I can still remember the first time I received a voicemail in my Inbox while I was working at home. It was a few years ago, and not long after the company had moved onto Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, which introduced this feature whereby phone messages could be routed through email. What an age we live in, I thought! Unified messaging in action, in my Inbox! (Never mind the fact that I probably ignored the actual message, along with most subsequent voice messages during the intervening years.)
And now a couple months ago, we upgraded to Exchange Server 2010, so I was able to receive my first voicemail with the voicemail preview feature that I'd been reading about for nearly two years. (And with the interesting mistranslated messages, who knew how many laughs that would be good for?) But seriously, it's a great feature, as are so many of the other features that make up the unified messaging (UM) piece of Exchange. If you're looking at the Exchange Server 2010 Architecture poster, which you can receive free in the March 2011 issue of Windows IT Pro, the new UM features are pictured at the middle left. To get the inside story of what's going on in this space, I talked to Adam Glick, senior product manager for Exchange.
Don't forget to check out the other interviews in this series on Exchange 2010 architecture, linked below. And finally, next week I'll post the final interview, with Microsoft's Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president for Exchange, who talked with me about what the future holds for Exchange.
BKW: So, Adam, what's going on with unified messaging? Tell us what it is and what it's good for, if you can.
Adam: Unified messaging is one of those growing areas. An easy way to think about it is, think of a universal Inbox. All of your critical messaging data shows up in your Inbox, building bridges across the silos of communication—how's that sound? This is a way of bringing those pieces together in one place. When you think about what that enables for users, there's obviously a high-level benefit. You've got one place where you can create and consume and find your information. For IT pros, you have just one place to manage—you have one set of servers and technologies to manage, one set of drive space, one set of legal compliance pieces that you have to search and maintain control of. This is really about simplifying, organizing, and consolidating information for both users and IT pros alike.
When I think about unified messaging, it's why you'll never have to remember you voicemail PIN, ever. I don't know if you've had that experience; I certainly have—I had it last week, actually, where I'd forgotten my voicemail PIN and had to reset it. We're not a very voicemail-centered culture at Microsoft. We're very email-centric. But people still call me, especially externally, and leave voicemails, and I need to get those. They show up in my Inbox, so I'd forgotten my voicemail PIN. The reality is you don't need it. It's another hassle, it's another set of Help desk calls that people are going to get to reset these things. When the voicemail shows up in your Inbox, there's nothing to worry about.
BKW: I'm right there with you. I couldn't begin to guess what my PIN is for voicemail. If it's not in my Inbox, it might as well not be there.
Adam: Exactly. Users benefit from the the fact that if you're on a mobile phone, that message shows up—you don't have to see the blinking red message waiting indicator in your office to know you've got new voicemail. You can read it, you can see it, you can hear it all from the web or from your phone, from Outlook. Users benefit from that. The benefit for IT pros is it's a much more simplified infrastructure. Many of them are running voicemail systems that could be 20 years old. Parts may not even exist anymore for them. We've heard horror stories from some of our customers trying to find parts for the 20 year old system from a company that's gone out of business, and they can't find them while their whole system's down. [Unified messaging] allows them to put everything on an infrastructure they can trust. You can manage it one way. You don't have different sets of data staying in different places. You don't have different sets of administrators have to administer these different pieces all over the place. It simplifies it for them, and simplifying things for IT, we've found, is always a good thing. No IT pro has ever complained to me that we made something too easy.
BKW: What are some of the new features and enhancements to unified messaging that came specifically with Exchange 2010?
Adam: Unified messaging has a number of new features. The biggest one that's going to pop up for most people is voicemail preview. That's the ability for the machine to listen to someone's voicemail message and then to print that out in text and send it to them in an email. I don't know if you're a Stephen Covey fan or not, but long ago I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the things in it is don't mistake the urgent for the important. The quintessential example of this is the phone ringing. If the phone rings, you don't know what the person on the line wants to tell you. So, do you leave the meeting to answer? Many people will answer the phone, depending on who the person is, how important. But they don't know that information.
With voicemail preview visibility, they leave a message, it shows up a minute later or so, depending on how long the message is they left—it's usually faster than that—and it will tell you what they said. You can read it. If it's my girlfriend calling and asking me to pick up food on the way home from work, great, I probably didn't need to walk out of a meeting for that. If it's her telling me she went into labor a month early, I probably didn't want to wait until after the meeting in order to deal with that. I can get that message right away, and I can act on it. The same thing is true with calls from people's bosses, calls from external vendors. It allows us to get information.
I used to work for a company that sent out quarterly information through a 15 minute voicemail call that they sent out to everybody. Or there are people that keep data on voicemail. Because you have pieces of information in your Inbox, you can use your Inbox search features to pull up that information. So if you left me a voicemail six months ago with your email address in it and I didn't write it down, if I want to go and find that, I can just type that in, and [the search feature] will pull it up because it's in that single universal environment that I have.