Voice Mail - Cornerstone of Unified Communications published by UC Strategies
by Neal Shact
A sound Unified Communications strategy is built on a foundation that supports the integration of both present and future, best of breed applications. The better the foundation, the tighter the applications can work together and deliver the benefits that users are expecting.
No where is the need for tight integration more important than in the voice messaging system (voicemail). Once a single applications device solely connected to a PBX, it is now a hub that connects multiple applications and may be integrated to multiple phone (both legacy and IP) and email systems as well as with directory, application and presence software. The messaging system itself offers numerous sophisticated applications such as speech recognition, fax, text-to-speech and others.
In a Unified Communications environment, skill in deploying voice messaging and automated attendant applications becomes even more important because of the complexity of the environment, importance of outcome on the users, and continued down-sizing of dedicated staff.
Challenges include:
- Multiple PBX's that may encompass both TDM and IP phone systems
- Multiple vendors
- Integrating silos of technology
- Utilizing or upgrading legacy hardware systems that may be End-of-Life while preserving the investment already made into them
- Migrating to a VoIP strategy
- Meeting demand for ease of use while delivering new technologies such as Unified Messaging and IM
- Moving toward newer, more supportable platforms with high reliability
Other challenges will inevitably emerge. No vendor has the ultimate crystal ball and can predict what the future holds. One challenge is the emergence of virtualization that supports real-time applications. This could open the door to voice mail operating in a new way. Messaging, once located in a telephone closet, then appearing in the data center could end up on an "internal cloud" in a virtualized environment. If this scenario unfolds, the portability of messaging software is important to avoid losing what you have invested. Therefore, as technology moves in this direction, it is important for you to partner with a vendor that provides flexible solutions that will accommodate to this type of change.
Single vendor solutions offer an illusory appeal to solve all of these problems but the reality may be fraught with problems depending upon how open the architecture is to support future customer applications. Any attempt to portray a requirement to have your users take any steps backward in anticipation of future benefits should be greeted with great suspicion.