What are UNITY licenses?

Question

My company purchased CISCO phones and we are still waiting (for 2 weeks now) to get our UNITY licenses before we can use them. My question is what exactly are UNITY licenses? I know they are for the voicemail setup, etc., but why are they sold and shipped separately? Is it for security reasons? Other reasons?

Answer 1

Cisco Unity enables and disables specific features based upon the run-time license that is installed on the machine. For Cisco Unity 3.x and earlier, the run-time license data is stored on a SentinelSuperPro security key (dongle). The keys are hardware devices that plug into the parallel or USB port on the Cisco Unity machine. As of Cisco Unity 4.0, the licensing mechanism is software-based, through FLEXlm, and does not have a hardware component.