February 2000

Active Voice Corporation 2901 Third Avenue, Suite 500
Seattle, WA 98121
Ph: 206-441-4700
Web site:activevoice.com

Pricing: A four-port system for 50 users is $9,280, including licenses for text-to-speech and ActiveFax.

RATINGS (0-5)
Installation: 5
Documentation: 4.5
Features: 4.25
Operational Testing: 4.75
GUI: 3.75
Overall: A-

Unity 2.3, a unified messaging package based on Windows NT, compares well with its competitors, including products from AVT, Callware, Lucent, Maisoft, and Telekol. But Unity 2.3 is more than a respectable also-ran. It boasts innovative features, such as impressively simple Outlook integration, browser-based configuration for the administration and clients, and an OEM version of Interstar Technologies’ LightningFax software, called "ActiveFax" in this implementation.

Unity 2.3 is also notable because of its ability to integrate with Internet telephony gatekeepers and its use of Lernout & Hauspie’s text-to-speech technology for the telephone user interface (TUI). Such capabilities position Unity 2.3 as a product with staying power; that is, organizations that deploy this product will be happy to continue using it well into the future. Microsoft-centric CTOs and VARs will find it easier to roll out than some of its competitors, and end-users will appreciate the product’s shallow learning curve.

INSTALLATION
Unity sells in three versions: turnkey (all you need do is configure the software); componentized (you build the server yourself and then install the software); and software-only (you install the software on the computer of your choice).

In our own tests, we would have preferred a software-only installation. We’ve configured enough copies of NT and Exchange to last us a lifetime, and we’ve installed enough voice and fax boards to fill up our laboratory neck-high. Since these products aren’t unique to Unity, we doubted whether it made sense for us to install them yet again. Why not concentrate on the unified messaging software instead?

A Hybrid Procedure
We won’t bore readers with the details, but our installation turned into a sort of hybrid procedure, combining the software-only approach with certain elements of the componentized approach. Ultimately, we sidestepped a couple of installation issues (Set up the basic NT server as a primary domain controller or as a member server? Use Unity’s own copy of Exchange or an existing Exchange server?)

In our installation, the first major task was installing the voice/fax boards. We learned that with the exception of Natural MicroSystems’ AG-T1 series of voice boards, the only boards supported by Unity are those supplied by Dialogic. We chose the Dialogic D/41D voice board and the GammaLink CPi/200 fax board.

In place of a PBX, PC-PBX, or IP-PBX, we connected a Teltone TLS-5, which is our favorite remove-all-variables analog line simulator. We often opt to use a simulator because if something goes awry during testing , the vendor can’t fault the PBX manufacturer.

The Software Installation Proper
Installing Unity itself and ActiveFax is actually the easiest part of the process. A copy of pcANYWHERE is also included for remote management and technical support. Final steps for the installation include PBX integration, installing third-party fax servers (for example, replacing ActiveFax with a more enterprise-scale solution such as Omtool’s Fax Sr., AVT’s RightFAX, or Copia’s FaxFacts), and configuring the clients.

Final Configuration Details
Before the installer can take the essential step of importing users from an existing database, it is necessary to set up class of service categories. In addition, the installer must determine which service categories should correspond to which licensed features. The licensed features include ViewMail for Outlook, Personal Web Assistant, TTS E-mail, and FaxMail. (ViewMail itself involves some installation. Also, installers need to introduce certain fax options onto the appropriate end user’s computers.)

Once the installer attends to these details, importing users may be accomplished in several ways. For example, users may be brought in from almost any common-format application, from an Exchange database, or indirectly from Windows NT itself. Once the users are imported, all that remains is user training for TUI self-enrollment, Web access, etc.

DOCUMENTATION
Unity 2.3 includes printed and online material. The printed material includes four main manuals (installation, system administration, PBX integration, and troubleshooting), plus an end user’s guide and an administrative guide for the ActiveFax component. The online material is divided between administrator’s help and end user’s help.

Printed Material
In the installation manual, issues such as those described in this review’s brief installation section are covered in great detail, through six chapters and multiple appendices. The system administrator’s book includes nine chapters, covering 300 pages. (In this manual the 120-word glossary definitely came in handy.)

The PBX integration guide contains implementation data for several switches. (Examples include Centrex/Fujitsu SMDI, Lucent/Nortel/Mitel Calista, Mitel SX-2000, NEC, Norstar, and Toshiba systems.) Dozens of other integrations are available as downloads from Active Voice’s Web site, at www.activevoice.com/products/unity/index.html.

The troubleshooting book includes six chapters covering everything from how to start and shut down the Unity server to how to diagnose Dialogic voice board problems.

The end user’s manual is quite good, complete with numerous flow charts, diagrams, and conceptual explanations. (A large stack of the end user’s guides came with the Unity packaging, and we have to admit, they even smell good.) The 90-page user’s manual may be too much for some people to handle, but it includes a quick-reference card. The remaining piece of print material, the ActiveFax administration guide, was the only sub-par manual in the collection.

Online Material
On the whole, the printed documentation is thorough and detailed, consistently so. However, such is not the case with Unity 2.3’s online documentation. The online material seems to be the victim of a split personality. Half of the personality —the administrator’s help — is clear and informative. However, the other half —the end user’s help — is sketchy and vapid. It’s as if Active Voice used different writers for the two sections.

The administrator’s online help is extremely thorough, easy to navigate, and a pleasure to use. In some cases, this section actually breaks with Windows help file conventions for the better.

The end user’s online help betrays a perfunctory approach. It might be somewhat helpful to the most inexperienced computer users, because every section has a one-sentence definition of a key feature. But most other users will find it inane. For example, the help file for the very complex message playback menu fatuously proclaims that "this page is used to set the options that determine what you hear when you listen to your voice messages."

Online help files need to tell users how to do things, not just what the things do. This requirement simply isn’t met by the end user’s online help system. Considering that the necessary help already exists through the administrator’s interface, we wonder if the developers simply forgot to link it to the end user interface, or if there was a conscious decision to dumb-down the online material.

FEATURES
System administrators need to understand that a "true" unified messaging product such as Unity 2.3 is beneficial because of the converged message store, integrated Exchange user database, browser administration, and elimination of proprietary voice mail systems. As a true unified messaging product, Unity 2.3 is distinct from other unified messaging offerings that are, perhaps, better described as integrated messaging products. With integrated messaging, the end-user still experiences a single inbox, but the back-end is stuck in the world of separate systems attached by semi-open CTI links.

As a unified messaging product, Unity 2.3 offers the best of both worlds. It makes the back-end life more manageable and affordable, and it makes the front-end (end user) life easier to teach and use. We would be hard-pressed to say which was more important. (We almost feel as though we could create our own version of one of those "less filling, tastes great" beer commercials.)

Back-End Bliss
Administrators will love this product. The administration page is divided into two sections: a navigation pane on the left, and the interface itself on the right. The navigation pane is subdivided into five sections, including subscribers, call management, reports, network, and system. The sections perform these tasks:

• Subscribers: add/remove/edit users and user privileges/class of service, record user names and fax IDs, configure distribution lists, and define security policies (passwords, lockout).
• Call Management: call handlers, transfer/call data gathering settings, greetings and prompts, caller input/IVR settings, and prompts.
• Reports: subscriber and system data, message activity, failed logins, storage, fax activity, administrative access, event logs, port usage.
• Network: locations, remote users (if your enterprise has multiple locations).
• System: main configuration, languages, schedule, file cleanup, disk usage, software versions, recording options, and administrator contact information.

But there is a lot more to Unity’s administration than what’s in the Web interface. More features are accessible through the Unity folder. These include a customizable outbound calling restrictor, a call status viewer, subscriber import and export utilities, Extension Addresser, addressing and integration tools, licensing and key mapping tools, and mechanisms for teaching your PBX what to expect for Unity (in terms of tones, messaging commands, etc.).

The administration of ActiveFax is accomplished with equally simple tools. The fax monitor interface lets you configure ports individually, and it has real-time indicators of fax activity, plus a "send fax" applet for testing the server’s basic operation. The setup page for the fax boards is accessible only when the fax service is suspended, but its most valuable feature is that it’s much simpler to learn than the full-bore administration elements of its fax server competitors.

Unfortunately, the ActiveFax help files are of the traditional Windows variety. We expected as much because the entire fax component comes from an outside vendor, but it would be nice if Active Voice value-added to the fax component by replacing the online help with a browser-based tool as sophisticated as the one used for Unity’s administration.

Front-End Fantasy
Our favorite "feature," from the end-user’s perspective, is how seamlessly Unity becomes a part of Windows (Figure 2) and caters to most users’ current knowledge base. As long as end users have the "graphical voice mail" concept properly explained to them, teaching the Unity features will simply be a matter of showing some new Outlook features.

For example, in some other NT-based unified messaging products, playing a voice mail file through Outlook requires a three-step process: opening the actual message, opening the attachment, and playing the voice message. However, in Unity, once administrators install the ViewMail for Outlook plug-in, all you have to do is open the message as if it were a standard e-mail (just one double-click), and the message plays automatically.

A similar issue exists for most good fax servers: many of them will send a notification or even the entire fax as an e-mail attachment. In Unity, however, the actual fax appears in your e-mail (with just one attachment click, not two), and faxes even have their own icon in the Inbox – sending faxes from Windows applications is accomplished by selecting a different driver to which to print.

Using the TUI is equally simple. As we mentioned above, the learning curve is shallow, and the IVR (which will be speech recognition-enabled in a coming version) makes itself familiar more quickly and easily than most dedicated voice mail IVRs that we’ve seen.

Many other useful features are accessible through the ActiveAssistant page. ActiveAssistant is arranged the same way as the administrator’s interface, with the content on the right side and the navigation pane on the left. Here, there are three sections: call settings, message settings, and personal settings.

• Call settings include greetings and call transfer/screening. Five greetings are available by default, but they are all customizable. The transfer/screening options include options for redirecting calls to any number, options for setting actions if your extension is busy, screen pop options, and screening options.
• Message settings list the choices for message notification, playback, addressing, private distribution lists, caller options, and fax queue options. Notifications can be directed to pagers, home phones, mobile phones, etc. There are many options for inserting pauses, touchtones, and auto-detection options, plus a calendar-like interface for specifying which messages types should be brought to your attention and when. (The rules settings can be tedious and a bit complicated to learn, but they are very powerful if used creatively.) Meanwhile, the playback menu sets your TUI options, like which kinds of messages should be announced and which options should be included with each message (sender name, timestamp, etc.). The addressing, private lists, and caller options menus are simple, and the fax queue menu informs end users about the status of their faxes.
• The personal settings menu is the least complicated section of the ActiveAs-sistant. Here, users can set their name, extension(s), directory listings, passwords, and languages.

ViewMail for Outlook is where end users have additional customization options. Accessed directly through Outlook’s Tools menu, the ViewMail interface has four sections: general, notification, record, and playback. The general tab lets you automatically play voice mail when you open the message, and it allows you to keep either entire messages or only message headers in your Sent folder.

Here, you can also set your telephone extension and local server. The notification tab lets you customize the new message and urgent new message sound files for voice mail, to distinguish these alerts from Outlook’s e-mail sound alerts. The record and playback tabs are where you select the telephone or your computer’s multimedia system for creating and listening to messages.

Unity’s wealth of features does not end here. Additional time-savers include the following:

• Customizable TUI.
• VCR-style interface for handling voice messages within Outlook.
• Access to Outlook’s rules features for voice mail.

Additional fax features include:

• Import/export phone books from any OBDC database.
• Forward faxes to a fax machine through the TUI.
• Drag-and-drop files to transmit.
• Broadcast fax and annotation options.
• Data encryption.
• Inbound routing based on DID, DTMF, DNIS, ANI, CSID.
• Fax-to-mail capability.
• Cover sheet editor.

OPERATIONAL TESTING
Unity deserves the highest praise for its usability. And, as we mentioned earlier, Microsoft-centric organizations will be very pleased. By creating the necessary tools to import and configure users and user groups, as well as class of service and administration levels, Active Voice made both the initial and continuing setup tasks as easy as possible.

We hate to sound like a marketing program, but Active Voice has gone even further, making all of these tasks work as active server pages, which means that any properly authorized user can access his or her settings from nearly any modern browser. Combined with Outlook’s WebMail application, the browser capability brings the efficiencies of unified messaging within the grasp of far-flung end users. Ultimately, we’d like to see Active Voice and every other enterprise unified messaging vendor create clients for Windows CE, the Palm OS, and wireless Web interfaces as well.

Unfortunately, outside of the Outlook inbox, not every feature is as easy to use. Creating caller- and time-specific rules and find-me/follow-me rules is complicated, compared at least to Outlook’s built-in rules engine and the engines of popular desktop call control applications that we’ve tested. This is partially caused by the nature of the Web: if you use a proprietary GUI, you can make the rules creation interface act any way you want, but HTML and ASP code limits the possibilities. We’re not suggesting that Active Voice use any other interface beside the browser for their main client, but perhaps the rules engine could be its own applet, if the increase in power and simplification were sufficient to warrant such an improvement.

The TUI and the fax options were adequate. We noticed, however, that the TUI requires you to press the asterisk key to log in, whereas most TUIs require you to press the pound key instead. There’s nothing wrong with pressing asterisk instead, but using the pound key is simply something that most people are used to already, so why stray from it?

The user, once logged in, may have mixed emotions. At first, the prompts are unexceptionable. The woman’s voice that serves as your narrator is pleasant and very natural-sounding, even when she tells you how many messages you have and what types of messages they are. However, the voice sounds very robotic and mechanical when it gets into the TTS mode. It’s hard to say if this is a limitation of the Lernout &Hauspie engine or simply a poor implementation of it on Active Voice’s behalf, but the TTS needs improvement. It handled dates, times, and common abbreviations properly, but the voice and inflection is annoyingly stilted.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
One of the first things we noticed when we tested the product’s ActiveFax portion is that the icon for fax messages is not unique. When a fax arrives in Outlook, its subject line appears in bold to indicate that it is a new message, just like any other e-mail. All that distinguishes a fax message from any other type of message is that the fax message continues to use the closed-yellow-envelope icon even after the message has been opened. (This icon differs slightly from the e-mail icon, which changes to an open white envelope once you’ve read it.) We definitely feel that the fax icon should be something completely different, such as an image of a fax machine, or perhaps an image of a sheet of paper.

The voice mail icon is already unique. We suppose the fax messages lack a unique icon because the product’s fax capabilities rely on ActiveFax, a portion of the product that could, perhaps, have been more thoroughly integrated into the whole. (Recall that earlier we noted how the ActiveFax online help was of the standard Windows variety.) It may be that Active Voice did only as much work as was absolutely necessary to integrate the fax package.

Regardless, for large organizations or for medium-sized organizations with serious faxing needs, we suggest abandoning ActiveFax, in favor of a solution such as those provided by Omtool or RightFAX, and taking the extra time to do a custom integration. ActiveFax is acceptable for smaller companies or as an entry-level, stand-alone solution in its LightningFax version, but we doubt it’s suitable for large-scale use, especially since it lacks features such as documents-on-demand, a decent OCR package, and a Web client.

Some of our other issues (already mentioned above) include the complexity of setting up calling rules, the disappointing online help for end users, the various administrative applets, and utilities that probably should be more centralized. It would be an improvement even if these utilities were merely placed (redundantly) within the administrator’s browser page. That, at least, would save an awful lot of mouse-clicking.

CONCLUSION
You’ll notice that ratings section gives Unity 2.3 very high marks for installation, operational testing, and interfaces, but lower marks for documentation and features. Even though the documentation and features of Unity both contain large parts that are best of class, each has serious flaws that in some way lowered the grades. Still, the overall product is at least as good as every competitor that we’ve seen, and in many aspects it is even better.

We knew before we tested Unity that it was one of the top five products in its category; after testing it, we believe that it’s among the top two or three. We strongly recommend this product for most organizations, with but two conditions. First, the fax component could stand improvement. Second, on the backend, Active Voice could do more to better integrate the entire solution. On the front-end, the user experience is exceptional, and the product does what it claims to do, and does it very well, at that.