Unified Messaging and Unified Communications
Joseph Parlas
Introduction
Welcome to the world of Unified Communications. But what does
that really entail? For most, it is a process in which all
information is shared in real-time mode. No longer is it valid to
wait one day or even 15 minutes for an answer to your question; it
now is done in a real time using many tools in the IP
Telecommunications tool chest. That's right, telecommunications is
now just another application, or I should say, a set of
applications, running within your environment. And it is critical
to communicate in real time. For instance, the government who may
have to respond quickly to a disaster or a company experiencing a
crisis needs to get all the employees together, even though they
reside in different parts of the world.
It all began in the early '90s when certain network equipment
manufacturers were declaring that all companies should think about
leaving their old "legacy" Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and move
towards IP Telephony. The main reasons cited were
- Only one set of cables would have to run to all the cubicles
since both voice and data run on the same copper wires, and
- Reduction of staff personnel since the network and telephony
communications teams would simply become one.
However each manufacture came up with their own flavor of rule
sets for bringing up calls over the data network (proprietary rule
sets known as protocols) to make phones ring. Since the protocols
were proprietary in nature between the phone devices and the IP
telephony PBXs, it was very difficult to work with different
manufactures of IP telephony equipment. In other words, the
manufactures were producing a great idea as long as you stayed with
them and did not try to mix with other vendors.
Despite this obvious drawback, IP telecommunications kept
emerging and so did the overall vision of simply saving money on
copper wire pulls and employee hiring. The new buzz words today are
unified messaging or
communications, and the vision is that everyone
will simply have one number which others would dial to reach you
despite having multiple types of devices with many possible number
combinations. All your faxes, emails, and voicemails will be
present in one single convenient inbox.
Here are vision statements of the two leading manufactures today
who are investing heavily in this area.
"Microsoft unified communications technologies
use the power of software to deliver complete communications -
messaging, voice, and video - across the applications and devices
that people use every day.
"Integrating the experiences you associate with the
telephone-phone calls, voice mail, and conferencing- the work you
do on a computer-documents, spreadsheets, instant messaging (IM),
e-mail, and calendars-has the power to fundamentally change the way
people work.
"We believe unified communications will transform business in
the coming decade in the same way e-mail changed the business
landscape in the 1990s.
"When phone services become software, are managed by a server,
and are delivered to desktop applications, many interesting things
happen." (1)
Cisco Unified Communications: Enriching
Collaboration through a Unified Workspace Today's organizations
must contend with increasingly complex communications environments
featuring a wide array of communications methods.
"Employees, business partners, customers, and constituents
communicate with one another through infinite combinations of
wired, wireless, and mobile phones; voice messaging; e-mail; fax;
mobile clients; and rich-media conferencing.
"Too often, however, these tools are not used as effectively as
they could be. The result is information overload, lack of agility,
and misdirected communications that delay decisions, slow down
processes, drive customers away, and reduce productivity.
Ineffective communications also result in missed revenue
opportunities because businesses are not prepared to quickly react
to market changes.
"Unified communications solutions have proven their ability to
help organizations solve such problems, enabling them to transform
their business, streamline business processes and reduce costs. For
years, companies of all sizes have been realizing the benefits that
carrying voice, data, video, and mobile communications across a
converged IP network can bring. Today, Cisco Unified Communications
Solutions unify voice, video, data, and mobile applications on
fixed and mobile networks, delivering media-rich collaboration
experience across business, government agency, and institutional
workspaces.
"These applications use the network as the platform to enhance
comparative advantage by accelerating decision time and reducing
transaction time." (2)
It is clear that the focus is using daily communications to
accomplish all work in the most efficient way and without having
the equipment that we use today get in our way. In Microsoft's
overall vision, the computer and phone are now represented as a
single instrument with which we execute our daily tasks.
Now the goal is to combine all communications into a single
device we use daily and which stores communications, whether fax,
email, or voice/video mail. However, we still have the proprietary
boundaries that all manufactures of this technology are facing.
Most companies today do not have a single solution from just one
vendor to supply their telecommunications needs. A single rule set
must be in place for all to work together, and in comes Session
Initialization Protocol, or more simply, SIP.
This protocol actually was derived from two other IETF protocols
as described below.
"SIP was originally developed by the IETF Multi-Party Multimedia
Session Control Working Group, known as MMUSIC. Version 1.0 was
submitted as an Internet-Draft in 1997. Significant changes were
made to the protocol and resulted in a second version, version 2.0,
which was submitted as an Internet-Draft in 1998. The protocol
achieved Proposed Standard status in March 1999 and was published
as RFC 2543 [3] in April 1999. In September 1999, the SIP working
group was established by the IETF to meet the growing interest in
the protocol. An Internet-Draft containing bug fixes and
clarifications to SIP was submitted in July 2000, referred to as
RFC 2543 'bis.' This document will be first published as an
Internet-Draft then as an RFC with a new RFC number, which will
obsolete RFC 2543. To advance from Proposed Standard to Draft
Standard, a protocol must have multiple independent interworking
implementations and limited operational experience. To this end,
forums of interoperability tests, called 'bakeoffs,' have been
organized by the SIP working group. Three interoperability
'bakeoffs' took place for SIP in 1999, with more planned for 2000.
The final level, Standard, is achieved after operational success
has been demonstrated [4]. With the documented interoperability of
the bakeoffs, SIP should move to Draft Standard status sometime in
early 2001.
"SIP incorporates elements of two widely used Internet
protocols: HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol) used for web
browsing and SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) used for e-mail.
From HTTP, SIP borrowed a client-server design and the use of
uniform resource locators (URLs). From SMTP, SIP borrowed a
text-encoding scheme and header style. For example, SIP reuses SMTP
headers such as To, From, Date, and Subject. In keeping with its
philosophy of 'one problem, one protocol,' the IETF designed SIP to
be a pure signaling protocol. SIP uses other IETF protocols for
transport, media transport, and media description." 3
SIP has taken off leaps and bounds, but why? The easiest answer
is the fact that it leverages the internet structure to request and
deliver calls and conferences. Because of this, it has quickly
emerged as the leading IP telecommunications protocol today, not
only for its robust nature in dealing with complex telephony
signaling, but also using structures used daily on the Internet to
set up calls like one's email address.
An extension called SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and
Presence Leveraging Extensions) has been added to this protocol.
SIMPLE was introduced in the IETF standards body through RFC 3261,
which allows instant messaging between callers, as well as allowing
each caller to view "presence" information of the other caller.
This allows the caller to see if the party called is available to
take the call, or they went to lunch for 45 minutes, even before
picking up the phone to call them. This saves many wasted minutes
spent trying to reach a party that is not available, or would
indicate the need to contact them through another method. Just
think how much time is wasted in a company by employees picking up
the phone and dialing another employee only to get a fast busy tone
or voice mail.
Who are the major players in the Unified Messaging arena for the
enterprise? The answer is Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM. However, Cisco
and IBM have been working very closely together to blend their
strengths to deliver a strong Unified Messaging package. Microsoft
is new to this area, but they have had lots of help through their
direct association with Nortel. For the small to medium business
range, there are literally hundreds of start-ups competing for this
area. including Cisco with the Linksys division. For instance, if
you are a small company and understand IP Telephony, you could get
an IP PBX for no money running on Windows or Linux platform to
service up to eight simultaneous calls with limited feature
support. (4) Features, in this case, would refer to things like
Call Parks, Hunt Groups, and Console Operator support. It is
amazing how competition is driving down the price for the small
business market. We could see many more companies compete not only
for the small-to-medium business range but also into the enterprise
market since IP communications is an application running within
your company.
Whoever can build or program the best application for Unified
Communications will win the market, and the top three companies
competing heavily understand that. This competition is great
because it leads to better services for the enterprise or small
business owner, as well as lower costs. Just think, not too long
ago, it used to cost around a quarter of a million dollars for an
enterprise switch with features and a couple of hundred phones to
go with it, but today the initial investment is substantially less.
This means the return on investment (ROI) will appear a lot faster
than before and is more quantifiable.
Now let's look at a 60,000-foot view of the main player
solutions starting with Microsoft.
Microsoft
Microsoft has made a significant contribution to the Unified
Messaging effort for the enterprise market. First, they positioned
an instant messaging product with presence capability through their
initial LCS product line and now with Office Communications Server
(OCS) they support rich, full-featured voice/video conferencing,
integration with all legacy or IP PBX vendors for phone devices and
feature support. Next, Unified Messaging was added in their
Exchange 2007 product line which allows basic Auto Attendant and
subscriber voice mail capability.
Microsoft is not in the phone business per se but teamed up with
Nortel and developed LG-Nortel Tanjay
Phone-sets based on Microsoft's popular windows CE operating
system (OS). Again, Microsoft's main thrust is that the phone and
PC become one. Their main goal is to use a single instrument for
all corporate communications; therefore, not too many desk phones
will come out of OCS's direct compatible product line. Instead, you
will couple OCS with your current phone system using Remote Call
Control (RCC). This will give the Microsoft Office Communicator
(MOC) client on the PC the ability to make a call via a phone on
their desk through the current phone switch. Microsoft has clearly
stated they are not in the PBX business and that does not seem to
be their focus at the time of writing this document, but things can
change.
The major advantage of the Microsoft solution is that their
servers are embedded in the majority of enterprise IT server rooms.
Microsoft also makes an outstanding OS platform for easy creation
of advanced programming solutions that enterprises have been using
for quite a few years. However, another company that has a major
footprint is Cisco.
Cisco
Cisco has been considered the pioneers of IP telephony. When
they first introduced IP PBXs, the majority of TDM manufacturers
scoffed at them, saying that it would never take off. Well, today
it has, and Cisco is not only in the middle of IP telephony, but
also has unified messaging in a battle for the enterprise market
place. Cisco, like Microsoft, has a clear advantage because a
majority of IT shops have Cisco as their primary router and switch
supplier. With a little additional cost, these same customers can
install and get IP telephony and unified messaging support as
well.
Cisco first introduced their true unified messaging product,
Unity, which was acquired from a company called Active Voice, and
which used other message stores like Microsoft Exchange or IBM
Domino as a catch for all voice mail and fax mail. Cisco, seeing
the advantage that SIP protocol had in providing better IP
telephony services, started supporting this protocol in the Call
Manager 4.0 product line with limited support. Now, Cisco has
Communications Manager 7.0, which allows not only Cisco IP Phones
but 3rd party manufacture SIP phones to be used directly with their
IP phone PBX product.
To leverage the full capabilities of SIMPLE, Cisco decided to
develop their own instant messaging client called Cisco IP Phone
Messenger, or CUPS client (IM client-like) for short. It gets its
configuration and communications support by using a gateway server
called the Cisco Unified Presence Server (CUPS). We will explore
this solution further
With this client, Cisco has incorporated the ability to view
then number of voice mail/fax mail messages, provide advance
presence information to other CUPS clients, and provide seamless
RCC (sometimes referred to as "click to call") control of Cisco IP
PBX-controlled IP Phones, allowing the IM Clients to call via their
contacts lists. Cisco was not the only company developing an IM
client for the enterprise.
IBM
IBM developed an IM client to couple to their Domino Server
(email server) called the IBM Sametime Solution. (5) This solution
allowed users to send and receive, like the Cisco and Microsoft
solutions, and provided secure IM communications linked via their
contact list coupled to their Lotus Notes client. Their
just-released new client now has an embedded soft phone, allowing
the IM chat client to easily raise the call through their call
control mechanism, most likely using the SIP protocol or use a 3rd
party PBX solution using click to call feature. The click to call
feature works with a large list of PBX manufactures, including
Cisco's Unified Communications Manager via the Cisco Unified
Presence Server (CUPS). What sets the IBM IM feature apart from the
others is the ability to determine the exact location of those they
are communicating with and then to quickly map their position using
the add-on Google map plug-in.
Blended Solutions
The majority of enterprise users do not necessarily use a single
solution. A blended approach may have to be exercised; however,
specialized gateways may have to be produced to tie the
above-mentioned solutions together. While they may be using the
same standard SIP protocol to incorporate call control and presence
information through their clients, they have also added
non-compliant extensions to incorporate features that they see
lacking in the standards-based protocol, thereby developing a more
robust solution for their customers. All software or manufacturing
organizations, except for one, have included these gateways to tie
the different solutions together; for example, Cisco IP Phones
"point to click" with IBM Sametime using the CUPS server as the
gateway mechanism. This is paramount because not too many
organizations just use one vendor for all of their solution
requirements when it comes to unified communications.
Summary
In conclusion, unified communications is really communications
"awareness" of those with whom we are trying to communicate,
combined with speed and minimal interruption. Now clearly, all the
major manufactures of VOIP systems are executing their respective
solutions today. However, it is the best solution is the one that
is the right fit for a particular company, one that streamlines
their business practices and allows a seamless integration into
their current operations. This is far beyond the concept of just
making a call and leaving a simple voice mail.
Footnotes
1. http://www.microsoft.com/uc/vision.mspx
2. Cisco Unified Communications Solution Overview:
"http://www.federalnewsradio.com/pdfs/Cisco%20UnifiedCommunicationsSolutionOverview.pdf">http://www.federalnewsradio.com/pdfs/Cisco%20UnifiedCommunicationsSolutionOverview.
pdf
3. SIP: Understanding the Session Initializations Protocol by
Alan B. Johnson ISBN: 9781580531689
4. http://www.3cx.com/phone-system/product-tour.html
5. IBM SWG CPO -WPLC Briefing 2008:
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/dw/techbriefings/presentations/lotus/summary.pdf