Unified Messaging Is Outgoing

September 1997 / Features / The Universal Inbox / Unified Messaging Is Outgoing

The universal inbox addresses only inbound communications. Integrated messaging also deals with outbound communications. By applying the e-mail paradigm to other forms of outbound communications, unified messaging ca n make it easy to do things that were difficult or impossible before: voice mail, for a dramatic example.
Suppose you get a voice-mail message and must inform many people of its contents. Today, you have to make many calls, or send an e-mail message to a distribution list. With unified messaging, you can forward the voice mail itself to the distribution list. The same applies to other types of messages. Fax files coming in through a fax server can be forwarded as fax mail. Received fax mail can be "printed" directly to a local fax machine. You can forward e-mail as e-mail, as a fax, or (through text-to-speech conversion) even as voice mail.

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Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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