Managing the constant flow of incoming messages to a business can become a time consuming distraction for even the most organised of us. But help is at hand in the form of Unified Messaging. The mail may never stop, but with Unified messaging it can at least be properly dealt with. Geoff Marshall reports on this increasingly crucial - and rapidly expanding - market

A recent Ovum report predicted that the Unified Messaging (UM) market would be worth $31bn by the year 2006. This is driven by other predictions, such as the fact that there will be one billion Internet users by 2005, and more than half a billion mobile phone users by 2000.

Business users, whether small one-man bands or large corporates, typically use three types of messaging: voicemail (answering-machine), fax, and email. This means that, to stay in touch, individual users have to check at least three messaging systems regularly. We say 'at least three' because many users have more than one mailbox associated with each of the three types of message -- for example, most people have voice mailboxes provided by their cellular phone operator, their office switchboard, and probably also an answering machine at home. To add to this, increasingly a fourth messaging service is becoming popular: the GSM/PCN cellular Short Message Service (SMS), which is a text-message pager type of service.

Managing all these messages has become a full-time job, and there are other problems such as: how do you deal with your emails when you only have access to a mobile phone? How do you pick up voice mails economically when you're travelling abroad? How can you receive faxes confidentially when travelling?

Getting the message
UM systems work by utilising gateway services that translate between different messaging platforms. Examples of this include:

1. Text-to-speech engines can read your emails to you over the phone.

2. Voice messages can also be delivered as WAV files attached to emails.

3. Faxes can also be delivered as TIF files attached to emails.

4. SMS or other pager-like services can be used to alert the user to any type of message received and can include within the SMS any editable text that can be derived from the message itself.

5. Outbound voice messages and faxes can be delivered economically over the Internet as email attachments.

6. Outbound voice messages and faxes can also be delivered economically over the Internet via a worldwide network of remote telephony/fax servers over local telephone lines in each country.

7. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can convert faxes to editable text for delivery by the text-to-speech engine, or email.

8. Speech-to-text engines can deliver a voice mail in any other form, such as, fax, email text, SMS.

We know of no UM product that offers all of these gateway technologies as of yet, but there is no technical reason to prevent this. UM aims to unify all messages, so that you can deal with them from a single inbox and possibly also a single outbox. When you're in the office, this may be a computer-based mailbox, such as Microsoft Outlook. Alternatively, the universal mailbox could be a mobile phone, when you're out of the office. Once you have text-to-speech in place, you can collect all your messages using only a telephone with its standard touch-tone keypad.

A point to realise about this approach is that you can respond to a message using a different user interface to that with which it was sent. For example, if you have access to a telephone only, you can reply to emails by automatically attaching a voicemail to an email. If you have access to the Internet, but perhaps not a phone (because it's too expensive to phone from abroad to collect your voicemails), then you can play your voicemails over the sound system of a PC, and reply by emailing typed text, or dictating a message to be delivered as an attached WAV file - potentially such a WAV file could ultimately be delivered automatically to the original caller over telephony landlines by a telephony server in the destination country, thus saving on the cost of an international call to reply directly by phone. Equally, receiving faxes in electronic form, rather than hard copy, makes it much easier to forward to colleagues as an email attachment.

What's On Offer
We looked at a couple of services that currently provide UM facilities:Vivao from Ovation Communications plc; and Unified Call Management (UCM) from Call Sciences. Both offer the first five of the gateway features listed above, but cannot yet provide the last three features (landline-terminated Internet voice/fax, speech-to-text, and OCR). These two services differ mainly in their approach to incoming
voice calls.

Unlike UCM, Vivao cannot connect callers directly to the recipient, and therefore does not offer the optional call-screening system of UCM. UCM uses a true personal number beginning 070 rather than the 0845 local-rate number that Vivao offers. Publishing your 0845 Vivao number is optional, because you can economically divert your other telephones to it. With UCM, there's nothing to stop you setting up diversions from your existing numbers, but you really are intended to publish your UCM personal number.

Vivao
Vivao can be used in conjunction with any digital mobile phone, regardless of cellular service provider, and any touch-tone landline phone (although,of course, the latter would not itself support SMS reception). If you already have an Internet Service Provider (ISP), you don't need to change the way you use the Internet for emails in any way. Either you can have all emails currently received through your existing ISP copied to Vivao's secure server for delivery by other means, or you can give out a new email address provided by Vivao. Also, you can route faxes and voicemails to your existing email account as attachments, or you can use the new email account provided by Vivao.

If you already have problems managing multiple email accounts, you can consolidate them into one inbox by arranging for them all to be copied to Vivao, and using the Vivao account's mailbox as your universal message centre. There are two ways you can access the Vivao account directly: use Eudora, Microsoft Outlook, or any other software package you are comfortable with; or use any Web browser connected via any other ISP anywhere in the world to go to Vivao's Web site and log on through a Web-based interface (this works like the service provided by Hotmail).

Regarding delivery by other means, once on Vivao's server, your messages can also be accessed using a touch-tone phone. Emails can be read to you over the phone, you can delete them, forward them, or reply (by voicemail attachment only at present). Your incoming faxes can be delivered to a local fax machine on demand - effectively, this is a store-and-forward service which can overcome the security issues of having faxes delivered to a hotel fax machine in your absence.

Vivao allocates you a voice mailbox phone number -- an 0845 number which can be accessed at local rates in the UK. You can publish this number or you can simply set updivert-on-no-answer or divert-on-busy options on your mobile phone and anynumber of other phones including landlines. You can change this back to your service provider's voicemail anytime you like. The same 0845 number can be used to receive faxes automatically. You can also use Vivao to manage your personal phone and email directory.

By keeping all your contacts in the Vivao system, you never need wish that you had someone's phone number or email address with you when away from the office. You simply phone your Vivao mailbox, and an automated attendant takes you through menus to select the person you want to contact and can then provide you with their phone number, fax number, or email address. Alternatively, you can access your personal address book using a Web browser. You can also set up mailing lists to enable you, for example, to broadcast SMS messages to your team of salesmen. Vivao's service is marketed through channel partners including AccordIT, BEI, Phones4U, SCC, TotalWeb, and Unipalm.

Call Sciences
Call Sciences Unified Call Management (UCM) service allows voice calls to be managed more effectively and, because many more location attempts are made by the system than standard PBXs, a call is twice as likely to reach its intended recipient at the first try. UCM routes calls using an
intelligent combination of the following principles: the 'find me' principle - personal profiles that are sensitive to time-of-day and day-of-week; the 'follow me' principle - allowing you to temporarily override your schedule and route calls to any number not normally within your contact numbers; the 'location cacheing' principle - the system puts calls through quickly by remembering where it found you last.

You have direct control over both the collection of messages and the routing of your calls - not only from any touch-tone phone but also via the Web. All access is protected by a personal identification number (PIN). UCM provides a wide range of methods of voice mail notification that are more efficient and less costly than traditional PBX forwarding to mobiles: mobile SMS messaging; text-only email notifications; email notifications accompanied by the message as a WAV/MIME attachment; QuikLink, whereby the notification takes the form of a HTML page that links to the message stored on the UCM host page. Linking in this way minimises the storage requirements of the PC.

UCM is also able to distinguish between voice and fax calls so that only one number is required. The UCM platform allows you to choose from a wide range of ways of receiving faxes. These include: automatically forwarding to the office fax machine; storage in a mail box to be forwarded to the nearest fax machine on request; automatically forwarding to email boxes as a TIF/MIME attachment to a text message; viewed on-line by accessing the Online Manager site either through any Web browser or by a QuikLink HTML page sent with an email notification.

You can choose to have all or some of your e-mail messages accessible through your mobile phone. By dialling into your mailbox and entering your PIN, you can hear your emails being read to you by UCM via text-to-speech technology. The same technology can be used to reply to e-mails using simple strokes of the phone's keypad. This allows a voice mail message to be recorded and sent as a WAV/MIME attachment of an email. You can choose which emails are accessed remotely by a sophisticated filtering system that can be customised by the individual via the Web. Emails can be prioritised according to sender's address, the subject field and the message priorities. UCM is marketed through channel partners such as Martin Dawes.

Racal
Racal Telecom has also recently launched a new unified messaging service that combines voice, fax and e-mail into a highly configurable application which gives users the greatest flexibility in the way in which they access and manipulate multimedia messages. Unified messaging is positioned as a value-added service to new and existing customers of Racal Telecom's managed 'Voicenet' services. The flexibility with which messages can be accessed over a fixed line telephone, mobile handset or via the Internet, and the numerous options for forwarding messages to the desired location in the most appropriate format, makes unified messaging particularly appealing to organisations with a large mobile workforce.

Racal's messaging solution is charged at a flat tariff, with discounts applying for a bundled service, the number of mailboxes and the term of the contract. Racal Telecom product and services director, Keith Dewar, says: "The convergence of all three messaging media into one system improves the efficiency of the individual while, for the organisation, it means reduced investment in and support for separate facilities. Unified messaging is one of a range of services, including non-geographic numbers offering free, national and local call rate services, that Racal Telecom has brought to market recently as the result of the commissioning of a powerful Intelligent Network platform running over the core PTO infrastructure."

Alternatives
Other companies active in this area include Virtualplus, which supplies the UM technology to X-Stream, the first ISP to offer UM. Also, Yac.com launched a brand new Internet communications service on 4th October. Along the lines of Unified Messaging, this new service is aimed at consumers and business travellers and offers one personal number for voicemail, fax and e-mail messages. The difference is that this is 100% free to the user and offers 100% free global redirection of calls. Further details are available at www.yac.com

Call Sciences gives users of its Unified Call Management service complete control over the collection and routing of incoming messages in voice, fax or email form