11. Unified Messaging and Voice Mail:
Get Any Message from a Single Inbox

Unified Messaging is the key element of Unified Communications concept that gives invaluable benefits to IP-telephony end-users.

The concept of unified messaging is that all kinds of messages like emails, voicemails, faxes and so on go to a unified mailbox, accessible both from your e-mail client and your phone.

So let us see what Unified Messaging can do:

The sources and interfaces of a Unified Messaging Account

Voicemail Messages

First of all, your voicemail inbox is a destination place for all the incoming calls, when you are not available. You will be able to access the saved messages from any phone at any moment or get those messages right from your desktop email client.

Fax messages in your mailbox.

Secondly, you do not need a fax-device anymore to view fax messages, because they will appear in a digital format in your mailbox right next to your voicemail messages. It is as easy to send fax messages – just send the target document to print and select the “fax” option instead of a printer. Note that some Unified Messaging systems may still need a fax-server to work with fax messages.

Access to your mailbox by phone.

Thirdly, you can access your mailbox via your phone in addition to your email client. Imagine you get into a traffic jam on the halfway to your destination, your laptop battery dies and you are waiting for a very important email. With the text-to-speech technology available with Unified Messaging, the system can read a vital email for you right on the phone.

There are two types of Unified Messaging systems:

1. Integrated Unified Messaging systems with the widely used email servers like Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino that use their email boxes to store your voice and fax messages.

On one hand, it is a naturally expected and obvious solution. On another, it still has a couple of noticeable drawbacks:

• you can only use Exchange or Lotus as your mail server;
• a large number of employees started using mail server for receiving voice and fax messages will significantly increase its load.

2. The second type of Unified Messaging systems uses their own storage for voice and fax messages, but you can still access all the messages from the same email client. With this approach, it doesn’t matter what email server is currently used in your company. Also, both servers work independently, so when some of them is down, you still can use the other.

Unified Messaging Integration

When deploying unified messaging software in a heterogeneous network, the main integration challenge is its integration with existing 3-rd party communication systems – 3rd party PBX and fax-servers, legacy messaging software etc. Most of the unified messaging software vendors support some of the 3rd party IP PBX and fax servers, but for those that are not supported a custom VoIP integration tool might be required.

Since the goal of unified messaging software is to provide a single mailbox for your communication channels, another way to use it may be to integrate it with communication tools that are not supported originally. For example, you may want your unified mailbox to receive SMS messages, pager messages, etc.

Unified Messaging Vendors

• AVST Unified Messaging by AVST
• Cisco Unity by Cisco
• CommuniGate Pro Messaging Suite by Communigate
• FrontRange VoIP by FrontRange
• InTouch Unified Messaging by AudioCodes
• Kinesis by ActiveVoice
• Modular Messaging platform by Avaya

What to Do Next

Unified Messaging is one of the key Unified Communications solutions that allows you to receive all your messages from any source and access them from any device.

While unified Messaging solutions are offered by both IP-telephony system vendors and 3rd party software developers, you can examine the solutions that support your IP telephony network and choose the one that suits your requirements better. You can also use custom IP telephony development services to extend it with additional functionality, specific to your business.

Read the next chapter: 12. IP Phone Applications - Your IP-Phone Can Do Much More

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