The Benefits of Unified Messaging

As part of a recent client interaction and whiteboarding session, I was asked to express my views about the benefits that Unified Messaging might deliver in terms of enhanced collaboration. In my reply, I acknowledged that we are well into the era of Unified Messaging (UM) as close to 1/3 of enterprises are in the process of deploying infrastructure to unite telephone and email systems. This trend started off as a way to lower operational costs and deploy IP telephony, but has now grown far beyond its original scope. The future of Unified Messaging will enable an entirely new class of rich and interactive collaboration as well as much smarter infrastructure management. High definition video is certainly only a few steps behind voice as the next logical media-stream we will add to our networks.

One of the changes we will soon see to workgroup collaboration is what we call “Asymmetrical Messaging” whereby a voicemail may be replied to with an email (and vice-versa), or a message instantly converted to text by speech recognition agents. This text could then be automatically appended to a client’s record for future reference. These new types of interactions will dramatically enhance our collaboration experiences since voice is a much richer communication medium than plain text.

Research (and human experience) clearly demonstrates that it is far easier for us to detect emotions and intent from listening than from reading. However, it is usually much easier and faster to scan through a long text (speed-read) to get a feel for a situation. Trying to “speed-listen” to a lengthy recorded conversation would not be effective and might give most users bad headaches. UM will enable us to choose the media best suited for the task at hand.

The integration of calendaring and voice systems will also enable us to conduct more effective meetings – by simply inviting a conference bridge to a meeting, we can have the bridge agent record the entire meeting and automatically send a link of the conversation to all attendees. Smart voice tags can be used to identify action items, tasks and due dates, and automatically update our calendars or project plans.

The ability to consult our calendars and interactively book meetings while on a phone call will soon be as simple as conferencing in our calendar agent who will be able to reply to spoken commands such as “When am I free next week?” The same will go for address book lookups – “Call John Smith on his mobile” and smart reminders – “SMS me at 4 PM to remind me of my dentist appointment.” All these interactions will be logged in our collaboration systems for consultation and review. It will soon be easy for a user to request a unified composite view of the communications he has had in the last 60 days with an individual, whether via phone, email or other social networks.

Another exciting possibility is Intelligent Attachments & Smart Delivery. Intelligent Attachments are documents that a user can have emailed out by simply requesting them from the phone server. Smart Delivery is the ability to request that an email message be forwarded as a synthetic voice message, or request that a voice message be forwarded to an email account, in effect choosing the way a user wishes to interact with the content.

These applications and more we have not yet imagined will augment our capacity to deal with complex projects, shifting schedules and distributed virtual teams. Our productivity will be enhanced and soon we will not be able to remember how we functioned without these applications at our command. However, they will also need to be well designed against abuse and hacks so that users feel confident using them. The management capabilities will need to be fully integrated with existing directory services and identity management platforms for fast provisioning and de-provisioning. Of course these new capabilities will require copious amounts of additional processing and storage, but this will be a small price to pay for the enhanced collaboration and productivity they will enable.

– Pierre Chamberland
Pierre Chamberland is the Chief Energizing Officer at Messaging Architects.