One of the great things about my job as a Technical Trainer is that I get to test drive, then use, some of the newest and coolest software packages. And, to the annoyance of my friends in the IT field, I mostly don't have to deal with the problems in deployment or the day-to-day drudgery of managing an enterprise. I guess that's a nice way of saying I understand their pain, without having to endure any of it myself.
I recently attended Exchange 2010 Ignite training. Three days of test driving the latest and greatest iteration of Microsoft's email system. It's quite an impressive product, loaded with new functionality and redesigned for unbelievable degree of robustness. While there I spent some time exploring something near and dear to my heart, their implementation of Unified Messaging (UM). It was great to learn a bit about deploying Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging in the context of a legacy voicemail replacement - an area where I spent a considerable amount of time.
The last slide of the last lecture had a fascinating bullet point - "A Natural Replacement for Legacy Voicemail". What you'll find while comparing a legacy voicemail to Exchange is that a lot of those "Legacy Features" such as voice distribution lists and cascading pager notifications are missing. This may not be a huge deal, since your company may not use them anyhow. However, it suffices to say that it's not a voicemail system but an implementation of voice into a more email mail centric system. It's a tradeoff - legacy functionality for more a more modern feature set. Assuming of course that you want those new features and can live without the legacy ones such as voice mail networking with legacy systems via VPIM or AMIS or replacing a familiar telephone user interface (TUI) with an unusual version.
Upgrading to Exchange 2010 requires a fork lift upgrade. There is no process to upgrade your existing 2003 or 2007 systems. However, Exchange 2010 is 2003 and 2007 capable. Meaning, you can have both 2003 and 2007 systems in your Exchange 2010 enterprise. So you don't upgrade, you add the new system then move the users over . Although you can go right from 2007 to 2010 in controlled manner, you cannot upgrade your 2007 UM though, only move those users.
One thing I found vexing in both 2007 and now again in 2010 Unified Messaging is how tedious it is to manage voice features for an Exchange user. Although the management interface has been streamlined and improved I found it tough to go back and view or make changes once I set up a voice user. Near as I could figure, I could enable or disable UM for a user, anything else, I'd have to use a wizard again.
The last two criticisms I have deal with Speech. Speech recognition is a processor intensive function, not only on Exchange but on a CallXpress system as well. Speech also has a few subtleties that one should think about in an administration context (Hence, it makes sense to be able to make user changes easy). Take name changes for instance. What happens when "Holly Holt" gets married and now is Holly Smythe, only pronounced "Smith". What if she wants her old name, her new name, and maybe "Holly Holt-Smythe" as well? We can do this. We can also handle both Holly Smythe and Olly Smith by a few tweaks in administration. By the way, I asked that exact question in the class.
I got the reaction I probably deserved by asking such a thing at 4PM on a Friday. I'll blame it on that rather than any product deficiencies. I spent a bit of time trying to explore this further on the web and couldn't land anywhere that described sizing, speech recognition, and disambiguation.
MS Exchange 2010 also supports Speech to Text. The caller leaves a voicemail message, and Exchange converts it to a text email. Very slick. We've had that with our "got-voice" integration for some time. We were given what I'd describe as an oblique warning that this is processor intensive and we shouldn’t give it to every user. Suffices to say, too much of a good thing here is probably a bad thing. I couldn't find much info anywhere on that either, other than everyone agreeing it was cool. I'm guessing that since I've heard that it's speech to text transcription accuracy is less than 50%, the more users added means the less likely the messages will be transcribed properly.
Not that I'm trying to be mean, these two features are very cool. There are, however, a lot of problems that pop up during speech deployment. CallXpress has the tools to deal with these issues and without making light of the complexities, they are pretty straight forward.
Make no mistake, it's a cool system with lots of other cutting edge features such as Rights Management, Exchange Online (Cloud access), a very cool new look and feel to both Outlook and OWA, and awesome high availability and archiving capability. The way Microsoft has redesigned the architecture, with it's resulting many-fold increase in hardware efficiency, probably makes the upgrade worthwhile.
However, Unified Messaging was disappointing. With it's ability to integrate to all versions of Exchange (2010 soon to come, no doubt) CallXpress allows you to add UM capabilities as awesome and rich as these new features while at the same time providing true legacy voicemail replacement and continuity during an upgrade.
Original Post: http://www.avst.com/blog/2010/02/is-exchange-2010-a-replacement-for-legacy-voicemail/
