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Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications




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Slide 1 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

Thank you, I'd like also to extend my welcome. It's difficult take time out of your busy day but I think it's equally difficult to plan your communications future with what's going on out there both in your environment and certainly in the industry in general. So what we thought we'd do today is spend a little time not completely focused on product capabilities but talking a little bit about the strategy you'll deploy as you move from your environment today, which for most of you is probably a somewhat older TDM type infrastructure, an older data infrastructure and moving forward, to try to tie all this together that that's what we're looking at doing here with unified communications.

Slide 2 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

Fortunately this is a very important area for a lot of people and as a result there's a lot of different groups that study this and kind of take a look at what's going on out there in the market and talk about what's possible and what approach you might want to take and one of these groups certainly in our market-space the leading group is Gartner. Gartner last year did a study called Critical Capabilities for Corporate Telephony. The focus of this study is what does it take for an enterprise, whether it's a high education enterprise, medical, or a general enterprise, to go from where they are today to where they want to be in three to five years. There are a lot of changes out there in terms of what's available and these tools diffidently have an impact on how you do business and they can prove how you do business. I think the trick is how do you generate enough time to really study them all. So, there are lots of companies like us that are out there trying to be helpful to present this information.

This particular study broke down into eight areas- the things you should look at as you look at potential applications and solutions. You notice that these aren‘t really about the features you should look at; this is a much higher level view. I think the concept here is if I'm going to buy a piece of my infrastructure I'm going to upgrade one piece of my infrastructure that's going to be part of a unified communications infrastructure when all is said and done. Besides the functionality of the application, which most of you could look at without a problem, what other issues do I want to make sure I address. This is a list of the ones where going to sort of look at as we go through here, and these have more to do with how that one piece you would look at upgrading is going to fit in to the infrastructure in general both as you start this migration and in the end when you have all the components in place. The last thing you want to do is end up with an infrastructure that when you're all set and done you don't have the kind of conductivity that you need. So we're going to look in our space, in the unified communications space, for you what kind of things you need to be looking at.

Slide 3 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

So we'll start with architecture. Architecture is sort of the most boring piece. Not that many generations of applications ago… the only people that worried about the architecture were the people deploying it. From the user's point of view it was just a mystery that in the back there was an application running and did what they needed. While that's still true, now the architecture is more important because the architecture is the first key element that has to do with how you could integrate any particular solution with another solution in your environment. In our case, if we're talking about the CallXpress product, we're certainly about talking putting it in your local area network environment, attaching it to your groupware perhaps for unified messaging, looking at some of your other enterprise applications for data access, and one step beyond that your actual physical architecture has to take into account how it gets deployed. It used to be fairly straightforward at least for a voicemail product; it ran on a server and it sat back in your phone room next to your phone system. Now, its considerably more complex than that, the goal of course in deploying this deployment, the architecture piece, is mostly about cost and integration. The cost piece has to do with the administration, as well as the upfront cost, and the integration peace has to do with not only with what can it connect to but how easy is going to be to maintain those system.

CallXpress is a little unique in product space in that it gives you more choices. More choices probably make sense with the last of the independent providers of this kind of application of any size and, as a result, our market goals tend to be broader than our competition. Most of our competition is owned by a switch vendor center, so they tend to specialize within one environment and we sort of had a little wider view than that. If you happen to be a sight that has multiple locations then the ability to deploy a CallXpress gets a little more complex, as do all your apps, whether you want to centralize it, as you probably centralized you email and groupware infrastructure, or distribute it so that the individual elements are out at site where you're individual buildings are. And, in the end, probably what you'll look at the some sort of mixed environment. CallXpress is unique in that it can be deployed on a single server or on up to twenty one different servers and those servers can go where they need to go depending on your environment and what you're trying to accomplish. We'll talk about this distributed architecture and these capabilities as we look at some of these other pieces because this key architect piece in CallXpress 8 is really what lets us get into all these other areas in terms of creating the kind of functionality that's going to meet this list of requirements.

Slide 4 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

So we'll start with architecture, take that architecture, and we'll move to the first piece that the architecture gives us which is scalability. As you look at buying new solutions and upgrading existing solutions, scalability seems to be fairly small concern. You know what you have today you have an idea what you need going forward but at the same time you want to make sure that in the future, where there is likely to be changes, you want to make sure you get a product that will take you foreyard without suddenly have backed yourself into a corner.

In the case of CallXpress that's very simple, actually, we start at four ports can go up to three hundred eighty four ports which all called processing systems are pretty much going to do for any single site. Even as we start looking at the architecture where we centralize your sites, our ability to have twenty different call servers connected to different PBX's in different buildings allows us to scale from the smallest campus up to the largest kind of group campus. Up to forty thousand users, twenty thousand of those can be unified message users so we're not too worried in the scalability peace in terms of our ability to meet your needs, we're mostly concerned that as you evaluate going forward that you make sure you pick the product that, while it fits what you're really looking for today, also lets you move forward. All of these pieces are really about the changes you're looking at evaluating today and making sure you take into concern the different pieces that might change in the future.

Slide 5 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

The next thing the architecture gives us is a new peace which is high availability. Now, high reliability has been around in our industry for years. When you buy a new phone or a voicemail your expectations are that it never breaks, that it reaches that famous five-nine of availability up time, which was easy to do in the old telephony world because that was a closed environment. The phone system and voicemail is hooked together and pretty much everything else was excluded. And now as we move forward with unified communications, both the telephony and call processing component tend much more open. They're sitting on your local area network, parts of them are functioning out across your firewall out onto the internet, and the ability to have something go wrong has really increased.

So, yes we still want high reliability and we do that with raid drives and highly stable platforms but we also need to look at what happened if a component does fail. It's now possible in the world for something to get through your firewall and damage some or your infrastructure. So most of you and most of your enterprise critical systems have a strategy that says “what do I do if something fails”. So, our new architecture lets us address this as well. In a CallXpress environment, you can deploy a server (a single physical server) with all of our functionality on it and have a voicemail very similar to what you have now or in the past, we also have the ability to spread the application across multiple survivable component. So if you look down here in the high availability section there, what I've done is deployed a CallXpress with a system or controls server and two call servers. So instead of a single forty-eight port voicemail, this would be two twenty four port call servers controlled by a system server and that's actually a single functioning voice mail. Any user can call into either call server and get their messages, any call can come into either call server and leave a message for a user, a user can move from one building to anther each served from a different call server and still have integrated voicemail. It's a completely integrated application but by deploying it across multiple components I've now created a situation where if something does happen, if something goes wrong with one of the call servers, the other call server remains and can take the traffic. There will be a reduction in capacity, but basically you're still in business.

Now if the system server fails, that's actually the centralized depository for messages. The call servers are highly survivable they'll continue to just answer the phone, play all the applications, and record messages. The only thing they can't do is get to the messages since they were stored on the server that's now down. When the server is fixed and comes back up everything synchronizes and we're back in business. Up to that much high availability simply comes from deploying it on multiple components; there's no specific piece of software there we've talked about.

To take it a step further, we can add a pop standby backup server to the system server. This server sits next to the system server and it's in passive mode, but its monitoring the active server and every bit of information to the drive on the active server is written to the drive of the passive server. If something goes wrong with the active server or if the maintenance routines on the passive servers decide it's in trouble it gets shut down and the backup server becomes the active server. It takes over usually in less than a minute. Keep in mind since the call servers are survivable; even during this switch over you don't lose calls in progress or anything else. Now you're running on the backup server which has become the active server, alarms go out, someone comes along and repairs your server, and you move back to fully high available mode. What this does is basically take over the IP address when it needs to take over the functions. For many people that's enough in the way of high availability.

Some people, particularly people with multiple sites, have a tendency to want some sort of geographic redundancy for their critical systems. In other words, I have four main buildings if I lose an entire building I need to be able to not only have the other buildings continue but I need to have the ability to switch that traffic and those work pieces of functionality over to my remaining buildings. For disaster recovery, we support a third system server in a different physical location and this one (much like the passive server) is constantly updated it has a complete and functional copy of everything including the messages. Basically, if the site is lost and if you take a look at that high availability site let's say the server room flooded or some sort of disaster like that, the administrator goes to the system server for disaster recovery, clicks on one button, and it now takes over. It basically modifies the different pieces in the DNS table such that all the call servers that are remaining, that can be communicated with, now hone in on this server and this server carries on. This is not something trivial for a five minute failure; this is something that you tend to do knowing that you have some sort of long-term failure you need to deal with. When the time comes, you go ahead and switch back and the messages move back and you're back in business again.

So high reliability has always been there and now we add to that that high availability capabilities from something simple like multiple call servers going all the way through to a full geographic redundancy type situation. Now in this picture I showed two call servers as if they were in the same building and then the third one in another building. You need to keep in mind that those twenty call servers that are available can go anywhere, well relatively anywhere. They can go two or three and a single building, two or three across the street in another building, two or three in a different city, two or three in a different state, or whatever you need in terms of tying your system together. The call servers are highly portable as long as you have standard voice over IP quality connections on your data circuits, you can put these call servers anywhere. So, if you ended up with a situation where you have four buildings, two call servers in each building, the geographic redundancy piece becomes more important because when you lose one building by having a geographically separate systems server you're actually able to keep the other three buildings up and functioning completely. So high availability option… Not only are they something you're probably looking at today but keep in mind the solution you make is going to determine what is available to you in the area of high availability. If you're worried about your phones being highly available and your system groupware (whether you're in notes house or exchange house) If you're taking the care to do all that then you probably should be looking at your call processing and messaging piece as well.

Slide 6 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

The next piece we look at it the actual integration capability. How well can the system that you choose today actually look at the other things that are going on? Now, today the obvious piece I think for most of us is the voicemail hooks to the phone system and that's an area where we've been working for twenty five years. We're certainly the leader in telephony integrations today. We do all the major phone systems and most of the older phone systems still, the older TDM type interfaces, but we also have interfaces using IP technology to the newer systems. The fact that we connect to all these different phone systems is really only of interest to you as long as we connect to yours, which I'm sure we do, but also keep in mind that as things change you want to make sure the solution you pick today will allow you the flexibility to connect to perhaps a replacement IP PBX in the future. Or, if you tie together new systems if you acquire a new building or another university you tie them together. The ability for your system you choose today to hook to any environment is something you want to consider.

The next thing we look at, certainly in our product space, is connection to the email stores. Unified messaging is a fairly popular piece with our product and unified messaging is something we've been doing since 1991. We have the most flexible unified messaging out there and there are a couple of things that are good to know about our product if you're evaluating this part of the infrastructure. One is we connect to pretty much any email system, we certainly do exchange and notes and GroupWise, but we also do send mail and any IMAP 4 kind of email environment (basically and IMAP 4 client) and we also do any type of email. One of the things that is kind of interesting to people today is not only the functionality that you get in unified messaging but there is concern over the message store. There's HIPAA in the medical industry, there's FIRPA that effect probably some of you, and the privacy act for students. There are conditions were you have to understand what unified message is doing with those messages and be able to control that based on your individual circumstance. The great thing about the CallXpress product is it does unified messaging in any of the ways it can be done. We can store the messages on our system and you can get to them in email. We can put them in the email server and you can get to them through email. We can put them out and you can get them through a web connection. We can push out a copy to some off site email store. We can connect cloud email systems like Google mail. So whatever your environment is, we not only have that covered today but if you were to change, and I know changing out groupware packages is no trivial process and no one really wants to think about it, but if you were to change today, let's say you're a GroupWise shop that eventually upgrade to exchange, it's good to know that it's just a program change in CallXpress to connect to that other store.

Beyond connecting to the groupware, there's a lot of interesting unified communications in connecting to other business applications. Whether that's a student registration system or a records system or an order entry system, we offer a number of tools that let us create custom applications so you can use your call processing piece to connect to your other enterprise applications. We offer UC connect, which is our integrated IDR package. This is actually software that runs on the CallXpress platform and now CallXpress, as well as being a voice messaging/ unified messaging system, can host custom IDR applications which means you can have a developer write an application were a user calls in, enters their student number, request a fax or an email or even a voicemail of their latest grades statistics. So allot of custom type functionality. We also offer a .net developer platform, a SOAP API, where if you have applications that are running on your desktop, maybe for a small call center, call center overflows to voicemail rather than require than requiring the agents to dial into voice mail, you can actually the SOAP interface to bring those messages out of that overflow and display them in a client application and let them play them for the client. So its custom functionality made easy. You basically put these two products together and you can write almost any kind of custom application that leverages the full functionality of the CallXpress platform. The last category is “presence”. This is a big, big issue in industries today. No one has really quite defined it completely everyone talks about desktop presence, like with instant messaging, we have tendency to have a longer view on presence but what we can do with these custom tools is connect your call processing functionality to your presence engine. So, you can make changes in your application based on present status whether that present status is IBM same time, office communicator, any one of the standards based ones. There's now the ability to extend that as well using this interoperability that comes on this CallXpress platform.

Slide 7 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

Mobility would be the next big category everyone's concerned with mobility already. Some of it grows and gets more important and certainly by industry it's different but the fact is there are large categories of workers who really don't spend the bulk of their time sitting at their desk working. They have a need to be in different locations. And whether that's someone who is always out and working, someone who travels, someone who spent half of their day in another building taking care of things. The ability to support a mobile employee as effectively as you do one that's tethered to a desk on a regular basis is very important. You already have some tools that can extend this but the issue really becomes one of how productive are they when they leave.

If you're an average desk worker, you kind of tend to come in the morning, turn on your computer, get into your groupware package, and you immediately look in your email you do a triage to find out important message, what requires your attention immediately, you look in your calendar and see what your day looks like. Maybe based on an email message you call a co-worker, maybe set up another meeting or gather some information and email back to somebody to clear one of your messages. That knowledge worker loop is very traditional for desktop workers. Triage your information, find out what's important, solve that issue, and rinse and repeat for the remainder of the day. Great way to work, we're all pretty productive with that. Typically at our desk we have a good set of tools the issue becomes when we leave our desk we don't have a good set of tools. Yes, we all probably have a mobile phone and some of us get our emails on the mobile phone and we can see our calendar. But it's still difficult to do that sort of knowledge worker loop.

What we've done is we've added module, an optional module, to CallXpress called personal assistant which does that piece. It actually extends out the functionality the calendar and the contact and to interactive call screening you can't duplicate the way you work at your desk. And this is productive time that can be done from a speech interface as well. And when you're doing it from a speech interface, what we've done, not only done, is extend the mobility but we've given you the method to turn non-productive time, time behind the wheel when you're driving, into productive time. In my case, every day I climb into my car in the morning, I put my Bluetooth headset on, and as I'm pulling out of the driveway I call into the CallXpress system, CallXpress says “hello, what can I do for you”, I say “what are my appointments for today?”, I'll read my calendar and I get a idea of what's going on, then I say get my new email, and I listen to my email. Maybe the first one is something I can handle later so I skip it. The next one's a message from one of my contacts on the east coast and so I choose to call them and resolve that issue and I delete that email and move on and the next one is from my manager saying we need to resolve an issue so I go ahead into my calendar using speech command, I create an appointment, I invite my manager and I invite two people from my contacts. Basically, by the time I've done my forty five-minute drive to work, that forty five minutes has been very productive time and I've duplicated what I normally have to do after my first cup of coffee. I'm sitting at my desk for that first forty five minutes so personal assistant partially is about a virtual desktop. The second thing personal assistant is about is presence and availability.

The other issue you have when you're away from your desk, when you're mobile, is you're not as easy to find and yes we all have mobile phones and most people can have mobile phone number although giving it out is granting perpetual access for people to call you. So, our personal assistant piece let's you create a schedule that says based on the time of day, here are all my devices: I have my desktop phone, I have a phone in the lab, I have my mobile phone and I have my home phone number. I then go in and create call lists and the call list says when I'm at work, the most typical patterns would be try me first at my desk, then try me in the lab, and then try me on my mobile phone. And then I have one that's mobile that says first try me on my mobile, and then try me on my personal mobile. And then you have another list for the weekends that says try me at home then try me on my personal mobile. I then take those lists and put them into a calendar and I've now sort of granted access for callers to me regardless of whether I'm at my desk or not. Now my schedule might change, and it does quite frequently, so I might have my schedule that says from one o'clock to four in the afternoon use my at work schedule and one thirty in the afternoon my boss asks me to go out on an appointment with him and as I'm walking out the door I call into the system and I say change availability to mobile and now I've overridden my schedule when people call me while I'm sitting in the car driving up to that appointment. I can still get my incoming calls. As I walk into that meeting I can go change the availability to do not disturb so I don't get bothered when I'm in the meeting and then I reverse that process as I head back. So if you think of the ability to make yourself highly available through this application that's kind of how we approach the availability piece. Now since you're so highly available, we also add some very powerful interactive call screening. So, when I answer a call it might say something like “you have a call from Bob Smith say accept call, reject call, acknowledge or transfer”. If I accept the call, were connected and that's pretty straightforward. If I reject the call, the call goes to my other call handling options which might be a menu of choices for that person or it might be simply taking a message. If I say acknowledge it allows me to record a brief acknowledgement message to that person and basically saying “Hi I'm going to meet all call you back in twenty minutes”. And if I say transfer, it lets me transfer that call. So what I've done is I've made myself more available but I've also given myself more powerful tools that decide whether that interruption more or less important than what I'm currently doing. And all these tools are based on integration to the other things in your area” integration to your groupware package, to your telephone system, to your mobile devices. Once you're mobile, the ability to tie all that together still remains a pretty powerful piece of what you want to be looking for.

Slide 8 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

Despite the fact that you know most of our presentations tend to have all the flashy fun end speech applications because they make such good demos. One of the most important pieces that I think everyone concerns themselves with as they look at implementing new solutions and upgrading their environment is the ongoing cost of that solution. This always fierce battle is people buy new solutions, but intelligent administrators they're going to be looking at what the ongoing cost are to deploy this technology and as we talk about unifying your communications environment, the holy grail would be to have a single administration interface for everything in your enterprise and that's just really not there yet we're getting closer there is various integrated directory structures but really that overall easy way of doing everything not quite there yet. But what you do want to evaluate is the ability to lower those cost going forward. What do I have to do to support this system and what's it going to cost me day to day to do that.

There are a number of things you want to be looking at such as the administration interface itself. We have a very powerful and intuitive interface. If you have one CallXpress system you go into that interface they can you can make all the changes to the system from that interface. It's a windows client you can load it anywhere you want on your WAN or LAN or run it from home through the firewall, whatever you want to do and you can have as many instances of that installed and running. So, you can actually have ten people that administered the system. Each of those accounts can also be set up with a different set of functionality. So you can have three or four people but all they can really do is make small changes to subscriber mailboxes. So they can reset locked mailboxes and change passwords and the small kind of ground clutter that comes to your help desk can be handled by them- this requires less training and lowers the cost. And then a few other people can have a higher level functionality. These are the people we spend the money and the time training and they can actually manage the application, add new mailboxes and do other things.

If you happen to have more than one CallXpress system, you actually can use that same client to maintain multiple CallXpress systems as if they're one. So if I have three systems throughout the campuses in my city, I could tie them together and when I open up my administration console and look at subscriber mailboxes, I would actually see actually see all of the subscriber mailboxes from all of those systems. What that would mean would be I could say that I had forty mailboxes in the administration Group and they're scattered across my three systems I could right click and highlight them and maybe change their message retention from fifteen days to thirty with a single command treating it as if it is one system. By using classes of service I greatly reduced the kind of time that I need, most people and most systems are capable of setting that up. Now working the systems together both for administration and exchange of messaging is something you want to look at depending on what your structure ends up being.

We also support some other tools that make it a little easier to maintain the system. If you're somebody that's using active directory to create and maintain your users we have an MMC snap in that goes on the active directory client and when you create a new mailbox it will automatically create a CallXpress mailbox and when you actually want to change a mailbox it has to do all that through active directly. We don't store anything in active directory, we don't modify the schema, but we do let you have that productivity gain from using that single client to maintain your users both out on your network and in email and in the CallXpress system as well. Then we have a wide set of tools for archiving, message retention, searching among message; all those kind of things that are kind of part of a system administration that you don't actually consider on a day to day basis. But, it's very important to make sure you have those tools as you go in to evaluating these systems. We have SNMP monitoring as well for those who might be maintaining your infrastructure using SNMP. We have the all the pieces for that. We also have our own programs that run on CallXpress and use email alert to basically to let you know if there's something about your system. You can define parameters that say “when my memory usage on my system gets at ninety percent state there now that something that shouldn't happen and you need to notify the administrators via email.

There are also a number of third-party products that allow you to administer your PBX and the CallXpress system from a single window. Just like how active directory lets you do your email and groupware from a window, there are products that let you do your PBX as well. Depending on your environment, we certainly could talk about those. So the whole goal in the efficient management piece is to make it as easy as possible and the ability to push off lower end functions to administrators by having multiple accounts is a popular alternative we see people take. Also, we have a web user client that lets the users themselves do a lot of the simple changes to their mailbox. They can change their message notification numbers. They can change their security codes, greeting, and things like that. And doing it over a web makes it easier therefore they call into the help desk allot less. And that's also a tool to increase the efficiency of your group because a lot of very, very simple things can actually be handled by the users themselves. So efficient management is not only for the system itself, but looking at how you can kind of gain inefficiencies by tying the management of this product together with the management of other products that you're going to evaluate as well.

Slide 9 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

Open standard support has always been a part of who we are. We're pretty lucky, I think, in that from day one we have a system based on open standards. We've never had a proprietary product. This had to do with the time when we came into the market. So we always have an open operating system. We've always had industry standard cards and protocols and everything else and that gives us big advantages. Part of the interoperability we talked about when it with PBXs comes from the fact that since we have these open standards we get to use all sorts of software and hardware made by other people to increase the conductivity for our product. So when we had to integrations (RTP) we could go out and license the leading products there. When we had to do integrations using the protocols for the integrations, all of that was available to us and that interoperability became easy because of the platform we used; and the same thing with email.

CallXpress runs on a windows server so having the tools to connect to other groupware and email package; that's all made easily available to us with third party products. And then the extensibility we talk about again here. If we don't connect your environment in the way we need to, we have the tools to extend what CallXpress can do with both the IVR package, the UC connect package, and with the third party SOAP package as well. It's interesting we don't really consider ourselves a player in the stand alone IVR market. You certainly could buy CallXpress and build a bank balance by phone kind of application or prescription refill application. But if you're really looking a large stand alone IVR application they're companies that specialize in that and they'd probably be more suited to your needs. Once you have a CallXpress, for very little money you can add the UC connect IVR package on and now there's just dozens of little things that come up, little things your system can't do I or things you're having a problem with in one of your particular departments that can be easily solved by writing these applications. Most customers, most large customers, have the ability to create these themselves. Our development environment, in both of these cases, is Microsoft visual studio so if you want to use C-sharp, C-plus plus, Visual Basic, or Java or whatever line you want to use our tools are very open and they let you take whatever piece you want and use the tools and the technologies you're familiar with to extend that functionality. So you adapt very, very well into your environment as it is today but that extra little piece to extend that is also available.

Slide 10 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

Then the last of these categories is how you deal with multi site locations. Now, multisite locations are interesting. They can be a single campus with eight buildings all running off one integrated phone system, one integrated group mail, and one integrated network. They can be multiple buildings each distributed with their own phone system all on a single campus. There can be campuses in different towns or different states. You can have a campus with five buildings and then across town you can have an adult campus in another building that is separate from the campus. For all of those, there is a specific set of tools that lets you, from our point of view, treat that the way you want. You certainly could have a distributed system. CallXpress going from four to three hundred eight four ports means if you really felt the best way that was to put a separate stand alone system somewhere, you can't do that, and then you can go ahead and network that together to CallXpress for maintenance purposes and for messaging purposes.

If you have multiple buildings with multiple systems you, might choose to put a single CallXpress in and put gateways, either our call servers or the dialogic media gateways, out at those different buildings connecting to those phone systems. So leaving the phone system separate but still tying it all together to a single integrated messaging system. So the choice is completely up to you. We spent a lot of time in the sales process with any customer with multi site locations in a conference room with a white board drawing it out make sure you understand all of those tools you have. The other things from multiple sites that kind tend to pop up, on the productivity side, we just have a wide set of tools that helps you out. We talked about UCConnect which can be used to do almost anything including we have a number of customers that built alarm access points. They have multiple buildings and when somebody walks up to their door there's a phone, it comes off hook, it rings into an application, they put in their employee ID number and the monthly pass code, and it either activates the door strike or it rings the correct person or whatever needs to be done. We have a wide set of preconfigured applications like NotifyXpress that runs and it actually is used to create outgoing call campaigns. So if you have an application where, let's say, every Thursday you have a couple of people that sit in a room with telephones make outgoing calls confirming the people that are supposed to show up to a function on Saturday. That can all be automated with NotifyXpress. You extract that information into a text file, you record the appropriate greeting, and then you set CallXpress to work. Perhaps at the end of the day when the ports are all free, those CallXpress ports will now come off hook, call those people, deliver that information, gather information, etc. So, all those tools just become much easier to deploy in a multi-site location with CallXpress because of its ability to centralize both the usage and the maintenance of those functions.

And then the last piece for multiple site, we're pretty good about how we license that make these choices very easy for example you don't buy everything you just buy what you want so if you don't want UCConnect because you're not going to build custom applications, then you don't buy it. If you don't want a speech interface, then you don't have to pay for the speech interface; just buy the pieces you want. We have alternate telephone user interfaces so we can emulate the Octel, Aria, the Intuity, and the Meridian mail systems. And basically, that's a feature where if you don't need to do that then you don't buy those. And then the interoperability pieces such as integration are all from a menu and you simply pick the pieces you want. Also, our licensing is a little unique in that we don't license users. We license ports and obviously the more users you have the more ports you need so it's just a change in licensing it's not like we're leaving money on the table, but that does mean if all a sudden you have to add 10 users because you opened up an annex somewhere, your actually in pretty good shape you simply add those users. At the point where you ports get busy, yes you do have to come back and buy some more ports but users are free.

Now, unified messaging licenses are on a per user license; but for basic voicemail, there is no charge for that. So what that means, if you have a structure that's complex, it's fairly easy for people with a single building, a thousand users, one phone system, it's pretty easy to sit down with them and figure out what they need to do. If you have a more complex enterprise layout where you have multiple buildings, multiple campuses, multiple phone systems, or even multiple groupwear instances we have a number of people that have bought our system because they have three exchange server environments all in different domains and they wanted a single integrated system and no one else can do that. So, definitely you want to take into account the midsize business support and as it gets into multiple locations, it gets much, much more difficult and you'll want to spend a little more time looking it over, making sure you understand all of your choices.

Slide 11 (Eight Critical Capabilities for Building Your Campus Communications)

One of the great thing about our product when it comes to all of this is the basic architecture that we came up with day one, in our earliest days, we were actually founded by a number of gentleman that came out of an IT department and felt that rather than buy separate IVR platform and a separate voicemail platform and a separate fax server, that there was good justification to build a multi application platform so you could share the expensive resources like the card, and the processor, and memory, and all that and then you could put on that the appropriate applications. So that's what we did in our very first version of the product and what we discovered very early on is what an application should not do is connect directly to anything in the outside world. If our Unified Messaging connected directly to exchange, then every time a version of exchange changed, you would have to buy something new for us to change. So instead, we run all of our connections through an interoperability layer and that means we can connect to any phone system because we have the integration piece that we simply add in and indeed multiple phone systems. A single CallXpress can connect up to ten different types of phone systems all on the same platform because of this interoperability layer. It also made it much easier for us to get into the unified messaging market because connecting to email is now done with interoperability connectors. So that when I change the functionality of my basic application, I don't have to change anything on the outside. I don't have to worry about whether it works because interoperability layer takes care of that. And as we move forward, that's how we're doing it with business application conductivity and the new presence interface that were working on as well. In the next year you'll see us actually package, as part of the product, conductivity to the popular presence engine so that you can control that scheduling we talked about directly from your OCS or same time client and, likewise, our telephony presence will be able to be triggered off of your Groupware calendar. All of that becomes much easier when you do it in this kind of mode with inoperability.

The last piece here is just sort of a wrap up. It was much easier ten years ago, fifteen years ago to replace a voicemail system or a telephone system or an email system because they were stand alone silos and basically you could bring the top three contenders in, you could put them through a bake off, you could evaluate the systems, you could have them talk about what they would do in your environment and then you make your choice. In today's world it's much more complicated than that both because the solution have to interact to be effective. There's so much functionality that you are going to want today and in the near future that is completely based on integration between these solutions but also the pace of change is different. You are changing out things much faster than you used to and all of this technology has to work and play well together for you to get the maximum benefit from unified communications. So, the solution here is, you know, pay attention to what Gartner said and you know how to do the basic preparing for a new solution. You just want to extend that out a little bit. Think in advance on what else is important, how that conductivity is something you want to concern yourself with for today (your environment today) but also going forward while it's impossible to know what you're going to do in the next year or five years you still want to make sure you have the flexibility not to lock yourself in.

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