What do a successful technology implementation and a good sound system at a concert have in common? Both have no feedback and very little distortion. It has certainly been true of our unified messaging project at Hughes & Luce.

Four months have passed since our firm-wide rollout of CallPilot Desktop Messaging software from Nortel, and I’m happy to report that it has been a great success. In fact, surveying our users to ask what they thought of the new features, I received nothing but positive responses.

How It All Began
The project actually began in 2001 when we started planning for the replacement of our two 15-year-old telephone and voicemail systems. A key item in our product selection was the unified messaging feature of each system. We looked at IP telephony but wound up selecting a traditional PBX system. We evaluated the products available from Nortel, Avaya and Siemens; and what we finally selected was a pair of Nortel Option 61c switches and CallPilot voicemail systems for both offices. This combination came closest to meeting our needs

Although we wanted unified messaging, we felt strongly that voicemail and e-mail systems should be kept separate—we didn’t want to risk a situation in which we could lose access to both, simultaneously. Since the CallPilot system runs on a server that is connected to the PBX and the LAN but is independent of Exchange, our desire for independent systems was fully met. The link between our desktop computers and voicemail is actually an add-in to Outlook, so that voicemail and e-mail populate two different inboxes inside Outlook. It might be argued that this isn’t really unified messaging, but to me it looks, acts and quacks like a “unified messaging” duck.

The Benefits—Loud and Clear
At first I was skeptical about the value of integrating voicemail with Outlook. After all, I had managed my voicemail nicely for years without it. So as with most new technologies, I did the installation myself first.

It is not the ability to play a voicemail on my computer that is handy, but the ability to quickly review and handle the voicemails received. At a glance, I can tell who called, when they called and how long-winded they were (the attorneys are also praising this as a benefit of the system).

Additional benefits we’ve derived from managing voicemail in Outlook include the ability to forward voice messages to any e-mail address, internal or external and to move them to an e-mail folder. In addition, we can profile that e-mail into our DMS, easily transcribe voicemail, remotely view them via Outlook on Citrix and provide e-mail notification when voice messages arrive—a particular favorite of our BlackBerry users.

Not Totally Perfect
We’ve identified a couple features that could affect other systems even though they’re specific to the CallPilot software. The native voicemail file format is a proprietary format from Nortel that creates a compressed and relatively small file size. However, when a user forwards a voicemail to an e-mail address, it is automatically converted to a .wav file, expanding it about 10 times in size. Thus, a one-minute voicemail in CallPilot format starts out at 125 KB; but after being converted, it ends up closer to 1 MB. Over time, if voicemail is forwarded and stored frequently, storage issues could surface.

Also, users must be conscious of choosing the proper way to forward voicemail. If they use desktop messaging to forward to someone else in the firm and use the e-mail address instead of the voicemail box address, he/she will not be able to retrieve that voicemail in the traditional manner with a telephone. This could affect a traveler who checks  voicemail by calling in.

It’s Good to Be Unified
Despite these small glitches, the future of unified messaging looks good at our firm. It has proven to be a useful tool for our attorneys for managing and preserving another form of client communications. And our biggest wish list item should be filled later this summer when Nortel releases an update to the software that will allow users to play voicemail from within a Citrix session.

About our author . . .

Sean Curry, IT Director at Hughes & Luce in Dallas, has been working in the IT field for 20+ years. He has been a member of and a volunteer in ILTA for 10 years and currently serves on ILTA’s Board of Directors. You can reach him via e-mail at Sean.Curry@HughesLuce.com.