Defining the Right Path to Unified Messaging – part 2

(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. Read more

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. Read more