Datasheet

12 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING EXCHANGE SERVER 2010
Figure 1.4
Viewing a voicemail
message sent via Unified
Messaging
Not all voice systems are going to support this feature ‘‘right out of the box.’’ More and
more vendors (such as Cisco and Mitel) are tweaking their Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
systems to talk directly to Exchange Server 2010 Unified Messaging, but you may still require
a VoIP gateway of some type. Many traditional ‘‘hard-wired’’ PBXs will require a PBX-to-VoIP
gateway, but even some VoIP systems will require a VoIP-to-VoIP gateway.
If you are like us, you are more of a specialized network administrator. We have never
managed a phone system in the past and are only slightly familiar with some of the phone
terminology. We just assumed that VoIP was VoIP and that was that. Working with the folks
who manage your telephone system will be a new and exciting experience. We were quite
surprised to learn that there are more than 100 implementations of SIP on the market.
As of 2010, unified messaging solutions have only about a 10 to 15 percent market
penetration — that is, of course, depending on whose survey you read and how you define
unified messaging. Some vendors define it as delivering a voicemail to a user’s computer and
allowing them to play the voicemail over the PC speakers; this voicemail might have been
delivered to the user’s mailbox (on the server) or it might have been pulled by Outlook or another
client application and stored in the user’s PST file. Some vendors consider solely inbound faxing
to be a unified messaging solution, though in our opinion that is not terribly unified.
Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging and Faxing
The Exchange 2007 implementation of unified messaging implementation only supported
inbound faxing. This feature has been removed from Exchange Server 2010. For a compre-
hensive faxing solution, we recommend you take a look at one of the many third-party
faxing solutions. One of the reasons for this is that the Exchange 2007 solution only pro-
vided inbound faxing, but many third-party solutions on the market that integrate well with
Exchange provide both inbound and outbound faxing.
Microsoft has decided to get into the unified messaging market for a number of reasons,
including the fact that unified messaging has a fairly low market penetration thus far.