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FirstClass as a Unified Communications Platform
courtesy of the Tech Newsletter
A Hot Topic
Unified Communications (UC) is getting a lot of attention in the industry press right now. One of the reasons for this is the existing perception that UC is the next big business productivity booster. Also,the current crop of voice mail systems are starting to become outdated and the costs for supporting these systems are climbing. Telephone companies are looking to offer services that can keep their user base loyal, and enterprise administrators are looking to reduce their number of servers, while offering their users higher levels of functionality.
So what sort of functionality typically gets labeled UC? Everything from "find me follow me" telephone services to email pagers have been labeled UC. In general, though, the term is accepted as describing systems where email messages and voice messages arrive in the same mailbox and can be managed from either a user's computer or telephone. This is a pretty low bar, but surprisingly many systems label themselves UC and can't even provide this level of functionality, leaving email inaccessible from the telephone.
If we raise the bar a bit, we can define a true UC system as one that has the following functionality as a minimum:
• voice, fax, and email communications unified in a single message store
• communications collected from multiple telephone numbers or email boxes
• communications accessible from many devices such as telephones, fax machines, web browsers, PDAs, and desktop computers
• device access to communications that is consistent, feature rich, and maintains status changes (for example Unread status).
The FirstClass Architecture: A Natural for Unified Communications
Now that we've defined what a true UC system does, let's look at FirstClass to see if it fits our definition.
Let's start with a diagram of the FirstClass architecture:
 One of the key elements of the FirstClass architecture is that it supports a pure client/server model of access to a central data store. Since your network Desktop and Mailbox are not stored on your computer's hard drive when you access FirstClass, any client around the rim of the diagram has equal access to data and status information. How does a system that stores email on the local hard drive offer email access over the telephone? It often doesn't, or it relies on slow and unreliable "mailbox synchronization" protocols to store copies of data in multiple places. In the pure client/server model supported by FirstClass, the telephone user interface (TUI) becomes just another client. It may have a different user interface than a GUI client, but it has access to the same data, configuration, and status information as richer
clients. This powerful ability to access your network Desktop equally from many devices makes the FirstClass architecture a natural for implementing UC.
Another key element of any UC system, is that it must "unify" access to all of your communications, so a UC system must support access to a wide variety of content types and protocols. If you look around the rim of the FirstClass architecture diagram you can see that all of today's most popular protocols are supported. This means FirstClass UC goes beyond voice mail, fax, and local email and gives access to Internet mail, newsgroups, mailing lists, and even mailboxes on other email systems.
The concept of the TUI as just another client is critical to making UC work properly. When you log in to FirstClass from your telephone, your Mailbox (among other objects) is opened by Voice Services. The content is "rendered" to the telephone using a combination of prerecorded voice and text-to-speech (TTS) technology. When you hear that you've got new voice mail or email, using the telephone keypad, you can open the items and listen to them. Voice mails are played as is, emails are read to you using the TTS engine, and faxes can be marked for same call fax back. From the TUI you can read, delete, compose, forward, and check history, all of the operations you can do from the GUI client. Best of all, when you return to your computer, all of these operations have had the same effect on your network Desktop, as if you had done
them from the GUI client or web UI. Outbound copies of messages you composed are in your Mailbox, the history and unread status on your messages is correct, and the objects you deleted are gone.
The flip side of this, the idea that the GUI client is just another access method to telephony data, is also critical to getting UC right. The main struggle with traditional voice mail accessed from the telephone is data management. Since the user can only hear Mailbox status, it is very difficult to manage large numbers of voice mails, so many systems impose or assume message number limits. As well, it is difficult to implement features like sophisticated greeting management, since the TUI limits what is practical. Occasional web or client GUI access solves these issues by giving the user easy-to-use data-management functions. In FirstClass UC, greetings can contain call routing logic, can activate or deactivate on schedule, and can implement custom handling based on both calling and called number. These features would be impractical to
configure by telephone.
FirstClass as Your UC Platform
So what does all of this new functionality represent in terms of a user experience? As it turns out, something very powerful that can change the way a person works. FirstClass UC users are never cut off from their important data, as long as they have access to a telephone.
 Let's take a look at some uses of FirstClass UC that help to explain the power of the product (all of the examples work today in the shipping product):
• Steve is a busy executive and FirstClass UC user. Every morning during his commute to the office, he puts his cell phone on hands-free and logs into FirstClass UC. Not only does he get all of his voice mail, but he has all of his email, and even any calendar notifications that came in during his off hours, read to him using TTS. By the time he arrives at the office, he has an overview of what he has to do that day.
• Julie is a sales representative who is on the move all day. Since she is hard to reach, she has her voice greetings configured to allow callers who reach her work number to either leave a message or get connected to her cell phone number. Whenever she is waiting in an airport lounge, she logs in to FirstClass UC using a web kiosk, and is able to read her email, listen to her voice mail, and view her faxes.
• Len has four telephone numbers: his business line, his business fax, his cell phone, and his home phone. He has all of these forwarded to FirstClass UC, with a separate greeting for each. His fax number just beeps and receives the fax, while his business phone has a sophisticated menu allowing callers to do one of the following: leave a message, call his cell phone, or talk to his secretary. The cell phone greeting simply prompts the caller to leave a message, while the home greeting has his best Clint Eastwood imitation and a "secret" option for his friends to reach his cell phone.
• Joe is a financial advisor who spends a lot of his day on the phone and prides himself on personal service. In addition to the kinds of greetings mentioned in the previous example, which help Joe's customers reach him, Joe uses custom greetings to let specific customers know what's happening with their accounts. When Joe's biggest client calls, she gets the message "Hi Cheryl, Joe here. I recorded this message at 9:00 AM on December 8th and it looks like a good day to buy Centrinity stock. Let me know in your message if you want me to make a buy, and I'll call you back ASAP". Because Cheryl is so important, Joe records a message for her each day, and any message she leaves is marked as urgent so that Joe gets paged as soon as she hangs up.
• Elena is a lawyer working in a small firm. For each client the firm represents, they create a conference to track communications with or about that client. If anyone at the firm gets an email, fax, or phone message regarding Tridem Labs, for example, they simply drag it into the "Tridem" conference. When the Tridem Labs VP, Elena, calls to complain about the way they handled a contract negotiation, Elena is able to find the Tridem Labs CEO's voice mail that instructed them, and forward it to Elena via Internet email.
• Bill is a lawyer at Elena's firm who specializes in recording transcripts. The firm has set up a "Transcripts" conference with its own phone number. Now, instead of taking a recorder and bringing tapes into the office, Bill calls the "Transcripts" number with his hands-free cell phone, and starts recording. When he's done he hangs up, the message arrives in the conference immediately, and the transcription clerks start working right away transcribing the text directly into the body of the message. The message is then sent into the appropriate client conference for later use, where both the original recording and the text transcript can be accessed.
• Rose is an elementary school teacher, in a school where FirstClass UC is installed. Even though the school has only a couple of telephones, each teacher has their own phone number. Parent's can call and leave messages for Rose without disturbing the class or the secretaries. By using the powerful greetings system, Rose has set up a voice menu that allows parents to "hear" about homework assignments and school news. Rose listens to her voice mail from her classroom computer and uses text files (and TTS technology) to keep the homework section of her voice menu up-to-date. For her, the best feature is that she can type in the day's homework just once, and use FirstClass UC to publish it to both her class web page and the voice menu system.
Sizing Up the Competition
When comparing UC systems, it is important to look past the brochure and investigate whether the platform has a sound architectural base for delivering the functionality you require. Architectural warning signs of poor UC systems include:
• multiple message stores: These systems lack uniform features across message types and the ability to mix media.
• client-end unification: Not really "unified", these systems are weak when accessed from devices other than the primary computer.
• client-end message store: Also weak at device access, they often rely on synchronization protocols that work poorly.
• limited support for industry standard protocols: Limits access methods and the ability to unify external data sources.
• no UC client software: Has limited features and difficult to administer and set up.
FirstClass' pure client/server architecture and years of connectivity development have made FirstClass a natural UC platform. To get UC right, a design must store data in a central place and treat access from all devices equally; some will have more powerful UI's than others, but access to data, status, features, and configuration information is equal. In fact, there is an argument to be made that because FirstClass has a collaboration engine at it's core, it actually goes beyond UC into the realm of Unified Collaboration.
To bring a UC system up from Unified Communications to Unified Collaboration add the following capabilities to those previously discussed:
• access to collaborative conferences, mail lists, and newsgroups
• access to Instant Messaging and user-presence information
• access to group calendaring and scheduling information
• collaboration by sharing, forwarding to conferences, threaded replying, and annotating the data as "unified"
• scalability sufficient to support your entire collaborative community.
In Summary
There is no other software available today like FirstClass UC, that combines the scalability, reliability, accessibility, and feature set with a powerful collaborative engine. FirstClass UC (the Voice Services module installer and licenses) has been available for adding to existing FirstClass servers, or as part of a brand new site, since July 2000. Furthermore, if you examine the architecture of most competing UC systems, it is clear that they either need to start over or they have a lot of work ahead just to catch up.
More Information
Contact FirstClass Sales at sales@firstclass.com or phone 1.888.588.3444 and they'll tell you what you need to know about costs and telephony requirements.
Another way the benefits of FirstClass UC can be deployed to your site is through one of our ASP partners (in Canada that includes Sprint Canada, Telus, and BellZinc). Monthly service can be purchased from these suppliers for those who wish to outsource their UC needs.
If you would like to see additional features by the author of this article, click here.
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