|
Exchange
2010 Unified Messaging combines voice and e-mail messaging in the
Exchange Server store and integrates telephony systems with Exchange.
Many companies manage voice
mail separately from e-mail. Usually, voice messages and e-mail exist
as separate inboxes on separate servers, and users access them using
different tools. Frequently, each communication tool requires a
separate address list, which can make it difficult to keep all address
lists synchronized. Unified Messaging brings these tools together and
offers an integrated store and user experience for both voice mail and e-mail.
Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging provides the following core features:
Voice mail Also known as call answering, it enables the system to answer the telephone and record a message when the user is unavailable. Outlook Voice Access
OVA provides users with access to their Exchange mailbox from a phone.
It enables you to use any telephone to retrieve e-mail, voice mail,
calendar, personal contacts, and to access the company directory. You
can also create messages to both internal and external recipients. With
Exchange 2010 SP1 you can also change the sorting of the messages—for
example, you can play the oldest voice mail first.
Note:
An excellent Quick Start Guide for Outlook Voice Access 2010 is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=137165.
Play on Phone
This feature lets a Unified Messaging–enabled user listen to a voice
message using a telephone instead of playing it over computer speakers
or headphones. Voicemail Preview The Unified Messaging role uses Automatic
Speech Recognition (ASR) on newly created voice messages. When users
receive voice mail, they receive messages that contain the voice
recordings along with a text
transcription that Unified Messaging creates from recordings. UM also
learns from the individual and will improve over time by using a
grammar-generation algorithm for the most used words per mailbox. This
algorithm is performed by the mailbox assistant once a month. Voicemail
Preview is not available in all languages. Exchange 2010 SP1 increases
the accuracy of voice mail preview and also includes the ability to set
the UM policy to automatically send voice mail messages to Microsoft
for analysis so that Voicemail Preview can be improved, especially in
languages other than English. SP1 also adds additional languages such
as European Spanish. Protected voice mail Unified Messaging provides this functionality so that callers can send private mail, which Microsoft
Rights Management Services (RMS) protects. However, Unified Messaging
restricts users to only forwarding, copying, and extracting the voice
file from mail by applying the Do Not Forward template. Auto Attendant
Allows callers to look up a person and identify his or her extension
number from the organization's global address list. With auto attendant
you can also create custom menus for callers, define different
greetings based on the business hours, describe to callers how to find
the people they are calling, and connect callers to the operator. Call Answering Rules
The user can configure a custom experience for incoming callers by
creating and customizing call-answering rules based upon different
factors such as time of day, free/busy status, Caller ID, and so on. Message Waiting Indicator (MWI) Exchange Server notifies users of the presence and number of new or unread voice mail messages on their phones. Missed Call and Voice Mail Notifications via SMS Users can receive notifications about missed calls and new voice messages on their cell phones in a text message via the Short Messaging Service (SMS). Calling Name Display
Exchange 2010 SP1 enhances the support for displaying caller names if
your PBXs or IP gateways pass the information in their SIP INVITE. You
can identify that the name was passed from the PBX when you see the
name in quotes, such as Voice mail from "Joel Stidley".
|
Ankur Kothari
Senior Technical Product Manager, Exchange Server, Microsoft Corporation
Creating a voice mail
product in today's world involves looking at how people work today,
which invariably differs from how voice mail solved a need in 1975.
Today, people rely on many communication technologies to achieve their
business needs—the telephone being only one of them.
What we learned from customers and our research was that users are overwhelmed with information—information overload
is a term we heard many times. Helping solve this challenge is
something that we hope Exchange Unified Messaging will do, by placing
voice mail in your e-mail Inbox and making it accessible in a number of
languages. We've done some great things in making a voice mail message
very similar to the e-mail experience by introducing speech-to-text
technology, which will create a text-based Voicemail Preview of a
message—one of many new features that will help users to be more
productive in the now.
|
|
