Unified messaging gets real - Technology Information

New solutions help make high-demand applications more than just a pipe dream.

By now, everyone has heard about unified messaging and the advantages of having all voice mails, e-mails and faxes in a common mailbox. If it is so great, however, why has unified messaging not caught on? It is for the same reason corporate telecommunications managers and systems administrators are losing sleep at night: their clients do not stay in one place.

Although the common mailbox exists today, the promise of being able to retrieve or send messages with whatever device is available--be it a telephone, personal digital assistant (PDA) or personal computer--has not been realized. Early unified messaging systems were not able to offer global accessibility to messages in a secure manner. In addition, unified messaging meant transitioning from hard and fast voice mail systems that delivered telco-grade quality to e-mail systems that crashed on a semiregular basis.

With the introduction of new unified messaging infrastructures that utilize Internet messaging server appliances, telecom managers finally have the unified messaging applications they need to appease their clients--and get a good night's sleep.

By using messaging-specific appliances that support standards-based Internet messaging, solutions can be optimized, delivering high performance and reliability, while keeping management costs low. In addition, service providers and enterprises can offer their subscribers fast and secure Web and wireless application protocol (WAP)-based access to multiple media messages without the need for costly protocol conversions.

CHALLENGES ARE ADDRESSED

Unified messaging got off to such a slow start because it brought about new challenges that were not adequately addressed with initial architectures. Problems with network integration, global access, storage and latency meant unified messaging would not realize its promise to provide anywhere, anytime, any-device access to messages. New Internet messaging platforms address all these issues that have hindered unified messaging in order to create a system that is flexible, scalable, easy-to-deploy and affordable.

Because unified messaging sits at the point of convergence, a messaging system must be capable of supporting more than one specific access technology. Most unified messaging solutions on the market today, however, are designed to provide messaging to the desktop phone or PC exclusively. They assume that the reliable, high-bandwidth connections needed to stream audio in an effective manner are present.

What the industry needed were solutions designed to accommodate multiple types of access devices; of taking information and rendering it in a manner appropriate to the device in the network that is available at the time a message is being retrieved. In other words, the platform must support low bandwidth and/or unreliable connections, especially if wireless connectivity is to be accommodated.

New messaging server appliances are designed to do just one task--messaging. As a result, they do not carry any of the overhead and inefficiencies found with general-purpose databases, routers and operating systems.

NO HACK ATTACKS

A major concern with unified messaging is that once a company's voice messaging system is opened to the Internet, the provider/enterprise also is opened to potential security problems (e.g., viruses, hackers, disruptions of corporate information). Yet, before unified messaging can live up to its name, subscribers must be given access to their messages from any location.

In the new unified messaging paradigm, the data moves into the network core, making it accessible from multiple locations. Because the messaging server appliance is specifically designed to only perform one function, there is no way for a hacker to obtain a Unix prompt and gain access to the unified messaging system--or any other corporate system for that matter. Furthermore, the operating system is built in such a way that it only will allow for leaving and/or retrieving messages.

Subscribers now can gain secure access to their messages from any Web-connected device. Subscribers also need to be protected from harmful viruses, which need to be filtered out prior to being stored so they are not able to destroy the system.

Previously, having messages downloaded to a personal computer did not do subscribers any good if they were in a meeting or in the car away from the computer. If subscribers are to access their messages from multiple places using multiple devices, unified messaging also must provide additional storage, as well as robust backup and recovery plans. New solutions that embrace the Internet message access protocol (IMAP) standard allow for the central storage of messages within the network or messaging system and make them readily accessible to subscribers, regardless of where they are or what device they are using.

LATENCY ISSUES RESOLVED

With computer data applications, latency makes an application irritating; with voice applications, latency makes an application unusable. Unified messaging subscribers want instantaneous access to their messages, which is especially challenging when text-to-speech conversions are required. Incorporating IMAP within the messaging base and using messaging-only servers solves the latency issues that plagued initial unified messaging platforms. The result is a greatly enhanced user experience.

IMAP also is what enables a message to be linked to any other message, regardless of how it was originally created. Just as people are able to respond to an e-mail by replying with another e-mail, they must be able to respond to e-mails using voice mail, or visa versa. IMAP is the "thread" of the message that makes this possible.

While thinking that all messages--regardless of form--could be found in the same mailbox was nice, unified messaging, as an application, clearly was introduced to the world before its time. No one addressed the needs of the telecom manager in the boiler room who had to deploy it and whose job depended on performance and availability. As a result, the telecom manager who had to choose and implement unified messaging was placed in a difficult situation.

Adding to the problems of telecom managers was the fact that their clients did not stay in one place. Yet, the mobility aspect of people's lives is what has been driving the demand for unified messaging.

Thanks to new platforms that incorporate Web-based appliances, corporate telecom managers now can be the heroes in actually bringing the true unified messaging application to their clients. Best of all, they do not have to lie awake at night worrying about it.

The power of IMAP

Internet message access protocol (IMAP), as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), is designed to provide the features of enterprise e-mail (e.g., foldering, searching, server-based mail, access from multiple locations) using open published standards. The IETF created IMAP to address the limitations of post office protocol (POP), an Internet mail standard that fell short in answering all the questions associated with delivering e-mail to disconnected clients.

In addition to enterprise installations, IMAP is ideal for unified messaging in that it allows access to the same store from multiple devices--all while maintaining the state of the mailbox at each access point. For example, once a message is read via the phone, it is marked "read" and does not appear as a new message the next time a subscriber accesses messages from the PC. IMAP's foldering capabilities allow unified messaging systems to automatically segregate e-mail, voice and fax into separate folders.

Modern IMAP servers also are designed to handle rich media applications, eliminating the need for two separate stores for regular text messages and audio messages. The inability of early unified messaging systems to synchronize disparate message stores no longer is an issue, thanks to IMAP.

The IMAP forum offers additional information at www.imap.org. The Internet Mail Consortium provides detailed information about Internet mail standards at www.imc.org.

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Frank is vice president of business development for Mirapoint Inc., Sunnyvale, CA.

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