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F E A T U R E

CallPilot Aces UM Challenge

October 15, 2001
By Peter Morrissey

Cisco Systems Unity

Cisco's Unity provides complete access to voice- and e-mail messages from either medium -- if you use Exchange as your e-mail system. So not only is it possible to access all your voicemail from Outlook/Exchange, but if you have access only to a phone, it's possible to have your e-mails read to you using the text-to-speech converter. If you are already an Exchange shop, this won't be a problem -- unless you decide to switch e-mail systems, something you won't be able to do without throwing out your whole voicemail and UM environment.

Cisco sent us its CallManager product to support its Ethernet phones. The hardware and software are purchased as a package that includes a rack-mountable Compaq server running Microsoft Windows 2000 with redundant disk and power supplies. The Unity software, which provided the voicemail and UM capabilities, comes in a similar package. Normally, for scalability purposes, the Unity software must run on a separate computer, but ours was installed on the same computer as the CallManager. The Unity software is scaled up by adding servers as new users come on board. You likely will have to add the Viewmail option to Outlook to get the full client functionality.

Synchronization between the voice- and e-mail environments was tight. For example, when a new e-mail arrived, the MWI (message-waiting indicator) on the Cisco phone went on instantly. And when a new voice message arrived, a pleasant voice said "You have new voicemail," immediately alerting us as the message appeared in our Outlook client summary. Voicemail messages accessed via Outlook were clear and crisp.

For one test I left a voicemail with the Cisco soft phone running on my Dell Inspiron 5000 notebook using its built-in microphone. The message still sounded great by the time it got to Outlook. Digitized voice is a wonderful thing. When playing voicemail, it was possible to move to any part of the message and even speed up the speech.

Unified-Messaging System Features

Click here to enlarge

Going in the other direction, the experience wasn't quite as pleasant. For example, when listening to my e-mail messages over the phone, the text-to-speech converter sounded mechanical. It was also entertaining (or annoying, depending on how much free time you had) to listen to a URL embedded in a message. The text-to-speech converter could not identify the string as a URL and attempted to pronounce the URL. For some URLs this works great. For others, it should have been spelled out letter by letter.

The Cisco system cannot accept speech commands -- so much for checking messages with your hands-free cell-phone apparatus. This weakness is balanced out by Cisco's inclusion of a soft phone, which makes it possible to access the corporate phone system using a laptop. Also, annoying about the Cisco system is that, when using it to listen to voice- and e-mail messages, you can't choose to listen to one over the other -- we always had to go through all our voicemail messages before getting to e-mail.

By the time you read this, Cisco will likely have released Unity 3.0; we took a look at Cisco's information on this release but did not notice any major feature improvements.

Unity 2.46, CallManager 3.07, MCS 7835, 7960 phones, starts at $160 per seat for four ports. Available: Now. Cisco Systems, (800) 553-6387, (408) 526-4000; fax (408) 526-4100. www.cisco.com

Peter Morrissey is a full-time faculty member of Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, and a contributing editor and columnist for Network Computing. Send your comments on this article to him at ppmorris@syr.edu.