Ask someone for contact information and you'll probably receive a business card listing two voicemail accounts, three e-mail accounts, two fax machines, a pager number and a cellular phone number. In an effort to stay connected, we all are being inundated with numerous types of messages flowing into several different systems or devices. And checking all of these locations for new messages is no picnic.

For instance, each of these systems has its own nomenclature and navigational methods. Remembering the different logon IDs and passwords requires more than your brain RAM. And because you're typically "device-locked," you can't listen to your e-mail messages over the phone and reply to them by voice. You can't call your fax machine from your car phone and have it forward a fax to your hotel. You can't forward a voicemail message as an e-mail message. What's a modern worker to do?

To view the Report card. Simplify your life! Implement a unified messaging system, and the time and trouble you spend interacting with voice, fax and e-mail systems will drop to a dribble. You will be able to consolidate these message types in one central location--your e-mail inbox--and access it from your telephone or multimedia PC. You'll never be confined to replying or forwarding within the same media of the original message: You'll be electronically and telephonically liberated.

Today's highly mobile workforce, along with the increasing presence of inexpensive multimedia PCs and growing use of high-function PDAs (personal digital assistants), drives this unification. Network Computing recently looked for unified messaging systems that offer e-mail, fax and voicemail integration within the inbox of the most prevalent e-mail systems--Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise. We sought systems that offered ease of administration and maintenance and a software cost not to exceed $15,000 for 50 users.

We tested three unified messaging products in our central Florida Real-World Lab®: Applied Voice Technology's CallXpress for Windows NT 5.03, CallWare Technologies' CallWare 5.3 and Lucent Technologies' Octel Unified Messenger 1.0. Our test bed included a Samsung Pro Star PBX system, two 200-MHz Pentium servers running Windows NT 4.0 SP3 or Novell NetWare 4.11 over an Ethernet LAN, Exchange Server 5.5 with Outlook97, and GroupWise 5.2.

Two of the systems we tested integrated voicemail, fax and e-mail within the user's messaging inbox; Unified Messenger lacked fax capabilities. Each let us create, access and play back messages via telephone or PC. Both CallWare and CallXpress united the messaging types at the client, while Unified Messenger achieved this unification within the Exchange message store. After logging on to both CallWare and CallXpress, we had to wait for the voice server and the messaging server to synchronize. Unified Messenger didn't require synchronization, so our inbox appeared immediately.

We did not evaluate the Windows clients provided by CallWare and CallXpress; installing a separate client on a user's desktop is too costly and redundant with the messaging client. Any unified messaging product that does not integrate with the most common messaging systems is too product-centric. These Windows clients eventually would be accessed via Exchange, Outlook or some other messaging client.