Thoughts On Unified Messaging Services?

This Clan Anonymous Coward scribe asks: "I have been using uReach for the last eight months now and have become hooked on this whole unified messaging thing. The fact they give you your own 800 number without extension was a big plus. I find I use the service for call forwarding, sending and recieving faxes and consolidating e-mail from other accounts. I would like to know what other Slashdot readers think of unified messaging and what service they use and how they use it."

UMS in Finland

[euroderf]

Take a peek at http://www.iobox.com/ [iobox.com].
They're pretty big here in Finland, and they just got mentioned in Time.

Great concept. Hard to integrate

[Ellie]

I spent several years providing UM services to business travelers thru a company called eGlobe. The concept is great, however getting it integrated into your existing environment (Such as office vMail, pager, existing vMail at home, etc) is difficult. It will only really come into itself when the back end suppliers (such as switch companies, PBX companies, etc) support it via standardized format for messages. Most implementations are very simple. All messages are just an email with an optional mime attachement, either encoded voice, or fax, etc. Our system was pretty cool, it provided access to your message store from pretty much anywhere in the world via a local phone call. The storage was local in your 'home' country, and we did a real-time lookup via LDAP from whereever you dailed in. There was a node in all major business centers world wide. Great concept, we just couldn't get backing from our senior management and thus we all went our own way. I'd be interested in getting back into it if someone knew of a group doing this stuff in Denver. Let me know.

Hate to endorse a commercial product, but....

[scotpurl]

Lotus Notes provides a lot of unification. Email, pagers, fax gateways, voicemail (going into your inbox), and databases (non-relational natively, and can pump in and out of other SQL/Oracle servers). A co-worker says he once piloted a product that read your inbox to you over the phone. And since it's a database, dial up, synchronize, hang-up, and deal with it all off-line.

So, yeah, it's a commercial product, and there's money involved. However, they do fully support Linux as a server platform, and even have a 90 day working demo for download: http://www.lotus.com/dominolinux [lotus.com].