Microsoft Exchange Server 2007: Tony Redmond's Guide to Successful Implementation

7.13 Unified Messaging 737

Chapter 7

 Because of the increase in potential business, a wider range of system

integrators will be available to help companies to design, deploy, and

support UC.

There will also be some challenges. For example:

 The cost of transforming outdated telephony and Windows infra-

structures may cause organizations to make trade-offs as to what parts

of the infrastructure they will modernize first. Some may decide to

concentrate on telephony, some on Windows, and some will attack

both to produce a totally integrated infrastructure.

 Demos of UC invariably get the creative juices going, but there’s a lot

of hard work between running a demo and running UC for a large

organization.

 Some companies will resist what seems to be an invitation to put all

of their UC eggs into the one Microsoft basket; heterogenous support

for UC is still an issue as not everyone runs Windows.

There is too much content in the world of UC to attempt to cover it

here. Instead, let’s look at what Unified Messaging means in the context of

Exchange 2007.

7.13 Unified Messaging

Unified Messaging has been around for a long time. The industry normally

defines UM to be a system that provides access to email, voicemail, and fax

services via phones and email clients. I remember visiting a Nortel develop-

ment group in the late 1990s to see their latest technology for integrating

voicemail with Exchange. Nortel had a special form of Windows server that

incorporated about 80GB of disk space to store voicemail that fit into their

PBX. An add-on to Outlook allowed users to listen to voicemail. The system

worked well, but it was expensive (over $100 extra per user), required special

hardware and software, would only support specific models of PBX, and cre-

ated work that was very much outside the boundaries of a normal deploy-

ment of Exchange. The overall cost and complexity of deploying and

supporting UM was the usual block that stopped companies from translating

an initial interest in UM to an actual implementation.

Perhaps because of the cost and complexity involved in connecting

email to traditional corporate telephony systems, up to the time that they

started to lay out the feature set for Exchange 2007, Microsoft never really