Unified Communications

Unified communications can improve the productivity of virtual workers by letting them retrieve messages from a variety of sources, proactively notifying them of new messages, and allowing for easy distribution of messages across the organization.

The momentum for unified messaging is accelerating, primarily because of rapid obsolescence of legacy voice-messaging platforms, new compliance and e-discovery requirements, high management costs for existing disparate systems, and the need to improve communications capabilities of the distributed workforce.

Organizations have options as to how they implement unified messaging: They can integrate the technology with IP telephony or install a stand-alone system, for example. Although there are several common features across product lines, distinctions include scalability, architecture, choice of message store, and migration capabilities.

IT decision-makers should evaluate their voice and unified messaging plans with an eye toward understanding the impact of voice mail obsolescence, the need to support compliance and e-discovery requirements, and potential cost savings from simplified management and improved productivity. They should start by creating a project team involving representatives from voice, network, security, and messaging. The team should evaluate vendor options to establish a roadmap for unified messaging implementation. Four factors are driving the interest in, and speeding the adoption of unified messaging:

Obsolescence of existing systems. In May 2006, Avaya announced an end-of-life schedule for the Octel voice-messaging platforms, including models 200/300 and 250/350. Avaya ended sales of new cabinets in June 2006 and expansions to current systems in June 2007. In 2011, Avaya will end all support for the Octel platform. With vendors such as Avaya phasing out their traditional voicemail products, organizations are unable to meet the increasing challenge of supporting aging systems and providing for growth and expansion.

Management challenges Many businesses are supporting stand- alone islands of voicemail systems, with no way to transfer messages between users on different systems, and without a way to centrally manage systems as a single entity. The myriad of existing systems from various manufacturers adds significant training and support costs. Distributed systems mean that it is difficult to leverage economies of scale that come from a homogeneous messaging. Instead, enterprises must maintain a variety of different skill sets, depending on the system at each location or within in each business unit. These skills are becoming increasingly difficult to find as older systems become obsolete. In most organizations with more than one voicemail server, there is no easy way to send out a company-wide voice message.

Compliance Legacy voicemail systems cannot meet emerging e- Discovery requirements. Voicemail systems do not store header information such as caller, call-time, or other information required tracking of who called whom and when. Systems such as Octel and Audix don’t support an ability to search for specific calls, or to easily export messages for archiving.

New features As companies become increasingly virtual, with larger numbers of mobile professionals; time wasted by calling to check for messages is no longer tolerable. In addition, many users struggle with management of multiple message stores (e.g. desktop and cellular/mobile voicemail boxes). Wasted time and lost opportunities occur when faxes, such as contracts and proposals, cannot reach sales personnel in the field, or field workers must wait until they have Internet access to check for new messages.

Unified messaging provides a key component of a unified communications architecture, enabling integrated access to a variety of stored messaging systems such as fax, e-mail, voice, and—in some cases—video. Selecting the right unified messaging solution requires a careful examination of requirements, from user, IT, and management. Vendor approaches vary based on areas such as integration with VOIP platforms, support for distributed environments, and message storage options. IT departments should conduct a careful assessment of their requirements to enable choosing of the optimal vendor.