Legacy Voicemail — the Dilemma
Voicemail itself isn’t a thing of the past. But many legacy voicemail systems purchased more than 5 years ago are. And though such systems are generally designated as “end of life” and “no longer available,” many outmoded voicemail systems still do what they were intended to do: Let a caller leave a recorded voice message for someone at any time of day, then allow that someone to listen to their messages whenever it’s convenient, from virtually anywhere they can find a phone.
That’s why voicemail has been such a success the last couple decades — and why thousands of organizations still find it useful. It’s also where the voicemail dilemma comes in for any organization that still relies on a legacy solution. As the legacy theory goes in voicemail circles, proprietary vendors have historically designed their systems to reach end-of-life status after 5 years, if not sooner. And unless a business can afford to scrap its voicemail system and start over, which many can’t, any company making a huge proprietary investment has little choice but to purchase “nextgen” voicemail updates every 3 to 5 years from the same vendor.
Same thing for voice over IP should an organization decide to migrate their phone system to VoIP using SIP. Many businesses are forced to use their proprietary vendor’s bolt-on VoIP hardware and middleware, with the hope that it meets organizational VoIP initiatives and budgets.
Some people call the legacy process “protecting an investment” or “maintaining a heritage system.” Others simply refer to it as vendor lock-in, usually to a major proprietary vendor that makes millions alone in selling legacy upgrades and maintenance services on a routine basis.
Messaging Overload
Beyond the legacy aspect, one-dimensional voicemail just isn’t enough to handle modern business communications that have become more electronic. These days, businesses receive far more e-mail messages than voicemails. Consider, too, the faxes they get and the accelerated pace of business on a daily basis, and workers are drowning in messages of all types. Data, as well as voice.
To handle this messaging overload, many employees find themselves managing three separate “inboxes” to stay connected to co-workers and customers. One inbox and account in the corporate voicemail system, another in the corporate e-mail system (if they even have or need e-mail), and a third that’s typically a departmental fax machine, which isn’t very confidential since anyone can pick up and peruse an incoming fax. Worse, IT staffs must maintain three systems that are often disengaged from one another, usually from three separate administrative interfaces, with IT voice people and IT data people usually going in opposite directions.
Your Voicemail System is More Than 5 Years Old. Now What?
So your legacy voicemail system is outmoded. Do you upgrade it now, and then do it again in another few years? Do you replace it with newer proprietary voicemail hardware and take your chances for the future — including new technologies like VoIP? Or do you make the organizational transition to unified messaging or unified communications that bring advanced voice and data messaging features to traditional voicemail? The pre-integrated Communité® (kâ-mun-e-tay) solution from Interactive Intelligence can make your decision easy.
Unlike rigid legacy hardware, Communité takes an innovative, flexible applications approach to voice and data messaging. By doing so, the Communité software and its open standards event-processing platform gives organizations plenty of options, all from a scalable solution that lets them:
- Replace legacy voicemail equipment
- Expand voicemail to unified messaging via Communité licensing — including maintaining voicemail-only users; or implement unified messaging from the start - Scale to unified communications, which build upon unified messaging by adding features such as calendar and contact management, one-number Find-me, presence management, user-definable call handling rules and other productivity tools
- Migrate existing phone systems to voice over IP via SIP Before taking a closer look at everything Communité can do, though, here are some common issues to consider as part of your organization’s voicemail and messaging strategy.
