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Plugging the Communications Time Drain

February 20, 2003
By Sean Doherty

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	In this article
	Introduction
	RFP Deliverables
	Interactive Intelligence Communité version 2.2
	Cisco Systems Unity 4
	THe Benefits of SIP
	Complete Responses to RFI
	If Not Sans SIP, Avaya Coulda Been a Contender
	IP PBXs Going Strong
	Hey Buddy, Got Speech?
	Report Card

It wasn't long ago that enterprises boasted of their multiple communications systems. These separate e-mail, fax and voicemail streams gave customers and employees valuable services and provided an edge in responding to business concerns. Boy, have times changed.

Today, such splintered communications drain valuable resources and divert labor from revenue-generating activities. Employees must gather information from disparate e-mail and voicemail systems, plus they may have to schlepp to another building or even Kinko's to handle fax transmissions. And despite mobile hand-held devices, professionals often lack access to e-mail and fax when on the road, frustrating their efforts to service and support customers.

Enterprise IT departments also burn valuable resources managing those separate systems, especially if multiple individuals or groups are responsible for each.

If you're shifting uncomfortably in your seat because this sounds like your life, unified messaging might be just what the doctor ordered. UM is all about giving users single, combined inboxes for e-mail, fax and voicemail and letting them manage multimedia messages via a central message store. IT wins too because you get a central point of administration for enterprise messaging. Also, multiple devices--such as a computers, telephones and PDAs--can access, display, play, forward, copy and archive all message types. With UM, remote professionals will get the same messaging services on the road as they would in their home offices. Finally, important incoming messages can be rerouted directly to users, no matter where they are.

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Fly Like a Leagle

To investigate enterprise UM products, we developed an RFP based on a fictitious legal-services company called Legal Eagles LLC, or Leagles to its friends (see "Legal Eagles on the Hunt").

Leagles has offices in Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Seattle and specializes in providing high-quality, low-cost research and information services to law professionals nationwide. But the company feels constrained in its efforts to support clients, office workers and remote professionals with its current messaging infrastructure, which uses separate e-mail, fax and voicemail systems.

The San Francisco office is moving to Oakland to reduce operating costs and take advantage of a more favorable business climate. The Bay Area office leverages Active Directory with a Microsoft Exchange 2000 e-mail system and Captaris RightFax facilities. The legacy TDM (time-division multiplexing) PBX that supports the office's analog phones and voicemail has reached the end of its useful life. The new Oakland location provides QoS (quality of service) for voice and data on a Gigabit Ethernet (TCP/IP) backbone with switched 100-Mbps network connections to every desktop.

Leagles is looking forward to the benefits of a converged network and VoIP (voice over IP), but its immediate need is to get a grip on messaging via an IP-enabled UM system that supports SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). Then Leagles will be able to ride the next wave of Internet multimedia services. SIP will put more intelligence in PDAs and wireless data appliances to improve mobility management and extend true multimedia sessions to remote professionals. Getting a head start on this technology will put Leagles in a good position to increase its multimedia publishing efforts as it pursues possible mergers and acquisitions in the legal-publishing industry. Until then, SIP should improve LAN-based call and session management for a VoIP implementation.

After a successful implementation of UM in Oakland, Leagles will investigate UM for its other locations. We sent our RFP to Alcatel, Avaya, Captaris, Cisco Systems, Comdial, Interactive Intelligence, Microsoft, Mitel, NEC, Nortel Networks, Siemens and Vertical Networks.

Alcatel, Avaya, Interactive and Cisco responded, but only Interactive's Communité and Cisco's Unity met Leagles' minimum requirements for unified messaging: IP-enabled solution with SIP support; single message store for multiple message types (e-mail, fax and voicemail); single point of administration; and Web-based access. (Check out our complete RFP and responses)

Alcatel's Unified Communication system is still in beta and will not be available until later this year. Avaya's Unified Messenger, like Captaris's CallXpress, Comdial's Interchange, Mitel's NuPoint Messenger, NEC's NEAXMail AD-120 and Siemens' HiPath Xpressions, lacked SIP support (see more on Avaya). Vertical Networks declined to participate, without offering a reason, and Nortel could not free up the resources to participate. Microsoft responded that its UM solution is offered via partners.