Unified Messaging (UM) is the new terminology for the "smash-up" or convergence of heterogenous technologies like: e-mail, voicemail, faxes, phone texting, and video into a single point of access for the enduser. This repository can be exposed in a varity of ways, allowing for multiple, flexible access. Get all your various communication inputs from your email box on your PC for instance, or from your cell phone or from a WEB browser, or call in and get an interactive voice response attendant to read your messages back to you. The UM concept is to gather all possible messaging objects and present them back in a single framework accessible through a wide variety of devices and connection modalities. The result is a simplified user experience: one place to check for or review messages. Ease of use means real productivity gains. Versitility of access equates to the same. Whether I'm on the road or at my desk in the office, I can get to my important datasets. I can remain responsive to people trying to connect with me. Inside the smashup each separate commincation technology gains the added feature sets of the other genres. For example: voicemail becomes an annotatable datafile that can be added to an email. Now my email has sound and my voicemail has data.
Learn more...