* Potential difficulities of employing unified messaging systems
Editor’s Note: Starting Dec. 5, this newsletter will be renamed Unified Communications. The name change will reflect the newsletter’s broader focus as we report on the industry’s move toward a unified messaging model. We hope you will continue to enjoy the newsletter and thank you for reading.
Unified messaging offers the potential for significant gains in user productivity and reduced IT investments in managing disparate elements of the corporate infrastructure. However, employing a unified messaging system presents some potential difficulties.
First, as has been mentioned previously in this newsletter, is the issue of storage. Storing faxes, voicemails and other content in message stores that are already growing at more than 40% per year won’t be welcomed by many IT managers. Although the overall storage requirements by an organization may actually decrease as a result of integrating all communications into a unified communications architecture, the impact on e-mail stores could be significant.
Second, and probably much more difficult for many organizations, will be the notion of storing voicemails in a unified mailbox. Given the growing demand to archive e-mail content for purposes of compliance with e-discovery or regulatory requests, what will regulators or courts require for a voicemail stored in a mailbox?
Fundamentally, there is no difference in the content between a voicemail and an e-mail, since they are both just bits of data stored in a single repository. However, there is no practical and reliable way as yet to convert a voicemail to text for purposes of archiving. The options for a company faced with such a problem are either to have someone listen to each voicemail for necessary content or have someone transcribe it to a text file. There are reasonably priced services for the latter option, such as CopyTalk, that will transcribe an unlimited number of four-minute dictations for a flat fee of $59.95 per month. Although that might be workable for senior executives, for example, it’s neither a scalable or long-term solution to the problem.
While unified messaging is an extremely useful capability, I believe that it will spawn discovery requests and court decisions regarding voice content that technology won’t be able to satisfy right away. I’m interested in what you think – please send me your thoughts on this issue.
