This road-warrior nirvana comes to you courtesy of UM (unified messaging), which -- at least in theory -- brings seamless unification and easy access to voicemail, e-mail and in some cases fax messages. Since theory and reality don't always meet, however, we decided to find out how UM works in real life. And we discovered that, while it's not perfect, unified messaging is for real.

What Do Readers Think? Check out our e-poll results on unified messaging.

Many vendors are staking claims in the UM space, and there's no way we could have done justice to all of them in a hands-on review. Instead, we decided to concentrate on systems that support VoIP (voice over IP), a natural fit with UM technology. However, we still were left with a plethora of vendors. So we decided to invite only those vendors that participated in our VoIP RFP of Nov. 13, 2000 ("RFP: VoIP Invasion -- Are You Ready for It?"). This let us verify some of the claims made in the RFP by some of the biggest players in the industry, while also limiting the participants to a field of four. The disadvantage was that we eliminated coverage of a lot of other worthwhile products, but many of the vendors offering these were mentioned in our reader survey.

In our RFP we introduced eGen, a manufacturer of electrical generators that had been growing rapidly and was renovating a building on its new campus. The company was interested in running voice telephone services on its LAN, thus saving the cost of cabling for voice while also making additions, moves and changes more cost-effective. The RFP required vendors' offerings to scale to 10,000 phones on a VoIP PBX within months.

For this review, imagine that eGen has been successful, expanding rapidly and adding to its work force and customer base. Key to its success has been top-notch customer service, but problems are arising, mainly stemming from a leaner economy. Although the business is growing, tight profit margins mean doing more with the same number of employees: The sales force is straining to keep on top of new orders while spending lots of time on the road. Managers don't have the leisure to spend an hour each morning sorting through voicemail, e-mail and faxes. Users have called on IT to help them get a handle on the crucial information coming at them fast from all sides.

The time has clearly come for eGen to implement a UM solution. The idea is to work smarter, not harder. These systems don't come cheap, and a firm ROI (return on investment) figure is hard to pin down, but the cost savings for eGen in increased employee productivity and improved customer service should be considerable.

We went back to the original four vendors, inviting Alcatel, Avaya, Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks to the table. Only Cisco and Nortel had the guts to pony up this time. Alcatel's excuse was that it was between releases, and Avaya didn't have much to say about why it couldn't participate. This was disappointing, and we concluded that it just wasn't up to the task.

Instead, in addition to evaluating solutions from Cisco and Nortel, we decided to examine a service-provider solution from CyberTel, whose PR person had been banging at our door. What got our attention wasn't the banging, but the fact that the solution is designed to work in a standards-based environment by embracing SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), which continues to build momentum as the protocol of choice for voice communications. ISPs considering a jump into UM should consider the CyberTel solution, as should enterprises thinking about outsourcing to a VoIP provider.

How We Tested Unified-Messaging Systems Click here to enlarge

We required that the vendors send us VoIP PBX systems with four VoIP phones along with hardware and software to support the voicemail-UM integration. We supplied the e-mail infrastructure, which included Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise and other POP3 systems. One thing that surprised us was that Nortel was not willing to send us one of its Succession servers, which is its all-IP platform. In the RFP response, which required that products be deliverable by November 2000, the company committed to providing a Succession server. Now, almost a year later, it could deliver only a Meridian with an Ethernet card for VoIP access. To be fair, in the original RFP write-up, we also made a big deal about the fact that Cisco had proposed true VoIP-enabled conference phones from Polycom. When we checked recently, those weren't shipping yet either.

One reality we discovered was that even though the Cisco and CyberTel products make it possible, listening to an e-mail message over the phone is unpleasant. The technology for speech-text conversion, though straightforward, delivers jarring, uninflected, synthesized speech. There are other challenges as well. For example, I "listened" to the invoice of an online order form that included a number of lines of underscores for formatting purposes. The CyberTel product repeated every single underscore. That stopped being amusing after about the first half dozen. Thankfully, the Cisco product decided to ignore the underscores. Listening to e-mails got old quickly. Unless your users have a specific need to check e-mail from locations without Internet access, you probably won't be able to justify this feature.

In contrast, a voice message can easily be packaged into a digital audio file that can be played by an e-mail reader while maintaining its original form and quality. And you have the benefit of being able to organize the messages and control the speech in ways that are impossible with standard telephone access. We found that accessing voicemail from an e-mail environment is superior to traditional phone access and should be considered seriously by those who have to track lots of e-mail and voicemail.

What We Say

Nortel's CallPilot solution barely edged out Cisco's Unity for our Editor's Choice award. Nortel had some key strengths that put it over the edge, though it would have widened its margin of victory if it had a text-to-speech component and a soft phone like Cisco offers. Nortel supports just about any e-mail system imaginable. It also has an IVR (interactive voice response) system, capable of voice-activated commands, that provides the hands-free experience we'd hoped for. Cisco's biggest downfall was that it supports only one e-mail package, Microsoft Exchange. There is no reason Cisco couldn't add support for more e-mail systems -- in fact, the company said it is working on a version for Lotus Notes. One difference in the Cisco architecture, though, is that integration is done at the back end -- for example, between its UM server and the enterprise's e-mail server.

Nortel, on the other hand, does all its integration at the client end, which probably makes developing for it a bit easier. The disadvantage is that each desktop must have the necessary plug-ins. Nortel claims that it has developed ways to ease this pain by doing installations en masse. In general, we've found that installing and integrating voice, e-mail and voicemail services is not trivial. There are benefits, but you need to count the cost and factor it in.