Is Exchange 2010 a Replacement for Legacy Voicemail?

One of the great things about my job as a Technical Trainer is that I get to test drive, then use, some of the newest and coolest software packages. And, to the annoyance of my friends in the IT field, I mostly don’t have to deal with the problems in deployment or the day-to-day drudgery of managing an enterprise. I guess that’s a nice way of saying I understand their pain, without having to endure any of it myself.

I recently attended Exchange 2010 Ignite training. Three days of test driving the latest and greatest iteration of Microsoft’s email system. It’s quite an impressive product, loaded with new functionality and redesigned for unbelievable degree of robustness. While there I spent some time exploring something near and dear to my heart, their implementation of Unified Messaging (UM).  It was great to learn a bit about deploying Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging in the context of a legacy voicemail replacement – an area where I spent a considerable amount of time.

The last slide of the last lecture had a fascinating bullet point – “A  Natural Replacement for Legacy Voicemail”. What you’ll find while comparing a legacy voicemail to Exchange is that a lot of those “Legacy Features” such as voice distribution lists and cascading pager notifications are missing. This may not be a huge deal, since your company may not use them anyhow. However, it suffices to say that it’s not a voicemail system but an implementation of voice into a more email mail centric system. It’s a tradeoff -  legacy functionality for more a more modern feature set. Assuming  of course that you want those new features and can live without the legacy ones such as voice mail networking with legacy systems via VPIM or AMIS or replacing a familiar telephone user interface (TUI) with an unusual version.

Upgrading to Exchange 2010 requires a fork lift upgrade. There is no process to upgrade your existing 2003 or 2007 systems. However,  Exchange 2010 is 2003 and 2007 capable. Meaning, you can have both 2003 and 2007 systems in your Exchange 2010 enterprise. So you don’t upgrade, you add the new system then move the users over . Although you can go right from 2007 to 2010 in controlled manner,  you cannot upgrade your 2007 UM though, only move those users.

One thing I found vexing in both 2007 and now again in 2010 Unified Messaging is how tedious it is to manage voice features for an Exchange user. Although the management interface has been streamlined and improved I found it tough  to go back and view or make changes once I set up a voice user. Near as I could figure, I could enable or disable UM for a user, anything else, I’d have to use a wizard again.

The last two criticisms I have deal with Speech. Speech recognition is a processor intensive function, not only on Exchange but on a CallXpress system as well. Speech also has a few subtleties that one should think about in an administration context (Hence, it makes sense to be able to make user changes easy). Take name changes for instance. What happens when “Holly Holt” gets married and now is Holly Smythe, only pronounced “Smith”. What if she wants her old name, her new name, and maybe “Holly Holt-Smythe” as well? We can do this. We can also handle both Holly Smythe and Olly Smith by a few tweaks in administration. By the way, I asked that exact question in the class.

I got the reaction I probably deserved by asking such a thing at 4PM on a Friday. I’ll blame it on that rather than any product deficiencies. I spent  a bit of time trying to explore this further on the web and couldn’t land anywhere that described sizing, speech recognition, and disambiguation.

MS Exchange 2010 also supports Speech to Text. The caller leaves a voicemail message, and Exchange converts it to a text email. Very slick. We’ve had that with our “got-voice” integration for some time. We were given what I’d describe as an oblique warning that this is processor intensive and we shouldn’t give it to every user. Suffices to say, too much of a good thing here is probably a bad thing. I couldn’t find much info anywhere on that either, other than everyone agreeing it was cool. I’m guessing that since I’ve heard that it’s speech to text transcription accuracy is less than 50%, the more users added means the less likely the messages will be transcribed properly.

Not that I’m trying to be mean, these two features are very cool. There are, however, a lot of problems that pop up during speech deployment. CallXpress has the tools to deal with these issues and without making light of the complexities, they are pretty straight forward.

Make no mistake, it’s a cool system with lots of other cutting edge features such as Rights Management, Exchange Online (Cloud access),  a very cool new look and feel to both Outlook and OWA, and awesome high availability and archiving capability. The way Microsoft has redesigned the architecture, with it’s resulting many-fold increase in hardware efficiency, probably makes the upgrade worthwhile.

However, Unified Messaging was disappointing. With it’s ability to integrate to all versions of Exchange (2010 soon to come, no doubt) CallXpress allows you to add UM capabilities as awesome and rich as these new features while at the same time providing true legacy voicemail replacement and continuity during an upgrade.

CallXpress 8 offers new Voice User Interface (VUI)

Did you know CallXpress 8 offers the option* to have integrated speech recognition?  By adding speech recognition to the system, users can be configured to use the new Voice User Interface (VUI) that allows them to navigate the features of their mailbox using spoken commands.

What is the Voice User Interface (VUI)?
Use easy to remember spoken commands to manage your messages, place calls to other system users, place calls directly to phone numbers and manage your mailbox settings completely hands-free to comply with government regulations when accessing your mailbox while driving.

• Easier to remember how to navigate as it uses commands that you would naturally say to perform actions
• Provides powerful features that would be difficult to use in a traditional DTMF TUI
• Most commands are the same as Seneca making it easy to transition from Seneca to the CallXpress VUI
• Utilize your 50 free UM & PA licenses to call contacts & manage your calendar from the VUI

* Speech Recognition is a licensed feature of CallXpress and is licensed on a per-resource basis.  Speech resources are pooled and allocated to ports as needed on a first-come first-served basis.

CallXpress Training and Documentation Gets an “Upgrade” too!

What’s new to CallXpress 8 Training or Documentation – for AVST Resellers and CallXpress customers

CallXpress 8 has been out for just a short time, and already I’m hearing rave reviews from our students and end-users about the breadth and quality of enhancements we’ve made to the product. No doubt Speech sparks the most interests in our classes, as students can’t wait to start playing around with the speech-enabled call processors and the voice recognition. We now train Speech in our Administrator and Core Technical courses, rather than separately like we did for the previous version. So if you’ve been wanting to see Speech in action and learn more about it, get signed up for one or both of those courses.

Also new to CallXpress 8 Training is our FastTrack course, which is designed to bring reseller technicians up to speed on the changes since version 7. A passing score on the accompanying exam allows students to become certified on CallXpress 8.

Please note: the FastTrack course is recommended only for reseller technicians who are already certified on version 7. A current certification is required in order to become recertified.

The course is broken out into seven lessons:

1. Introduction to CallXpress 8
2. Upgrading from 7.91 to 8
3. Understanding the new Interface
4. Working with Speech
5. Devices and Availability
6. Multi-Server Configuration
7. Upgrading from Web PhoneManager

So far, we’ve had a few hundred technicians take advantage of this course. If you haven’t enrolled yet, please download the latest training registration form from PartnerXpress and send it in!

New to CallXpress 8 Documentation we have a number of items:

• CallXpress Editable Pocket Guide – created as a request from our end-user community, this tri-fold document covers the telephone user interface menu. It’s delivered in Microsoft Word to allow you to make your own customizations and edits as you see fit.
• Voice User Interface QRC – with Speech integrated into CallXpress, this quick reference card shows the most common commands.
• Mailbox Archive Utility OLB – this online book explains how to backup and maintain mailboxes in CallXpress
• System Backup and Restore OLB – this online book covers everything you need to know to keep your CallXpress system backed up and safe.
• CallXpress Automatic Speech Recognition Guide – this guide covers everything related to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), including concepts, licensing, requirements, installation, and troubleshooting.

And as always, we’ve updated and rewritten many of the legacy documents to address the numerous enhancements in CallXpress 8. If you have any comments, questions, or recommendations for our Training or Documentation, please send me an e-mail.

Related Links:

• CallXpress Online Technical Training Datasheet
• CallXpress End User Materials

Why upgrade to CallXpress 8?

So you’ve heard the buzz….CallXpress 8, AVST’s next generation feature-rich Unified Communications platform delivers high availability, scalability, centralization, cost savings, mobility and more.  But what does this mean to you?

It means that CallXpress 8 delivers the mission critical functionality you have been looking for while protecting your current and future communications infrastructure.

Here are the some of the highlights of CallXpress 8:

• High Availability and Disaster Recovery – New, multi-call server architecture delivers continuous high availability and avoids system downtime.   A multi-server architecture combined with Neverfail®, a fully synchronized hot standby, provides IT administrators with the peace of mind that CallXpress is running 24×7.
• Centralization – CallXpress 8 provides customers with the ability to centralize messaging and call processing applications by using their existing voice or data networks and deploying AVST’s survivable call server technology or SIP gateways.
• Speech -  CallXpress provides speech access to your company’s communication infrastructure and real-time call connectivity. It also offers hands-free mobile management of telephone calls, e-mails, fax messages, contacts and calendar and complies with the hands-free mobile phone laws enacted in many states and countries.
• Personal Assistant - Provides Find-me/Follow-me capabilities to automatically route calls to the most appropriate telephone based on their current presence as well as Calendar and Contact management for users of Microsoft® Exchange and IBM® Lotus Notes®.  When combined with existing mobility applications such as unified messaging, voice user interface, and single number/single mailbox, CallXpress 8 becomes the most mobility-enabled solution offered by AVST to date.
• Scalability – Now able to scale up to 384 ports and 40,000 users, CallXpress 8 doubles the scalability of previous versions and can be networked for larger capacity.
• Interoperability – CallXpress 8 is compatible with more than 250 TDM, IP-PBX, and Centrex integrations with the ability to support up to 10 switches on a CallXpress system.
   

Understand the Benefits of Upgrading to CallXpress 8

AVST believes it is critical for customers to continually utilize the latest version of software. Proactive upgrades ensure optimal performance, continued feature enhancements, increased stability, and ongoing compatibility with emerging communications technology. Click here to view a feature matrix that lists many of the features available with recent versions of CallXpress.

Related Links:

• CallXpress 8 Unifying Communications Brochure
• High Availability Datasheet 
• Personal Assistant Datasheet 
• Legacy Voicemail Replacement Datasheet