Unified Messaging

I made a last minute change and decided to go to a talk on Exchange unified messaging. Imagine having a number to call where someone could read your e-mail to you—Outlook voice access. So far, they are focusing on setup—nice thing is that there is a useful default if the user has not gone through the setup process—including voice synthesis of the person's name. It is a little surreal to watch a demonstration of someone going through a voicemail setup process. J Cool—setup. Though it can be interactive, can also be done via script in a shell—thousands or tens of thousands of users.

The UI is singularly unimpressive, but the demos are great—showing how easy it is to set up voicemail menus—with voice recognition. Within seconds of typing "sales" as the phrase that the system will listen for, the presenter is saying "sales" and having the phone call routed correctly.

When it comes to listening to voicemail, it is a great feature that you can type in any phone number and have the voicemail played on any phone rather than on your laptop speakers (imagine being in an airport, using Outlook Web Access [OWA] and you see from your inbox that you got a voicemail—you note a pay-phone's phone number and get Exchange to call that phone and deliver your voicemail message).

OWA also allows you to set your voicemail "out of office" message. Very impressive demo of someone using voice control to listen to voicemail and e-mail messages. Exchange even realized that one of his messages was in Spanish, so the text-to-voice engine spoke in Spanish rather than English. There was not a single mis-step—every time, first time, he could control his messages with his voice. He could control his calendar, and he could inform other attendees at a meeting that e would be late. Imagine a lecturer having the option to send such a message to everyone in a lecture that he/she was going to be late. Marvelous.

Looks like, if we wanted to do that, we would need to have got our telephony systems from specific vendors: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/telephony-advisor.mspx

Not sure if they will be extending support to other phone systems…