Collaboration Loop

By Irwin Lazar

August 29, 2006

ImageAt last week’s VoiceCon, “unified communications” was the buzzword of the day, with numerous vendors touting their UC wares, and a highly successful “conference within a conference” focused strictly on UC. But UC is about more than technology. The emergence of UC will radically change the way people communicate and collaborate.

But there is still a fair amount of confusion between unified communications and unified messaging, so let's start by defining these two terms.

Unified messaging. Unified messaging deals strictly with the integration of various stored messaging services such as voicemail, e-mail, and fax. The nirvana of UM is a single user interface to various message stores, enabling such capabilities as listening to an e-mail via a telephone, or playing a voice mail from within an e-mail application.