Defining the Right Path to Unified Messaging - part 2
December 11, 2008 by Neil Butler
(part 2 of 2 in blog series) I already spent some time discussing the purpose of Unified Messaging and provided a high level overview of the most popular feature sets. Now I want to take you behind the scenes and explore how Unified Messaging can be deployed.
So, let’s take a look at the various architectures used to support Unified Messaging in CallXpress. By architecture, I am simply referring to the different ways to connect your voicemail system, your telephone system, and your e-mail system to deliver Unified Messaging functionality. There are four generally recognized architectures accepted in the market today. AVST’s marketing department created a cool brochure that outlines the “Four Flavors of Unified Messaging.” I’m going to break down each architecture for you so you understand them, and then I’m going to talk about what the implications are for using 0one of these architectures as opposed to another.
So, let’s start with server-based Unified Messaging. It’s called server-based Unified Messaging because it actually unifies the messages on a single server. This is also sometimes called single message store Unified Messaging. And basically what this means is CallXpress takes the voice messages and deposits them into the user’s e-mail inbox. The voice messages are now stored on the e-mail server. The advantage of this deployment type is that any access type you use to access your e-mail, you now have voice messages added to it. For example, you see voice messages in your e-mail client immediately when you open up your e-mail client. If you’re using a Blackberry Enterprise Server, Good Technologies Server, or Microsoft ActiveSync over the air to push your e-mail messages out to your mobile devices real time, you will now get your voice messages and your fax messages as well. If you’re using cached mode on Microsoft Exchange or Mailbox Replication on Lotus Notes, so that when travelers pick their laptop offline and they have all their e-mail messages, they’ll now have all their voice and fax messages as well. And if they go and stop somewhere in an internet booth and bring up Outlook Web Access or iNotes, or some other type of web access to e-mail, they will now also have web access to their voice and fax messages. So, it’s a maximum leverage for the existing infrastructure, and it makes it the easiest one for people to use because they’re used to deploying it and using it from a tool they already know. This deployment is the most feature rich, particularly for mobile people. It’s the easiest to use for the client, and it does support the real time push of voice and fax messages out to the mobile devices that are already getting e-mail messages.
Now, there are two areas of discussion regarding server-based Unified Messaging. While we don’t hear about it as much as we used to, some customers are concerned about the impact on the e-mail server and the network from moving and storing voice and fax messages. Years ago, ago, this was a real concern for customers and we would actually run network studies and talk about the storage requirements on their email servers. But in today’s world, when most employees have a large number of e-mail messages with large attachments, the few voice messages they receive tend to not really be very significant. On average, voicemail message attachments range in size from 200K to 400K and since most people only get about 3 to 10 of those messages per day, it’s not that much of an impact on the network.
A more prevalent concern regarding server-based Unified Messaging we have encountered lately is related to e-document policies and privacy. So if you look at HIPAA in the health industry, that’s the patient’s privacy act, it spells out what a good health industry company has to do to ensure that records, communications, everything that has to do with the patient stays as private as possible. And FERPA does the same thing. If you look at FERPA for the educational industry, it is the same type of act. And the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, is the same thing, kind of a little more powerful even for a public company, where not only is privacy an issue, but you actually have requirements for maintaining records and making them available for disclosure. Now all these documents completely ignore voicemail, none of them mentions voicemail at all. But there is some concern that if I put my voicemail into my e-mail system, what does that mean? Does that mean I am now covered? Are those voice messages subject to those same laws and regulations? And the answer is no one knows. Nobody has gone to court to spell out one way or another whether voice messages left in e-mail fall under all these same guidelines or not. So, it does make some corporate customers a little bit nervous.
So for those customers, we recommend client-based Unified Messaging. With client-based Unified Messaging, we’re going to leave the messages on CallXpress. The voice and fax messages remain stored on their relevant servers, and we’re going to unify them at the client level, instead of at a server level. So what we’re actually going to do is we’re going to take an e-mail client that’s already connected to the customer’s e-mail message store and build a second connection between that e-mail client and the CallXpress message store.
CallXpress in essence becomes very similar to an IMAP e-mail store. So now from that one client, messages will be viewed in two different folders, e-mail messages in one and voice and fax messages in the other. For desktop users, there’s very little difference between this and having server-based Unified Messaging. I can still open those messages and play them over the phone and play them over the speakers. I can build folders about projects I’m working on and drag voice, fax, and e-mail messages into it. There is a difference for mobile users though. Since the messages aren’t stored in the e-mail server, some of the tools that people have deployed to make e-mail more effective won’t automatically help with voicemail now. For instance, if you’re using a Blackberry server to push your e-mail messages out to your mobile users, if we’re not putting voice messages in the server, they’re not going to get pushed to the Blackberry device. So, a little less productive for mobile users. The upside is it has less impact on the e-mail server in the network, and there are less concerns from some people about HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, FERPA, et cetera. I’m not actually saying that this is a better way to do this, or that this has less legal implication because nobody knows that. What I am saying is we can do it either way. If one way sounds better to you, then you can do it that way. Unlike any other system on the market, if you change your mind and you’re using CallXpress, you can change the type of Unified Messaging that’s deployed with the click of a button. So if you’ve gone ahead and rolled out server-based Unified Messaging, and you get down the road a little and decide it is not a good idea to store those on the e-mail server anymore; with a click of a button you can go from server-based to client-based. No other system can offer you that flexibility. That’s pretty nice to know in a changing legal infrastructure where there are some very, very cloudy areas out there. It’s nice to know that you have the flexibility as a user to control that destiny yourself.
The third type of Unified Messaging architecture is called secure Unified Messaging. Now, secure Unified Messaging was actually the result of the direct request from a number of our large enterprise customers who said “When we do desktop voice messaging, we use an e-mail client to look at our voicemail, no matter what type we use, server or client, there’s a problem if anend user can forward that voicemail message off site." Now prior to this, voicemail was accessed on the telephone and it stayed inside the relative corporate firewall and it was a corporate asset, so to speak. With desktop messaging using an e-mail client, there’s nothing to stop employees from taking those messages, saving the attachment to a CD, or forwarding the message off site to their Hotmail account. We had customers that said that was of great concern and asked us what we could do. So we built a new type of Unified Messaging - secure Unified Messaging.
With secure Unified Messaging, voice and fax messages stay on the CallXpress server and they’re accessed with a web application. What we’ve done is taken our existing Web PhoneManager application, which prior to this was the web tool that users could go into to configure their mailbox, and we added to that the ability to view voice and fax messages. So now a user can be setup so they can get their voice messages from their desktop or from the internet using this tool. As an option, to further increase security, a user can be set up such that when they go to get their messages we use streaming media to deliver it to the PC speakers and as such, they can’t save a copy of that message, nor can they forward it off site. So it’s the most secure version of Unified Messaging. It’s turned out to be very popular for some companies because once they install the web application on their web server, basically there’s nothing more to be done. There’s no desktop visits required, no software to be loaded, no configuration to worry about. The web application can run a Microsoft internet server or it can run on an Apache Web server. It’s really technology independent. And it also works in browsers on Windows clients, Mac clients, Linux clients, etc. It works on Safari. It works on Firefox. It works on Internet Explorer - a very, very open standards type of solution. The only real downside here, I guess, is it’s not really unifying all the messages in a single application, but it does give you that same functionality of handling all your message types from the desktop.
Now, all three types of Unified Messaging; server-based, client-based, and secure are available on CallXpress. You don’t buy them that way. You simply buy a license for users. Let’s say you buy a license for several hundred users. The administrator can now configure those users for any of those three types as they’d like and change them anytime they want. So you’re not locking yourself into anything in the way of architecture when you buy a CallXpress system. Those three types are completely interchangeable and basically you can change them as many times as you want just by clicking a button. They can be assigned on a pre-user basis, or a per-class service basis.
This last type of Unified Messaging that we offer is in a separate category because it doesn’t require a license. We call it simplified Unified Messaging. One of the things that CallXpress has always focused on is message notification. You know particularly for mobile people, you can’t really process a message quickly if you don’t know that it’s there. So, in CallXpress, we have a very powerful message notification engine. It includes the ability to dial out to numbers and pagers, and various other devices. You can have a list of up to nine numbers at which to notify a subscriber as well as very, very flexible filters, so that you can only be notified of urgent messages, or only message of a certain type for only messages from a certain sender. And as an addition to that, we offer the ability to send out both e-mail messages and SMS short text messages for notification. So I can configure my mailbox that whenever I get a voicemail to send me an e-mail message telling me it’s there. This was one of the ways we handled Blackberry users in the early days when their devices weren’t capable of playing voice messages on the phone. We would send them out an e-mail, and they would hit that link to that e-mail and call in to get their message. And as an option, you can set that e-mail message that we send for notification to actually contain the voice message as an attachment. So what you end up with is two copies of the message: one still on CallXpress that you manage with the normal CallXpress tools, and a second over somewhere in e-mail that they manage with the e-mail tools.
This is the only type of Unified Messaging that gives you 2 copies of a message that have to be managed separately. Since this version is significantly less feature rich, we do not charge you for this. So with CallXpress, this type of Unified Messaging is free for one or all users. We don’t license voicemail users on CallXpress, basic voicemail users. You can have as many as you want on the system, and every one of them can have this type of Unified Messaging if you’d like. The pros and cons here are pretty simple. Less impact on the server and network, very easy to support foreign e-mail systems if you have contractors or people that have e-mail that’s sort of outside your control, this is an ideal way to go. The obvious downside is, it is the least feature rich. You have to modify how you handle messages because now you have two copies of voicemail and fax messages.
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