December 16, 2005 Opinion: Unified messaging | What's Old Is New By Barbara Darrow Courtesy of Remember. Never throw anything away. It’ll be back in style soon enough. Take unified messaging, for example. (Please.) BARBARA DARROW Can be reached at (781) 839-1223 or via e-mail at . Some of us remember writing about this more than a decade ago. This magical beast was to make all of our incoming communiques—voice mail, fax, e-mail, smoke signals—available to us from one easily accessible place: our mailbox. From there we could view speech-to-text converted voice mail, or listen to text-to-voice-converted e-mail. Oh joy. Somehow, this never took off. But now, Microsoft is back at it with its promised Exchange Server 12. Never mind that it will ship—next year or the year after—without the perpetually promised relational store Microsoft has talked about for years. But, it will have unified messaging that will work, says Redmond. The Exchange folks last week talked with great glee about how E-12 will enable even the smallest companies to deploy automated voice-mail attendants. The immediate response from some to that is probably that the one thing the world needs less of is automated voice attendants. Perhaps sensing this ambivalence, Mr. E-12 jumped in fast: “It’s OPTIONAL!” he noted. Microsoft ain’t alone in this journey back to the future. Get ready for IBM to mount a retreat from its Workplace branding at Lotusphere next month in (hopefully sunny) Florida. You remember Workplace—it’s the name change/product that threw the already-beleaguered Lotus Notes/Domino constituency into total chaos. Instead of the already-problematic IBM WebSphere/ Lotus Notes confusion, IBM threw a whole other monkey wrench in with Workplace. Nice job, fellas. As one pundit said: “Don’t be throwing out new names. Just tell people the truth, that products evolve.” The word “evolve” may be an understatement when you talk about moving from a nonrelational to a relational store, but what the heck. Videoconferencing, like the year of the LAN that was promised 10 years before it ever happened, looks like it’s for real now with VoIP. The gap between mouth movements on video and actual sound bites is getting shorter. And finally, isn’t this whole service-oriented-architecture (SOA) schmear just IBM’s system application architecture (SAA) in heterogeneous sheep’s clothing? Discuss among yourselves and get back to me at (781) 839-1223 or via e-mail at bdarrow@cmp.com. E-mail This Story Print This Story Get the latest Messaging news, product info, and trends every week.			PayPal To Offer Paying By Text Message Mirapoint Unveils E-mail Archiving Appliance Content Management Made Easy With Xerox USA.NET Launches Encrypted E-mail Service Sherpa Upgrades Discovery Attender Zantaz Integrates Mailbox Management And Hosted Storage     Messaging Pipeline's Main RSS Feed     Messaging Pipeline's Blog RSS Feed Editorial and vendor perspectives The Six Flavors Of Windows Vista Microsoft plans to release a full six-pack of Vista versions, one for every taste. Which Vista will be right for you? Hope is Not Enough When It Comes To Compliance Three Ways To Authenticate E-Mail And Stop Spam Wikis In The Workplace Review: Google Desktop 3 Vendors are now talking about how collaboration can be improved by integrating video with messaging applications. They're even talking about adding live TV to mobile phones. How far do you go before it becomes a bandwidth and business productivity drain? Video is a great idea     13% Video is fine but there needs to be size limits     25% It's never used for anything really productive     38% I draw the line at live TV     25% In search of messaging products? Check out our brand new Product Finder for a directory of groupware and collaboration tools, security products, archiving solutions, and more.