Mobility is definitely a hot topic in today’s IT market. Just look at some of these statistics:

• 32% of US employees are mobile workers
• There has been a 61% increase of mobile workers from 2005 to 2009 If the current trend continues, by 2016 the US mobile workers will have grown to 4.9 million
• Enterprise mobility is the biggest single trend across tech industry investment and innovation, even outpacing the cloud computing trend
• Apple has reported a record number of iPhones and iPad sales in the second quarter of 2011, powering revenues of $28.6 billion
• 47% off all adults go online remotely

One of the key factors that started this trend and continues to move it forward is the smartphone. We recently conducted a webinar titled, Getting the Most out of Your Smartphone . Here we outlined our mobile applications that are available on Blackberries, Androids and iPhones and gave step-by-step instructions on how they work. We also discussed mobility trends and where it may be headed in the future.

Check out other ways to keep up with these mobile trends and become more productive, efficient and available on the go.

What were the key factors that led Aims to choose CallXpress out of the many other solutions available? First, with an Octel telephone user interface emulation, CallXpress makes upgrading any system seamless for all end users. According to Aims’ Telecommunications Manager, Deb Martinez, “One of the main selling points for CallXpress was the fact that I did not have to retrain our users on a new system, and, thanks to AVST’s Octel TUI emulation, there was no retraining at all – it was an extremely smooth process for our faculty and staff. This was by far the easiest conversion I have ever made.”

Secondly, CallXpress is also a leader in speech capabilities. Aims is currently using the speech-driven directory which has reduced their inbound call traffic by 30 percent! In addition, CallXpress offers a unified messaging solution that is best-in-class. Unifying their messaging has greatly increased productivity and efficiency.

Lastly, CallXpress supports a mixed telephony environment made up of Avaya IP and digital systems across six locations. CallXpress enabled Aims to centralize administrative functions while also helping to protect against critical network failures.

AVST’s CallXpress has been deployed by more than 1,000 educational institutions. With all this experience and productivity features one could say that AVST is the “guru” of upgrading legacy voicemail systems to next generation UC solutions. So, let us help you aim your communications goals in the right direction by upgrading to CallXpress today. Read more about Aims transition to CallXpress here.

Compliance

Existing Federal and State regulations regarding the retention and storage of electronic information means that it is critical to pay close attention to corporate compliance issues when considering the various UM solution architectures.

AVST’s Recommendation: Consult with your corporate compliance officer or legal counsel to ensure you pick the UM architecture that best meets your organization’s compliance requirements.

Confidentiality

Preventing the external distribution of confidential corporate voice, e-mail and fax messages is, in many cases, as critical a consideration as compliance when evaluating UM solutions.

AVST’s Recommendation: Thoroughly understand your organization’s requirements for protecting the confidentiality of corporate data to ensure you select the correct UM architecture for your business.

Configuration

Selecting a UM solution that has the architectural flexibility to future proof your investment is another critical consideration. Do you want to store your messages on the email server or not? AVST uniquely offers four different architectural options in its Unified Messaging solution to ensure your organization has the maximum deployment flexibility today and, just as importantly, the ability to change the configuration of your UM solution, on a per user basis.

AVST’s Recommendation: Attend an AVST webinar on Unified Messaging to ensure that you fully understand the implications of deploying every different UM architecture.

Capability

Understanding the capabilities of each Unified Messaging solution you are evaluating is another critical consideration. What are the features and flexibility of the solution? Does it meet the requirements of your users that will be accessing the solution via the desktop, web, phone and/or mobile device? Can you deploy different feature sets for different users?

AVST’s Recommendation: Click here for the Unified Messaging checklist to ensure that the Unified Messaging solutions you are evaluating have the features and flexibility your organization demands.

Cost

Understanding the total cost of ownership (TCO) for each Unified Messaging solution you are evaluating is another key consideration. Some questions to consider (and quantify) are:

Do I have to buy licenses for all employees in my organization?

How much will it cost me to add additional users in the future?

How much is the annual maintenance?

What additional hardware and software is required to deploy?

Do I need to upgrade or replace my groupware solution to get UM?

Will the UM solution integrate with my existing and future telephony infrastructure?

How much additional cost is involved if I decide to switch groupware solutions in the future?

How much will it cost to implement the UM solution?

AVST’s Recommendation: Develop a clear set of pricing, configuration and support guidelines and apply it to each UM solution you are evaluating. Consider a five year TCO timeframe to ensure that you have the whole picture.

So, when you’re deciding on a UM solution for your organization, remember the five C’s: compliance, confidentiality, configuration, capability and cost. Happy hunting!

Users of CallXpress 8 now have the option to manage the profiles for SMS notification and simple unified messaging separately.  In the following 5 minute video, Pat Haney demonstrates how to easily edit the default XML message templates found on the CallXpress server to make them appropriate to your organization.

CallXpress is the most flexible Unified Messaging (UM) system on the market today. It offers customers complete flexibility in how they wish to deploy and use UM. Unlike all other competing products, CallXpress allows users to deploy any type and mix of UM on a system, as well as allowing users to mix UM and traditional voicemail users on the same system. CallXpress supports both of the popular UM architecture types: Server-based UM and Client-based UM.

CallXpress was the very first product to offer Unified Messaging (UM) solutions to customers and most recently took the top spot for the most complete UM solution on the market today when evaluated against other UM providers. 

If you want to know what your real UM options are, take a look at some of the related articles posted below to learn more about UM from the experts at AVST.

 Related Articles:

• Know Your Options: Understanding Your Unified Messaging Choices whitepaper
• The 5 C’s (Considerations) for Unified Messaging blog post
• Defining the Right Path to Unified Messaging – blog post part 1
• Defining the Right Path to Unified Messaging – blog post part 2
• Unified Messaging Resource Center

• With GotVoice®, CallXpress users can receive their voice messages in text form on their mobile device or their computer. Now you are able to quickly view the content of your voicemail messages when access to audio is prohibited or a challenge to access.

• As regulatory compliance requirements become a bigger issue for enterprises around the globe, we are providing  you a solution that ensures voicemail messages can be archived, retained and discoverable as needed.  Message archive functionality is now available for CallXpress through integration with Symantec Enterprise Vault, provided by Vault Solutions’ Archive Accelerator product.

• AVST was ranked #1 for the most complete Unified Messaging (UM) solution on the market today, evaluated against 16 other UM providers including Avaya, Microsoft, Cisco and Nortel.
• AVST is a Leader in Gartner’s report for Voicemail, UM, Notification, and Personal Assistant. (2007 Gartner Inc. “A Framework for Unified Communications”)

• If documents are key to your business, then RightFax is the right solution for you. RightFax together with CallXpress brings increased efficiency, flexibility and security to faxing and electronic document delivery.

• NotifyXpress™, a broadcast notification add-on to CallXpress, enables proactive, cost-effective outbound customer communications.
• Examples are Appointment reminders, School Notifications, Emergency Message Notification, Sales Follow up, and Status of Services (e.g. flight delay, payment due)

• ScheduleXpress is an ancillary application used to augment the Extension Specific Processing (ESP) capabilities of CallXpress, giving administrator the ability to create sophisticated personal and departmental menus as well as interactive audio menu applications for specific extensions based on time and date.
• To learn more about “Customizing Your Auto-Attendant with ScheduleXpress“, view this one-hour archived webinar.

• Example include Bank by Phone, Automatic Financial Reporting, Campus Directory, Store Locator and more, providing your customer information 24X7.

• AVST offers self-paced, interactive, on-demand online training courses for end user administrators.
• End user documentation and an on-line tutorial on using CallXpress are available on the AVST website.

• The AVST Community is all about providing end users with valuable resources and a gathering place where they can share and exchange ideas, ask questions, and provide solutions to one another.
• This social network is home to the CallXpress User Group, CallXpress User Forum, AVST Blogs and the AVST Customer Advocate Program.
• The CallXpress User Forum is an online social network for CallXpress User Group members hosted by AVST.  Membership is FREE for all CallXpress users with valid XpressCare® contracts.

• 2009 Programs
  • 0% lease up to 36 months on CallXpress purchases over $10K
  • 0% FMV lease on combined CallXpress purchase with other telecom equipment
  • CallXpress Rental Program

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.

Related Articles:

• Defining the Right Path to Unified Messaging – blog post part 1
• Unified Messaging Resource Center
• Know Your Options: Understanding Your Unified Messaging choices

Thank you to everyone who took the time to complete our brief online Unified Messaging survey. We plan to incorporate these type of surveys into our community on a regular basis so we can continue to monitor how you, OUR CALLXPRESS CUSTOMERS, are actually using AVST products and services.

First things first…

Congratulations to the drawing winner -
Rich VanDyke, Gordon Food Service !

Rich won an 8GB Apple iPod Touch simply for
completing the online survey by October 27th!

The reason for conducting the survey was so we could learn more about how Unified Messaging is being delpoyed in our customers’ organizations. Our intent is to use the feedback we received to not only guarantee that we continue to design and deliver the most complete Unified Messaging solution on the market but also ensure we continue to meet our customers’ emerging communication requirements. With that said, here is a summary of the survey results:

74% of survey participants were aware at time of purchase that CallXpress ships with 50 FREE UM licenses

74% of survey participants have deployed any/all of their FREE UM seats

47% of survey participants have already purchased additional UM licenses for CallXpress

68% of survey participants are planning to deploy additional UM licenses in the future

For those of you who have deployed Unified Messaging at your orgainization, I’d love to hear from you and I’m sure your peers would also like to hear about your implementation of Unified Messaging with CallXpress. Post a comment below and tell us how many seats you’ve deployed, what you’re using it for, and how your users feel about it!

Related Links:

• Unified Messaging: Productivity Payoff Today – VoiceCon webinar
• Defining the Right Path to Unified Messaging – webinar
• Four Flavors of Unified Messaging – webinar
• The 5 C’s for Unified Messaging
• Unified Messaging Time Saving Study

AVST isn’t here to hand out legal advice on this issue. That’s what lawyers are for. However, AVST does spend a lot of time determining what we can provide within our products to help our customers solve these types of issues. In this case, we have elected to integrate with software designed for this purpose.

There are many products designed to help companies meet their compliance obligations. One such product is Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, the industry leader in e-mail and content archiving. Message archiving is already a common practice with e-mail systems. When companies deploy unified messaging (UM) in a server-based configuration, these archives can also include voicemail. However, many customers don’t deploy UM in this manner, or will want or need to archive voicemail with unique retention policies, separate from e-mail. To that end, AVST has worked with Vault Solutions to provide message archive functionality through integration with Symantec Enterprise Vault. The integration is provided by Vault Solutions’ Archive Accelerator product. With this combination, CallXpress voice messages are stored in the “vault” for future access.

To learn more about Archive Accelerator and support for CallXpress message archiving, contact Rick Ganis at rick@vault-solutions.com.

Related Articles:

• Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)
• The Impact of the New FRCP Amendments on Your Business – An Osterman Research White Paper