CallWare Technologies. CallWare Technologies started into unified messaging a
few years ago as a Novell-centric system, then took the Exchange road after refining its voice mail
product. CallWare 5.2 messaging server and the ViewPoint 5.2 GUI offer a rich set of integrated
messaging capabilities. CallWare Technologies now offers integrated email client support for
Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Groupwise. Screen 2 displays CallWare's Groupwise messaging client.
ViewPoint offers integrated voice, fax, and email support from the messaging client. ViewPoint lets
you attach a voice mail message to an email sent over the Internet.
CallWare has amassed a great deal of experience in deploying integrated messaging solutions and
has developed a good product that has matured through field trials and customer fine-tuning.
Features such as logging all mailbox message activity and making it available in reports simplifies
your job when you have to track the status of a message.
Octel Communications. Octel is the world's largest voice mail vendor, and one
of its primary targets is the enterprise. Not surprisingly, the company is working on unified
messaging solutions. Octel has already announced Unified Messenger, the industry's first true
unified messaging system to use Exchange as the messaging server platform. Screen 3 shows the in-box
in Octel's Unified Messenger. The first release will add voice mail support to Exchange Server, and
a future release will support fax as another message type.
Unified Messenger was an aggressive project, and Octel is clearly proud of what the company has
accomplished. Unified Messenger adds a tab to the Exchange user directory to handle user-specific
information for the voice server features. The product extends NT's security layer to manage the
password information necessary to add the voice and fax message types. The product has no new
administration programs, only extensions of existing ones.
Octel says one challenge in implementing a true unified messaging system was dealing with
earlier-generation APIs that didn't work in a multitasking environment. A lack of message
data-streaming protocols made getting adequate message retrieval performance impossible.
Microsoft Exchange solved both problems, and the system works well, according to Octel. In the
future, Octel's Unified Messenger will add support for Lotus Notes and Internet's IMAP standard, but
Exchange is the anchor offering.
A New Era
Today's commercially available integrated messaging solutions have advanced from experimental
technology to the real thing in the past few years. The industry is at the threshold of a new era of
true unified messaging platforms running on NT and based on Exchange and Outlook. Now is the time to
explore this technology. In the near future, unified messaging is destined to become another
essential communications building block in the enterprise.
See also The Debate: Integrated Vs. Unified Messaging