 clusters:
Cluster1: ServerA (Pub) and Server B (Sub);
Cluster2: ServerC(Pub) and Server D(Sub)
We want to setup  intrasite  networking between those two clusters. As listed in the networking guide of unity connection 8.x:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/8x/networking/guide/8xcucnet020.html
The followings are the requirement for SMTP or SMTP Smarthost.
(1) The servers that will be networked together are directly accessible through TCP/IP port 25 (SMTP), or SMTP messages are routable through an SMTP smart host.
(2) For Connection clusters, you must have a smart host available to resolve the SMTP domain of the cluster to both the publisher and subscriber servers in order for message traffic to reach
For the redundancy consideration, such as when one cluster's publisher is down, the subscriber can still send or receive message from another location, as per the documentation, a SMTP smarthost is required.
I am questioning if this external SMTP smarthost is really required, since in case the customer could not provide us the Smarthost to relay the message, how should we do?
If we configure SMTP Access for Cluster Subscriber Servers as listed in http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/8x/networking/guide/8xcucnet020.html#wp1053483
will this exclude the requirement of smarthost when one publisher server is down?
Thanks,
JJ

Answer 1

Editing prompts such as it is will probably never be supported by Unity or Connection - for a request like this it would have to be provided in the conversation (phrase logic) as an option to use one term or the other.
I know it seems like just hacking and slashing the prompt files should be a no brainer and we're just being obstinate by not allowing it but that's not the case.
Many of the prompts used to construct the language specific phrase files are used in more than one place (i.e. each phrase does not have duplicate WAV files for each "token" used to make up the complete phrase - they get shared) - so it's a dangerous thing to go in and start replacing prompts here and there since it many times has unintended consequences. Supporting folks going in and making such changes and then calling TAC because something "sounds funny" is a daunting task as you can imagine.
once you open that up to other languages it gets gnarly in a hurry. The last voice mail system I dealt with that actually allowed for this type of thing was Repartee (DOS based system back in the 90s) - and when it got ported to OS/2 and then Windows support for direct prompt edits was yanked for the same reasons.
so long way of saying direct prompt edits are not in our future I don't think. I can pass on your concerns with "ID" vs. "Extension" anyway...