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On a daily basis most people receive a mix of phone calls, phone
messages, emails and faxes. Yet the management of this information is often done by very
different mechanisms to the telephone and the computer. Each mechanism has developed its
own way of functioning and, ironically, it has been the SOHO market which has actually
been at the forefront of some of the convergence of approaches.
Leaving messages with computers
The telephone system that we use today is extremely complex and anyone in business often
has several numbers on which they can be contacted. There is the office switchboard, the
direct dial number, the mobile number, the pager number, the fax number and the messaging
service number. For those high enough up the corporate ladder, most incoming calls will be
routed through to a secretary or personal assistant and this often means that a private or
limited access number is also in use.
Should you receive a call on any of these numbers and not be there, then it may be routed
to an answer phone, a voice mailbox, a messaging service or even an assistant. The latter
two are the least stressful for callers as they result in the message being passed to a
human being rather than left in a technological wilderness. Despite the widespread use of
computers, people are still unhappy about relying on them for important issues such as
message passing.
Having left a message, the next step is to wait for the recipient to collect that message
and this may be harder than you think. Frequent travellers who rely on mobile phones will
know how difficult (as well as expensive) it is to pick up their voice messages whilst
travelling. The biggest problem is relying on the various networks to pass a simple
instruction to your telephone letting you know a message has been received. Even with
office voice mail systems, picking up messages whilst on the road is not commonplace,
particularly if in the USA. Recently, Microsoft took most of the UK staff to a corporate
event in California. Unfortunately, most people simply set their voice mail to either
redirect you to one of those left behind or to refuse to take a message.
Faxes are a particular problem with mobile communications because few people carry a
mobile fax machine and this means that you need to know where someone is staying before
you can send them information. If that information contains instructions about a meeting
or urgent technical information then it may never arrive or arrive too late.
email
To get around the problems of the telephone system and messages, we are constantly being
exhorted to take to the electronic world of email. Yet even here there are significant
problems with staying in touch. I use a Hotmail account as an emergency road account, yet
on a recent trip to Singapore, I had real problems getting an email connection to my
normal online accounts. The solution was to take yet another email account, this time from
SingTel for a limited period of three months. At least I was then able to get to my
messages.
This problem does not just affect those from small companies, it affects large
organisations as well. Many of the Microsoft staff who set their voice mail to say that
they were away and would not be collecting messages also set their email to tell you that
they were out of the office and would not be collecting emails. So how to get around this?
The answer is to look at Unified Messaging, and what it potentially offers. The first
thing that Unified Messaging offers is a single interface for all types of messaging. If
you take the PC and the telephone, they are rarely brought together into a single device.
Perhaps the best known of those that have succeeded is the Nokia Communicator but you
couldn’t use it for your general office work because it lacks the power, the
applications and is the wrong type of device. Yet even the Communicator has limitations
caused primarily by the service providers.
A universal inbox
So we are looking for some mechanism that creates a universal inbox that combines these
different forms of messaging. To be successful, it not only has to provide access to the
messages but more importantly, should do so with a single interface. That interface should
contain all the necessary viewer technology to decode the information. Voice messages, for
example, should either be played through the PC speaker or better yet, use a
headset/handset assembly so that it replaces the telephone completely. If I receive an
email with attachments, the system should know how to present this information to me as
well as be able to distinguish it from a fax message. Installation of any such product
should install all of these components in a single pass, rather than rely on me to
remember to add different components.
It sounds a tall order doesn’t it? And yet we are finally getting there. Many systems
rely on the existing corporate email system and send other types of messages as an
attachment. This has the advantage of a single common interface for transmit and receive
but assumes that the local machine will be able to interpret the attachments. Such an
approach requires good compression and capture programs and assumes that the amount of
information to be transmitted is not excessive. Excessive is an important consideration
because a large number of online service providers apply limits to the size of messages
and how much can be stored in an inbox at any one time. Hotmail, for example, places a 2MB
maximum and this would fail to hold my daily electronic messages, let alone allow me to
collect any voice and fax information.
Internet standards
Much of the success of Unified Messaging lies in the acceptance of Internet Standards for
the transmission of messages. This, and the growth of newer services such as Internet
Telephony, has transformed the potential for communications. The basic services are
supported by most email products today such as Lotus cc:Mail and Microsoft Exchange. The
original SMTP service is quite dated now and many vendors have moved their services to
POP3. Unfortunately, POP3 does not distinguish between different types of messages and you
can find yourself sitting in a hotel room downloading several MB of files.
Newer services are always appearing, and one of these is the IMAP4 protocol which is
designed to overcome many of the limitations of POP3. Unfortunately, few of the major
Internet Service Providers (ISP) have moved over to, or announced dates when they plan to
move to, IMAP4. Services such as IP Telephony are also close to becoming a reality as we
see improvements to the International Telephony Union (ITU-T) key standard H.323 from
which the audio section is being used for this service. This standard is also responsible
for defining desktop video conferencing and is likely, therefore, to see us extending our
perception of Unified Messaging to include video and data transfer via other ITU-T
standards such as T.120.
The alternatives
An alternative solution is to take a look at either Citrix WinFrame or Microsoft Terminal
Server and combine them with your office system. Over the last year the thin client market
has been extremely successful with widespread adoption. The attraction is that very little
is actually transmitted across the link unless you choose to do so. As a result, you can
connect to your Microsoft Exchange at the office and choose what messages are important at
this time, without having to transfer everything to your local machines. Using the audio
contained in the Citrix and NCD clients, you can even play voice messages across the link.
If you need to transfer information to the client for later reading, then you can still do
so through the online mechanism but only that which you really want or need. You can also
pick up any other files from your server at the same time, saving multiple connections to
collect information.
Perhaps the most important thing here, however, is that the original information is still
present on your key office server and therefore you have an archive copy should anything
happen to the remote computer. At present, many of the better solutions come from vendors
who are focused on Unified Messaging as a vertical market, but expect big moves from the
next version of Microsoft Exchange.
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