Conversationware

Any telephone system salesperson will say their new sparkly VOIP platform supports unified messaging.

I bet it doesn’t support everything you might want though. The devil is in the detail.

Huh?

In reality, this is only because the word itself hasn’t been defined very well. So, what is being unified, where, and for whom?

If this subject is at all interesting to you, then you should know there are 4 types of user desktop accessible voice messaging.

A. Server based unified messaging

This very best unified messaging system sends voice and fax messages to the email server for storage and access.

The UM system will then usually also have a plugin installed at the email client for GUI setup and playback.*

This setup means that all messages then benefit from the ALL of the resilience and access methods that have already been paid for on the email system. (If you haven’t got resilience for your email system then message me abut Neverfail!)

1. The users see no difference between message types
2. Web Access is supported in the existing client OWA, iNotes
3. Notifications and rules are the same for all messages
4. Thin client is seamlessly supported
5. User voicemail set up is also GUI based via the email client plugin
6. Text to speech over the telephone is easy, but this should be available in all 5 scenarios listed here

NB: This does NOT mean install UM on the email server. I have seen this cause restrictions on functionality, reliability, change management overheads, and ongoing cost of ownership (and support…resellers take note). 

* Notes sites could use DUCS (Domino Unified Communications) for the clients, but this can be more expensive than a whole UM system on it’s own, so wouldn’t recommend it.

Most important of all, there is only ever ONE copy of the message for the user to worry about

B: Client based unified messaging (integrated)

This takes advantage of the ability of Email Client software, like Outlook, to access messages stored in different places.

Voice messages remain on the voicemail server, and are presented in a second ‘inbox’ to the user, meaning that access is graphical and bit easier, but not fully ‘unified’. The email client is ‘looking’ in two places for messages.

1. Voice messages are NOT available by web access to email
2. Resilience and backup for voice messages has to be considered separately
3. Voice messaging and email message are not totally interactive
4. Messages saved, or deleted, by the telephone are not resident in email ‘deleted’ folder, and therefore not retained.
5. Many systems can’t provide telephone access to email in this setup

C: ‘Simple’ ‘unified’ messaging

Most common amongst smaller telephone systems, the offer is to send voicemails to email.

Unfortunately, this option looks very similar on the UM brochure, with a voicemail in Outlook inbox.

In reality it is not at all useful for the user (the whole point of UM is to make life easier for the users).

1. The first choice is usually whether to ‘forward’ a voice message - which actually means ‘copy’. The trouble with ‘copy’ is that the user then has to manage two copies of the message, this is fraught.
2. The other option, which is to ‘move’ the message over to email, then means the message is no longer available via the telephone.

Not a good choice to have to make 

D: Browser based access

This isn’t ‘unified’ messaging at all, but it does provide a solution for those users who shouldn’t have voice messages embedded into email.

A lot of finance companies, for whatever reason, are worried that voice messages might be included in legal ‘discovery’. Interesting, because most legal companies I know are insistent that voice messages should be included in the email store.

Browser based access to the Voicemail server still provides a GUI front end for messages and mailbox configuration, but keeps the voice message separate from email, and, if streamed, can prevent a message being saved to desktop and then forwarded without record.

E: Voicemail Only

You may want some of the above for a proportion of users, but if you have users without email, they may want only a voicemail box. This should be possible without incurring any licence costs.

F: So What You Want is………

A system that can provide all 5 different types of messaging, concurrently, on the same system, to different sets of users with different needs.

You just don’t know what you’ll need next week, or next year after the acquisition.

You may also want the following

• Any PBX switch support - VOIP or not
• Multiple PBX support on the same box for migration
• Unlimited Auto Attendant Menus
• Personal Attendant Menus
• SMS notificiation
• Mobile device support (single mailbox, multiple devices)
• Mobile auto logon
• Speech Integration, Directory, Settings and Groupware Calendar and Contacts
• Fax integration
• Thin client support (Citrix, Windows)
• Old Voicemail key emulation (Octel, Audix etc)
• Networking
• Failover
• User Management
• Scalable
• Modular

Did I miss anything?

Oh, by the way, Unified Communications is completely separate - that uses different client software and application servers.

Message me if you need further info about a good service led distributor.

I’ve been having fun.

I got the idea of a diagram from David Armano - his blogging story is here, worth a quick read. He always seems to have a diagram or two to communicate his ideas and I’ve been impressed. I thought I’d have a go at that…only I can’t draw very well.

So, the mindmap below was created at http://bubbl.us - a free hosted service for mindmaps. A very simple to use and quite exquisite user interface. It took only a few minutes to work out how to use.

I love mindmap interfaces anyway, being the most gratifying way to communicate difficult concepts visually without any visual design talent (believe me).

The MOST special part of this map though is that it is ‘embedded’ on the page. It is read only, but, you can click, drag and zoom in and out on the page. Give it a go…I’ve been messing with it all evening.

No matter that I haven’t finished the map, I can update the web application, and it will update on the page, and anywhere else I’ve shared it, with no further effort.

One snag, the solution is being re-written right now, and we’ll have to wait for the problem free embedding version for you Firefox viewers. I’ve added the diagram (exported naturally) below for a full view.

If you can’t see it properly, click this image

The next step is for me to see what it looks like in a Reader.

The idea behind this mindmap is to group technologies together to see what patterns emerge and to remind how things might fit together.

Companies are going to find it harder than ever to prioritise where they spend their communications budget.

Unified Messaging groups together message types now merging into one client (although not a single application). Unified Communications are merging into another - if that’s your definition too - it’s not everyone’s.

The more established technologies have more facets, it seems to indicate there’s more to come from the asynchronous and newer techs. I also think that asynchronous technologies will merge into a single interface….stands to reason.

I suppose in the end, you have to decide what you want to communicate, who to, and how. This diagram merely shows the how.

I know I have to add micro-blogging, but feel free to chip in, or let me know where I’ve got it wrong.

Could society could be stupid enough to label completely different disciplines with the same moniker?

I used to wonder.

Communications meant both “telephone technology” and a “job title within some PR function”

Back in the day though, telephones seemed completely different to the ‘other sort’ of communications, which seemed to be about getting your message published in a newspaper.

Well, doesn’t this single word make more sense this year? (Happy 2008)

Today, you can draw a theoretical line between real time voice communications, through other one to one technologies, to messaging, and on to other asynchronous group based communications like blogs, wikis and social software.

So my theme is that;

• Marketing is talking - originally to a very wide audience, but now steadily being segmented (segmented, segmented) into smaller and smaller targeted audiences.
• Real time communications is talking - originally one to one, but now steadily being increased from one to one conversation into larger and larger targeted audiences.
• Communications has finally lived up to it’s original promise.
• Cisco bought a Web Conference company last year. That tells you the same thing - communications is communications, and wherever the technology falls between the two endpoints, it is all interelated.

So: communications were unified enough already. Therefore, doesn’t the phrase ’Unified Communications’ lack definition, ambition and a sense of purpose?

Get a telephone, and surround it with lots of other technology like IM, everyone seems to say. Perhaps the better approach is to define a business process, and then telephone enable if needs be.

Voice is used to persuade, to seal the deal. But the fact is, written communications are just as useful as voice communications and sometimes a great deal more.

I suppose I could have just rung you all to tell you, but this seemed like a better way.

PBX based companies had better think this through.

   It feels like the calm before the carnage.

This week, Microsoft aimed at the Enterprise market with OCS, and Microsoft Admins over the world pricked up their ears.

To be able to apply their hard earned Active Directory and networking skills to telephony, and not to mention finding a new use for all that spare rack space, it must have felt like heaven.

At the other end, the SMB’s also got something. For those who have never heard of Active Directory in other words, 3 Com announced it’s support for the open source Asterisk PBX. This aimed squarely at those interested in a good deal for their telephone plumbing. 

Open source lacks credibility? Well, here’s some  - and an excellent article from Dan York indicates some traction. Comparing Asterisk to the rise of Linux is probably spot on from what I’ve seen recently.

Trixbox had a stand at IP07 - (I thought it was VOIP for business show, my mistake), and it looked like theirs was one of the busiest stands. A cool colour scheme must be the reason.

Anyone who says Asterisk won’t be a player, well, that’s like saying no corporate would ever install linux based applications.

Back in May we saw $6.5B of linux server sales in a quarter. That’s only 7 or 8 years worth of activity, without credibility.

Genesys supporting Asterisk is somewhat of a suprise given who they’re owned by,  but hedging bets was never a bad thing. 

So - two potentially massively impactful solutions gain traction on a crowded staid technology market. The neighbourhood just isn’t the same any more - that banging sound must be the ‘for sale’ signs going up.

This time next year Rodney……..(for Only Fools and Horses fans)

This linked article from Red Herring shows Jajah has linked up with eHarmony dating site - I wonder who made the first move?

Whoever, it’s a great idea, and the service will presumably hide your number from people you’re not sure you want to know! I picked this snippet up from Alec of Iotum who also looks to treat voice only as a component part of a wider application.

The article, and Jajah’s website shows their burgeoning integrations list, and I feel this will be absolutely key to winning mindshare in the voice application market…even the hosted one.

In fact, voice right now is very reminiscent of the early fax market.

The market in the early 90’s seemed to be dominated by Unix based proprietary systems - check out this quote from Network Computing in the 90’s

Fax servers today are more or less tied to the software delivered with them, at least on the server side. Some fax servers support the Communications Applications Specification (CAS) and can therefore work with a desktop application that supports CAS. So to an extent, you can plug in the desktop client of choice, but you may end up losing some of the unique abilities of the server (such as sharing common phone books or accounting).

(more…)

Are you at your desk, are you on the phone…these are the two key ingredients to make your Real Time Unified Communications cake rise.

Presence, I think they call it, and, exposing (all of) the PBX telephone handset status to software is what’s needed.

Did anyone say Busy Lamp Field?

However, whether you can have cost effective UC might come down to whether you run a Call Centre.

I’ll explain (more…)

I have often teased telephony types and asked them ‘what’s the point of VOIP, or IP Telephony systems? Well, I found a plausible answer.

My semi serious point was originally because companies spend money on infrastructure and skills to change to IPT, and to me, it wasn’t immediately evident what the benefits are, and, well frankly, how do you measure ROI?

Well, I found a reasonable answer regarding old telephone system replacement which I thought I’d share. Bear with me….what I’m getting at here, is that completely open Third Party CTI interfaces cost different amounts on different switches, and it is extremely important for Unified Communications (Unified Messaging is fine either way)

If you buy the wrong telephony platform, you may not not realise that the CTI interface costs a fortune (£40K), and that no clever developers are likely going to bother trying to sell to customers with that overhead (when they can sell to customers who don’t have those costs instead)

NB: FOR THOSE THINKING SIP - ITS NOT A THIRD PARTY CTI, SO YOU’RE NOT COVERED

The wrong switch then, will likely restrict you to telephone system manufacturer’s software, or possibly their selected partners’, which often won’t integrate to the things you want it to. 

Worse, when you try and justify UC in particular, the ROI is still in early stages, and adding a wodge of cash to the bill just ain’t going to help you deploy very useful tools for your information workers.

As I understand it, IPT companies Mitel and Cisco are delivering the the right subset of CTI connectivity out of the box. UC developers and customers are not far behind. My Mitel partner friends knew that I wasn’t anti, and now I proved it

Click to Dial allows you to locate a number in some contact database and call it, but if the user is then handling the ongoing conversation on their telephone device - this precludes all other potential channels of communication - and it misses the point.

By Contrast, UC is about delivering a single user interface for Real Time Conversations - and these conversations need handling tools. See the picture below.

We’re all getting used to conversations being started in any of multiple modes, including IM, Telephone, Audio, Web, Video and Desktop conferences. The challenge is a consistent and single interface to handle the conversation

We might want to

• put people on hold
• mute them
• invite someone else either by IM phone or email (or by clicking their name)
• Consult with another colleague separately on a different channel 
• drop a specific person
• start a desktop share or make a presentation
• Record the whole thing

The tool also needs to do two things - show whether someone is at their desk, or not, and show when they’re on the phone (that defines presence for me). The first one is simple, the second can be approached in any number of different ways.

The ultimate goal is to share this information with people that you choose, in any organisation and whatever phone device you happen to be using. 

Have you seen a single interface to handle all of those conversations? Not many people have as yet, but it doesn’t stop them claiming to have a UC solution

My Teamwork from Alcatel Lucent has the best conversation GUI that I have seen and it also solves a lot of the problems that desktop installed solutions would have by being completely browser based, meaning that anyone can join in with any channel of communication.

It also covers a little of the other two aspects of UC, by which I mean incoming call handling and application integration.

Unified Communications is taking us away from being reliant on feature rich telephony  devices like proprietary IP Telephony handsets and corporate mobile devices.

I’ve been looking at the concept for a while and On Accenture’s Trivergence blog, Andy Zimmerman coins the “trivergence” phrase, I can link to the explanation.

The reason I picked it up is that one of the key aspects of this trivergence (type of convergence) is to abstract a user interface to any application, away from the devices that you use, onto the network, and accessible via the PC screen or browser.

To a degree I guess this has been happening since the demise of the typewriter, but this will continue into disruptive communications solutions. Perhaps its why Gartner warn against buying handsets with screens.

As an example, the Ipod is easier to stuff full of music when using iTunes, rather than navigating and downloading from a website from a screen measuring 2 inches square.

Further, he relates

About two years ago, when Accenture’s Innovation Center was researching Trivergence, we mocked up an application that transferred certain cellphone controls from the handset to a PC display, which we dubbed a SoftPanel. In focus groups, cellphone users were asked to perform a set of tasks (managing contact lists, sifting through voice mail, buying ring tones, etc.) first on the cellphone itself and then on the SoftPanel.

The results were unambiguous. Nearly 100% of respondents said they preferred using the SoftPanel for these tasks. It was clear to almost everyone that there should be a seamless integration between the PC and the handset – with each device doing what it does best, and doing it on a regular basis.

 Also he says

one of Accenture’s analysts sent me these comments from a discussion on cellphone usability:

“Mobile devices are still not intuitive enough for average users to navigate, and consumers do not have the time or interest to go through carriers’ service catalogues to figure out just exactly what is available to them.

“As carriers continue to layer on services, discovery mechanisms on mobile handsets are critical to enabling users to access desired applications and services with the simple touch of a button.”

Personally, I use Google Reader because I can access the pre-configured reader and articles when on the train through a browser. It is an example of application control being browser based rather than being developed specifically for each device individually. The application persists across whicever device I happen to be using, and this only succeeds if the application server is browser based.

Another post from the Trivergence blog, around Grand Central, shows how a very feature rich call control of an inbound telephony service has been abstracted from telephone devices all together by being browser based.

We’ve all used dozens of phone devices in our time, perhaps future phones will be simpler instead of more complex.

There is a lack of innovation in the communications world, as indicated by some of the industry watchers, here at techdirt and amusingly here too, around Telcos and PSTN.

What about innovation from premises based IP Telephony PBX providers, after all businesses pay through the nose for LAN and WAN upgrades and shiny new telephone systems.

Apparently though, according to Cisco at the latest presentation, the real benefits to businesses going forward are now acknowledged to be the applications and not the plumbing, and so the move towards renaming solutions from IP Telephony to Unified Communications goes on.

There is an echo here of when the department of unemployment renamed themselves to the department of employment, but the thought counts (with some honourable exceptions I know).

There’s an analogy in my previous post, and I’ll give that another go here, and compare Communications to a new kitchen (it beats using cars again). Hope i don’t overdo it..

Companies want to have a very functional kitchen (communications) arrangement - sure there are components to decide over, but the overall effect and usefulness for the whole family is paramount.

We’re looking to the plumbing companies, (Cisco IP Telephony of course) and kitchen sink and appliances manufacturers (Microsoft and other software applications) to work together. An average new kitchen is usually good value at about £10K, and you cut your cloth accordingly.

Trouble is, we already have a deal in place for new appliances - so we’re slightly caught out in the investment stakes already.

What we really want is the kitchen sink to plug into the existing plumbing, and have enough left over for the 5 ring hob in a central island with a groovy extractor (sorry).

We don’t really want to have to renew all the plumbing in the house, but we will if it makes a big difference to the overall effect - maybe.

The existing old pipes currently do not work with our new appliances (we can’t even click to dial) - so what are the options?

Do the new pipes work with the new appliances? Not without an adaptor - and how much does the adaptor cost, well, how about £40K? I heard this actual figure from a prospect recently, so it is heresay, but to open an API port…it’s a bit steep isn’t it…just for an adaptor?

 £40K?

Ah.

So, the old pipes don’t enable the new appliances, but the new pipes don’t either? It actually stinks, but then badly put together plumbing can do that can’t it.

IPT manufacturers seem to want innovation, but only if it has their label on it. Fine, but it’s like buying a car, and being charged twice as much if you want someone elses steering wheel. It just ain’t the way to win loyalty. Get real.

If you don’t believe me - see what it costs if you want to plug a SIP phone into a Cisco Unified Communications manager. The software port licence cost to connect the SIP phone is SIX times the cost of connecting their own phone. I was there when they explained this to a frankly silent room of customers.

Also, does a SIP server expose telephony endpoint status….only in a very limited way, and not so anything extremely useful can be deployed.

Developers steer well clear in this sort of commercial environment, and innovation is effectively stifled until the IP Telephony companies get around to integrating that new company they bought.

Sorry, correction, integrating six new competing and conflicting architecture companies they bought.

In this sort of environment, it does seem ripe for a change.