Friends tend to roll their eyes when I drone on about the perils of Wikipedia. And rightfully so since I'm usually ranting about some obscure error, like the time I corrected an entry on the entirely historical Cardinal Richelieu that detailed his interactions with the entirely fictional Three Musketeers.Last week, however, it was Wikipedia's entry on unified communications that was completely out of whack. Here's what it looked like (and perhaps still does since I didn't bother to enter a correction):
So there you have it from that font of all knowledge in the Internet age. Unified communications is all about getting voicemail delivered to your email inbox. Sometimes I think this confusing of unified communications and unified messaging will just never go away.
To Wikipedia's credit, further down the article does a better job at drawing a proper distinction between UC and UM:
But the self-contradictory entry does no one a service and perhaps some kind soul will correct it before long.
One company that has the difference between UC and UM down pat is Siemens Enterprise Communications. Yesterday the company introduced version 6.0 of Xpressions. The Xpressions voice mail software has had unified messaging capabilities since forever. What's remarkable about the new version is that it now also includes features typically associated with unified communications solutions: instant messaging, IM presence, and rules-based call processing, in addition to web conferencing and audio conferencing functionality. Both the new UC and traditional UM software can reside on the same server hardware, providing a considerably simpler way of introducing unified communications capabilities to your business than is typical for UC solutions with their complex integration requirements.
Microsoft is gradually turning its corporate IM server into a full-fledged voice platform. Long before that, Interactive Intelligence baked the presence management functionality so associated with unified communications solutions into its Enterprise Interaction Center IP PBX for mid-market companies. And now Siemens is delivering UC as part and parcel of its messaging software. Granted, Xpressions UC's unified communications services are rather limited compared with Openscape and other more full-featured UC solutions. But if Siemens expands on the presence and IM functionality, making them a bit more robust than what's to be found in the 6.0 software, this could mark a significant change in the way unified communications solutions are delivered to enterprises.
Here's an Xpressions UC screen shot:
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