Our Editor's Choice award goes to CallXpress. It offers extensive integration with Exchange, Notes and GroupWise and tremendous fax capabilities. In addition, it supports more network protocols and operating systems than the other two products. CallWare receives our Best Value award, providing the only trilevel administrative capability that unites the operating, voicemail and e-mail systems in a single console. Unified Messenger offered the easiest installation and configuration, as well as a single object store and directory, but lacked fax capabilities.

Applied Voice Technology CallXpress for Windows NT 5.03

CallXpress for Windows NT 5.03 was the most complete unified messaging system we evaluated. It presented an elegant blend of voicemail, superior fax processing and e-mail integration with features and functions that were fully accessible from a telephone or multimedia PC. With CallXpress, we listened to our e-mail messages over the phone using text-to-speech conversion (Octel Unified Messenger also supported this feature). CallXpress provided commendable voice quality, and we were pleased that we could forward an e-mail message to a fax machine as one of our telephone options.

CallXpress runs as a group of NT services for the server, the Dialogic voice board, which interfaces the PC with the PBX system, and several modules relating to the fax server, such as queue handler and RPC. This setup safeguards the application from competing with system resources and lets the system reboot quicker in case of a power or system failure.

A standard CallXpress server comes with an automated attendant and voicemail. Additional applications include a fax server, networking capabilities, a desktop message manager (Windows client), e-mail access, which lets users listen to e-mail messages via text-to-speech conversion, and an automated agent, which lets callers listen to routine information from a database over the telephone or fax machine.

CallXpress requires dedicated hardware, so we could not run the CallXpress system on the same server as our Exchange Server. The CallXpress server has a hardware lock attached to the computer's parallel port--a feature no other vendor offered. The serial number on the hardware lock matches the serial number on the software key disk, and the system will not run without the lock in place--which was extremely frustrating in the lab. If you need to print reports directly from the server, you must plug the printer cable into the hardware lock. While this provides copy protection and physical security, we noticed that it is very easy to inadvertently remove the hardware lock when you remove the printer cable, thus disabling the entire system.

We tested CallXpress with Exchange 5.5 and Outlook97. We integrated the CallXpress server with the Exchange server in just two steps. First, in System Administration, we selected the messaging system from a list within the user's property page, which included Exchange, Microsoft Mail, cc:Mail, Notes and GroupWise. We then entered the path to the Exchange post office and the user's e-mail ID. Although we automated this process somewhat by creating a messaging template that enabled all Exchange users by including the messaging system type and path, we had to manually enter each user's ID. Applied Voice Technology should further automate this process by letting the administrator select all or some names from the Exchange Global Address List during installation.

In the second step, we installed the CallXpress Desktop Message Manager for Outlook, which added the CallXpress information service to our Outlook profile. We provided the CallXpress server name, user name, extension and password, and whether to default to the phone or PC for recording and playback.

Fax to the Max Fax technology is a straightforward implementation when you're routing faxes from within the messaging system and viewing them on the monitor. However, receiving a fax from outside the system via DID (Direct Inward Dialing), or having the system recognize the user's name or number on the fax cover page via OCR (Optical Character Recognition) are far more complex procedures. CallXpress implements the RightFAX server--produced by a wholly owned subsidiary of Applied Voice Technology--to create a complete inbound and outbound fax-processing environment. This includes OCR, least-cost routing, status history, billing codes and fax queuing.