EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In today's intensely competitive business environment, companies need to be able to respond quickly to customer needs. Workers need a simple, single source for all of their business communications (e-mail, fax or voice messages) from any location, using a variety of communication devices. AVST introduced a version of CallXpress® specially designed to extend its award-winning product to integrate with IBM Lotus® Domino™ Unified Communications Services. This enhanced version of CallXpress provides an efficient, cost effective unified communications (UC) product, allowing current customers to add UC services by leveraging their existing IBM Lotus Domino installations.

This white paper is intended as a guide for companies looking to implement a UC solution that seamlessly integrates with IBM's Lotus Domino Server. CallXpress and Domino UC Services take into account the needs of users, IT administrators and business managers by providing the most complete, seamlessly integrated, scalable and reliable enterprise UC product for the Domino server available today.

The following are important considerations when considering a UC solution for the Domino platform:

AVST continues its lead as a world class UC solutions provider with more than two decades of leadership in speech and messaging technology.

CallXpress supports integration with the largest number of phone systems (more than 250 systems), supporting analog, digital or VOIP phone systems including organizations with heterogeneous phone systems.

Installation of Domino Unified Communications Services requires no significant changes to the underlying Domino or Lotus Notes® products currently installed (for example, no significant changes occur to default or customized Notes template objects or extensions). All changes are additions and new templates are created with inheritance from the customer's original templates and are provided by UC messaging APIs created by IBM Lotus directly.

By year-end 2005, 25 percent of enterprises will have incorporated components and methods designed to support UC, according to Gartner Group.

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

Unified communications represents the convergence of and universal access to real-time communication and messages. Real-time capabilities include call delivery, live call management and conferencing, as well as wireless access to back-end data such as calendars, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). To create UC, messaging capabilities — such as voice mail, e-mail and fax — are merged with call and data management and available from one device, whether computer, mobile phone, PDA or browser.

UC is based on open architectures and established communications protocols, which allow for integration at the technical level to provide a complete solution. It supports the 21st Century reality of work as an activity, not a location. Professionals can be truly mobile by setting calls to locate them in real-time, reading faxes on their Personal Digital Assistants while drinking coffee at home, listening to e-mail in the car, accessing corporate data through a wireless device, and by accessing voice mail, e-mail, calendar information and faxes all through one inbox while at their desks. UC combines the ability to access and manage real-time data with the flexibility of managing that information in the most efficient way.

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