October 15, 2001
  By Peter Morrissey

The distinguishing aspects of Nortel's CallPilot are its sophisticated, voice-activated IVR system, which lets it receive spoken commands, and its support of a wider variety of e-mail packages than any other UM product, including Lotus Notes, Exchange and GroupWise plus a variety of POP3 and IMAP clients. In fact, we had a hard time finding a package that CallPilot does not support. The product's main downfall is that it does not have text-to-speech capabilities, which would make it possible to check e-mail messages from a telephone. Nortel says it plans to add this in CallPilot 2.0, due out next year.

Nortel shipped us an IP-enabled Meridian PBX, a legacy PBX that supports Ethernet/IP phones. It also sent a few Ethernet phones plus a couple of analog models. The CallPilot server is essentially a PC on a blade, running Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. The blade was mounted in the Meridian PBX.

The equipment was shipped to us and installed by a local reseller with which Nortel made arrangements. This is the business model Nortel traditionally uses for its voice products, but it did not turn out to be an ideal arrangement for us -- there were delays and miscommunications getting things set up. The model appears to be designed so the reseller does any major configuration changes. This setup is common in the voice world, but a little difficult for us to get used to. In fairness, we're not sure if the problems were because the reseller was inexperienced with the product, paying customers were receiving priority or both. What we can say for sure is that if you are going to purchase one of these products, choose your reseller carefully.

Nortel's integration model is the opposite of Cisco's. All synchronization between e-mail and voicemail is done at the e-mail client. We were impressed that GroupWise, Outlook and Express, and Lotus Notes as well as Netscape and Eudora Pro clients are supported via an appropriate plug-in. We tried Outlook, Outlook Express and GroupWise clients. They all worked well, though we had a few minor glitches with the GroupWise client.

When we left a voice message on the voicemail system, it appeared in the summary of e-mail messages within a few seconds, showing the date and time it was received as well as the phone number and caller information, when available. This made it easy to manage lots of voicemail messages (especially compared with listening to and managing them through the phone). We also were able to use sliding pointers to quickly advance or restart a message anywhere and adjust the volume. This is a level of time-saving control that is not possible using phone access. We could easily save messages in a .wav file format, and send the audio as an attachment to anyone with a multimedia PC.

It also had a button that could continue playing the message on the phone if we suddenly decided the message warranted more privacy than PC speakers in a cubicle would provide. Once we clicked this button, the product stopped playing the message and called our phone, which started playing the message when we answered. Cisco's Unity had a similar option, but it was buried under about half a dozen clicks.

Nortel's IVR feature was hands-free heaven. For example, when accessing voicemail, a couple dozen commands could be issued verbally, letting us handle messages without touching the phone. All the typical commands that you would use to listen to, skip and navigate through messages on the keyboard could be spoken. The name for each command can be customized to something quicker or more intuitive for the user. Training it to the user's voice is also possible, though it worked well out of the box.

CallPilot 201i 1.07, Meridian 1 Option 11C PBX, M3900 and I2004 telsets, $27,545 for 24 ports. Available: Now. Nortel Networks Corp., (905) 863-0000, (800) 466-7835; fax (905) 863-8408. www.nortelnetworks.com