* Adomo combines voicemail with e-mail; Sprint combines IM with cell phones
Two interesting recent announcements focus on improving end user access to critical business information.
Adomo announced Voice Messaging for Exchange, an appliance that allows users to receive voicemail using Microsoft Exchange and the Outlook client. The Adomo appliance, which can be deployed using a distributed architecture, receives voicemail from a variety of normal telephony or VoIP sources and then presents it to users in their inbox just like e-mail. Users can send the voicemail to a telephone of their choice or they can play the messages directly from within the Outlook client, Outlook Web Access, a Blackberry device or a PocketPC-enabled device.
One of the reasons I like products like this is they bring to voicemail the ease of access and review that is available in e-mail. In normal voicemail, there is no ability to prioritize messages, quickly scan the identity of the callers or process the messages as efficiently as with e-mail. Consequently, traditional voicemail is more difficult and more time-consuming than e-mail. Making voicemail accessible through an e-mail inbox will simply make it more useful and more accessible.
Earlier in February, Sprint announced it is deploying the OZ Mobile IM Gateway and Mobile IM Client for users of Sprint’s PCS Vision service. Sprint’s offering allows mobile phone users to employ AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger, although the OZ Mobile IM Gateway also supports Yahoo Messenger and ICQ.
Here again, the focus of this product is on usability and the extension of presence. If you’ve become accustomed to using IM in the workplace, as about 25% of e-mail users currently do, then limiting IM to the desktop underutilizes the potential that presence can offer. While the OZ gateway is focused on consumers, most use of IM in the workplace still consists of consumer offerings, so having the ability to use consumer IM on a mobile phone will bring value to the workplace as well.
