Cisco Unity™ — Unified Communications
In today's business world, it's a
challenge to manage communications effectively while providing quality
customer service. Not only does your message traffic increase constantly,
but the number of messaging devices seems to grow daily. With the power
and convenience of unified communications, you can easily manage all your
communications so you have time to manage your business.
Cisco Unity™ is a Windows NT®-based communications server that brings
you intelligent voice mail and powerful unified messaging, and integrates
them with the desktop applications you use everyday. Cisco Unity™ gives you
the ability to access voice, fax, and e-mail messages using your desktop
PC, a touchtone telephone, or the Internet.
Intelligent Voice Mail
At its heart, Cisco Unity™ is a powerful and intelligent voice messaging
system. Individual users interact with the system in the way that is most
comfortable and convenient for them. The self-enrollment conversation is
so easy to use that new employees can personalize their voice mailboxes
and begin using Cisco Unity™ within minutes.
Cisco Unity™ provides full menu options to guide users through its many
features and then, as they become more experienced, gives them the option
to switch to brief menus for faster navigation of the system. Regardless
of their level of comfort or expertise, context-sensitive help is only a
single touchtone away.
When new messages arrive, Cisco
Unity™ can announce the number, type,
and priority of the messages received, the date and time they were sent,
or deliver messages to another extension, mobile telephone, or remote
location. When listening to your messages, you can use telephone
touchtones to adjust volume control and playback speed, and forward,
rewind, and pause messages. From your desktop PC, it takes just a few
mouse clicks to address or forward messages to several employees or entire
departments. And to help colleagues and customers reach you more
efficiently, you can record up to five different personal greetings. You
may, for example, want a specific greeting when you are out of the office
or if your line is busy.
Unified Messaging
In the past, voice, fax, and e-mail messages were delivered as separate
media to different locations. The telephone provided the sole means for
accessing voice messages and then could only play messages back in the
order received. Faxes had to be manually retrieved from the nearest fax
machine.
Cisco Unity™'s ViewMail® for Outlook module uses an intuitively designed
interface to make handling all your messages—voice, fax, and e-mail—easy
and convenient, whether you are in the office or on the road. You get
information about all your messages at once on your desktop PC, using a
touchtone telephone, or over the Internet so you can handle them in the
way that's best for you and best for business.
From your desktop PC, you can access e-mail, voice, and fax messages,
and reply to, forward, and save them in public or personal
Exchange/Outlook folders with just a click of the mouse. Icons denote the
type of each message to provide simple visual descriptions. You can see
the number, type, and status of all your communications at a single
glance. With Cisco Unity™'s text-to-speech capability, you get information
about all your messages-and even hear the text portion of e-mail
messages-over the telephone. You can then respond with a voice message
and, if using the optional fax module, print e-mail, attachments, and
received fax messages on a nearby fax machine.
Personal Web Administration
Cisco Unity™ gives subscribers the ability to customize their personal
settings from Internet Explorer 4.01 or higher using ActiveAssistant™, a
dynamic Web-browser interface. ActiveAssistant reduces the workload for
system administrators and gives subscribers additional flexibility to
customize Cisco Unity™ to suit changing demands in their work environment.
Subscribers can quickly and easily establish or change personal settings
such as their voice mail options, security code, personal distribution
lists, and message delivery options. For ease of administration and
security reasons, the system administrator decides which features
individual subscribers or members of classes of service can access.
Digital Networking Capability
Cisco Unity™'s optional ActiveNet™ Digital Networking module allows the
system to connect to other Cisco Unity™ servers at the same site via the
LAN, or remote sites using a WAN or the Internet. Digital networking makes
communicating with coworkers at remote locations fast and efficient.
Cisco Unity™ combines the power of NT with the versatility of unified
messaging, the efficiency of intelligent voice mail, the speed of digital
networking, and the ease of Web administration to bring you a
communications server that can streamline and support your business needs.
Cisco Unity™ Features
- Voice, fax, and e-mail messages are organized in your e-mail inbox.
- Voice and fax messages can be accessed from a desktop PC, laptop
computer with modem using the Internet, or any touchtone telephone.
- Send voice and fax messages to anyone who can receive Internet
e-mail.
- VCR-style interface lets you play, rewind, pause, or fast forward
messages with a few mouse clicks.
- Store faxes for on-screen viewing or printing from any networked PC.
- Forward faxes to any fax machine from a touchtone telephone.
- Download all message types and respond or create new messages off
line.
- Save voice and fax messages along with e-mail in public or personal
Exchange/Outlook folders.
- Apply Microsoft Exchange's Inbox Assistant rules to voice and fax
mail.
Cisco Unity™ Components
- Unified messaging (ViewMail for Outlook).
- Personal Web Assistant (ActiveAssistant).
- Intelligent Voice Mail.
- Digital networking (ActiveNet Digital Networking).
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