Conversationware

Hosted VOIP telephony sounds like a great theory, taking advantage of a combined economy of scale with your fellow hostees, with centralised management by experts that you don’t have to pay for all by yourself. Paying on a per user basis is something you can plan and budget for, so this is bound to create interest from businesses.

BUT, are companies going to trust third party telephony companies with their confidential data?

For instance, products I’m involved with include Unified Communications solutions, which usually involves integrating voice into other applications such as fax, email, contacts and network application software. Customers of any significant size are already going to have onsite email systems, usually Microsoft Exchange, or Lotus Notes.

The bottom line for me is that companies are not easily going to be persuaded to open up their firewalls to allow interaction between a hosted ‘telephony’ service provider and their existing vital and confidential information.

You and I know the reality that email is probably not secure in the first place, but this will be a significant disincentive none the less. The only person that could make that decision in full confidence they’re never going to get sacked is the boss, and being 95% sure isn’t usually enough to place an order.

Similar issues exist with hosted voice recording, as a current tech myth is circulating suggesting that confidential recordings might somehow inadvertently be made available to whoever else is sharing the host system. Not good if you’re a bank.

I think this will go the way of those ‘hosted unified messaging’ companies that were pervasive in the late 90’s, at first confusing the market, but then subsequently disappearing. It’s the same problem, you have to integrate with user’s existing interfaces, network and datastore, or it ain’t going to happen.

Therefore, this suggests that almost in tandem with ‘voice’ being increasingly integrated to network applications - it is possible that the case for hosted systems will make less and less sense. So is the answer just not to deploy useful hosted telephony technologies?

The ideal solution may be something between the two - that benefits from economies of scale, disaster recovery and managed elements of a hosted telephony service, but with some customer site based technology that can both deliver UC productivity, and keep those crown jewels safe. Not easy though.        

Few explanations spell out what this technology will look like to users, which is ironic, given that this round of communications convergence is all about the user interface.

The interfaces of multiple communication technologies are converging, at least, this is true of ones that do similar things.

For instance, Voice, Fax and Email messages all provoke the same requirements from users: they need to get notified, read new messages, create and send new messages to contacts, forward messages, filter save and organise messages, recover them on demand at some later date.

All the above functions apply whether the message is an email, voicemail or fax - so why ask the user to learn three different pieces of software?

Unified Messaging has been all about the single user interface, and almost without exception it is their existing interface, because they already know how to use it. Outlook, Notes and Groupwise now act as the front end interface to all messages types - not forgetting text messaging of course.

By the way, unifying the user interfaces doesn’t mean necessarily that the best thing for businesses is to buy a unified application, but that’s for another day.

Unified Communications, similarly, will be about the next wave of communications applications being put into a single user interface. This time though, it is ‘real time’ communications that include Instant Messaging, the pc based ‘telephone’, and audio -web and video conferencing. The similar functions being, contact, converse, record, include another party, transfer, hold, mute, ignore, etc. Interesting how Instant messaging isn’t really ‘messaging’ in this context

Will there ever be a single interface for messaging and real time communications - as per the Cisco video? Not in my opinion, as the functions are different, so users will probably be more comfortable with their existing interfaces.

So, Unified Messaging and Unified Communications are two different groupings of comms technology with certain common aspects, rather than one being a subset of the other.

There are other interfaces, that will use similar common aspects, including the browser. Perhaps that stage will be called unified work?

It is a complete myth that a VOIP PBX is the only way to get Unified Communications Applications.

Why bother with all the VOIP security issues and LAN/WAN upgrades, when you can get UC applications with your old (paid for) TDM telephone systems.

VOIP is a transport, not a software interface.

There is a certain satisfaction when you work out how much easier it is to press a key and ‘forward’ an important voicemail, recording detailed instructions for your unsuspecting colleagues.

It is not only the simplest way to delegate important tasks, it is also quicker and less expensive than mobile network voicemail.

So, it saves money and it’s smart, but still it seems most people still dial their message service, write everything down, and then chase around, calling and leaving messages for other people, probably misinterpreting the original message in the process.

It’s so easy to divert your mobile phone to your office voicemail system, and it’s less to learn, so I don’t know why more people don’t do it.

Welcome to Conversationware.co.uk This site is likely to feature ’stuff’ on business related Unified Communications software, comprising; Email, Voicemail, Fax, Text (SMS) Messaging, Instant Messaging, software based telephony, multimedia conferencing and mobility, collaboration, VOIP, PBX, RSS and other new media tools, and whatever else is merging to form Unified Communications applications.

That is, it will feature ’stuff’ once I’ve figured out how to use Wordpress, as I always find it easier to talk about technology than to actually use it. Come to think of it, that is kind of the point.