AVST CallXpress® is the leading unified messaging product on the market today. With over a 20-year heritage of supplying customers with call processing, voice messaging, unified messaging and unified communications solutions, CallXpress offers a wide range of solutions to a customer's communications problems. CallXpress excels in delivering robust, reliable, feature-rich unified messaging solutions that improve employee productivity and make a company easier to do business with. CallXpress was the very first product to offer unified messaging solutions to customers, starting over ten years ago. Yet AVST has continually added new unified messaging functionality to the product with every new release of software. CallXpress has a new type of unified messaging module called CallXpress Integrated Client Access. Through years of experience, AVST has come to the conclusion there is no single best deployment method. Every customer has different needs and requirements. This paper is intended to discuss the pros and cons of the various methods to deploy unified messaging.

THE MANY FLAVORS OF UNIFIED MESSAGING

CallXpress is the most flexible unified messaging system on the market today. It offers customers complete flexibility in how they wish to deploy and use unified messaging. Unlike all other competing products, CallXpress allows users to deploy any type and mix of unified messaging on a system, as well as allowing users to mix unified messaging and traditional voice mail users on the same system. CallXpress supports both of the popular unified messaging architecture types: server-based unified messaging and client-based unified messaging.

Server-based Unified Messaging

With server-based unified messaging, all of the messages (voice, fax and e-mail) are stored on a single server, the e-mail server. This allows users to access their voice messages from all of their familiar e-mail clients: their desktop e-mail program, any web-based e-mail access program, their PDA e-mail program, etc.

Client-based Unified Messaging

With client-based unified messaging, the voice and fax messages remain on their separate servers, and e-mail remains on the e-mail server. Common access to these messages is accomplished through a common e-mail client that is used to access both the e-mail inbox of the user and a new voice and fax message inbox on the voice server.

Simple Unified Messaging

With simple unified messaging, copies of the voice and fax messages are sent to the user at a specified e-mail address as e-mail messages with attachments. The original messages remain on the voice and fax servers. The two copies of the messages (the one on the voice server and the one in the user's e-mail inbox) are not synchronized in any way. The user must delete each message separately.

In addition, individual users can be configured for which message types they would like to have presented at each interface, the telephone and the desktop e-mail client. The following configurations are available on a per user basis:

• Voice mail user — E-mail messages only from the desktop e-mail client, voice messages only from the telephone interface.
• Full unified messaging user — Voice, fax and e-mail messages from the telephone interface, voice, fax and e-mail messages from the e-mail client.
• Desktop unified messaging user — E-mail, voice and fax messages from the desktop e-mail client, only voice messages from the telephone interface.
• Telephone unified messaging user — E-mail messages only from the desktop e-mail client, e-mail, voice and fax messages from the telephone interface.

Click here to download this white paper