World Telecommunication Day 1999 |
Woody Allen humorously parodied the quest for constant connectivity a couple of decades ago with a character who spent an entire movie calling his answering service to give them the phone number where he could be reached. Today's business people, particularly those who travel regularly, might fail to see the humor as they struggle to cope with an growing onslaught of messages and formats - voice mail, e-mail, fax, SMS (short message service) - from wherever they happen to be.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to access all your messages, regardless of their original form, from wherever you are and in whatever format suits you best? You can - sort of. The answer is ''unified messaging.''
Unified messaging uses the fundamental store-and-forward concept of all messaging along with format conversions to separate message form from content.
In a typical real world example, a server forwards your faxes as graphics files and your voice mail messages as audio files to your e-mail as file attachments. Some systems allow you dial in and have a message server read you all of your messages, whether they originally arrived as voice or e-mail.
Can you listen to a fax?
While some unified messaging proponents hype the any-to-any model, some conversions don't make practical sense - would you really want to access your voice-mail messages as faxes? Most existing services hedge somewhere - you can be notified of faxes by phone, for example, but you cannot access them.
A number of companies offer unified messaging products and services today. Jfax.com provides unified messaging services in the United States, Europe and the Pacific Rim.
Users get a telephone number in any of 60 cities in the world where they can receive voice messages and faxes that are converted and forwarded to an existing e-mail account. They can also access e-mail, voice mail and fax headers from a touch-tone phone.
PhoneSoft, an IBM Solution Developer partner, makes unified messaging products for Lotus Notes. Unified MailCall functions as a voice gateway for Notes, storing messages as audio files and forwarding them to the recipient's Notes mailbox. It also allows access to both voice and e-mail messages (using text-to-speech) from a phone.
For those who prefer to leave the laptop behind without losing access to e-mail, MailTel, from Acorn Communications Corp., is a service for selectively copying e-mail from a POP3 (standard Internet) account to a MailTel server, where it can be accessed from a phone using text-to-speech. The service can also notify users by pager or fax when important e-mail arrives.
In the future, voice recognition, optical character recognition (which converts images of words to text), text-to-speech and other emerging technologies may make any-to-any format conversions practical. For the moment, most of us could be satisfied with a single place to look for all those messages.
Charles Tobermann