Defining the Right Path to Unified Messaging

(part 1 of 2 in blog series) Unified Messaging is interesting. It’s been around long enough where there’s a number of ways to deploy it. Everyone has a slightly different idea on how you should do that. And if nothing else, when you’re done reading this two part blog post, you should understand the ways of deploying it, which in turn should give you some direction when making choices for your enterprise.

So what is Unified Messaging about? It’s really about access to messages. Unified Messaging provides easier, more productive access to all your message types: voice, fax and e-mail. Not only does Unified Messaging provide access to all your message types but it also enables access from the terminal or device you’d like to use, regardless of location. It’s certainly easy to see that sitting at our desks at work, we have an e-mail client and we spend much of our day inside there. Putting a voice and a fax message into that e-mail client makes it much easier to manage our activities. By integrating these items into a single system, I can now group all my messages based on subject or based on promotions and programs I am working on. I can also use the same way of working, the same kind of prioritization of the e-mail inbox to look for important messages to cover all types of messages, not just e-mail. But it goes beyond that because for some of us, working at a desktop all day long isn’t an option. In today’s mobile environment the urgency to receive messages in a timely manner is magnified, and the benefit of managing all your messages from a single screen is crucial.

Now, this is showing you the e-mail tool. It just happened to be Microsoft Outlook screen shot. It just would easily be Notes or Eudora, or Novell GroupWise or any clients you’d really want to talk about. And inside that inbox, what you see is voice messages designated by the little telephone icon; fax messages by the little piece of paper and regular e-mail messages. And these are literally all processed in the same way. Not much of a learning curve for desktop unified messaging. You open up your inbox, you see a new message, you double click it and that will bring the message up, and we’ll talk about playing that message in a second.  But you notice even in the header lines, there’s information about who sent you those messages, what type of messages they are.

With Unified Messaging we want to reduce the time to process messages AND we also want to extend the time that messages are available and reduce the amount of time it takes to get a message, read it, process it, and respond to it. There’s actually a study published by Frost and Sullivan that talks about message management with Unified Messaging. When we’re able to take all our message types and put them into a single tool, that saves anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of the time we’d spend handling messages. Now if you think time at a desk, where you would actually be in your e-mail, reading your e-mail, the light would come on your phone, you’d stop, you’d call in, you’d log in to your voice mail, you then you’d listen to those messages and then you’d get up and go out to wherever your fax machine was and get your fax messages. Then you’d come back with all that information and try to tie it together by subject. It is pretty easy to see how looking at it all on one screen and having it in one simple place to manage will allow you to be more productive and more responsive because you’ll know about all those messages in a much more timely manner.

I think we’d all agree that Unified Messaging is one of those solutions that connect key elements in your corporate infrastructure. It connects your phone messages with your e-mail system, with your faxes, with your network, with your Groupware and those connections all need to be built in such a manner that not only will they deliver the functionality you want, but they will also match certain corporate directives.

Most Unified Messaging solutions have a similar feature sets including access to all types of messages, 24×7 access to those messages, message notification and internet access. In fact, functionality is probably within 10 percent the same in most competing Unified Messaging products today. Where these products differ however, and where I think some additional attention should be placed, is on the architecture used to deploy Unified Messaging. The Unified Messaging architecture is behind the scenes and it doesn’t get much attention, but it turns out it’s a fairly critical piece in an organization’s deployment of Unified Messaging.

Stay tuned for part 2 in the Unified Messaging series post where I’ll take you behind the scenes and explore how Unified Messaging can be deployed in a variety of environments.

Related Articles:

• Defining the Right Path to Unified Messaging – recorded Webinar
• Unified Messaging Resource Center