Unified Messaging Improvements

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 delivered the first version of our Unified Messaging (UM) experience from the Microsoft Exchange and Outlook teams. UM enables you to receive voice mails and FAXs in your Outlook Inbox. You can listen to voice mail messages while in Outlook or on your phone.

In Outlook 2010, we’ve added some cool new features to Unified Messaging, including Voice Mail Preview, protected voice mail, and Call Answering Rules to make the UM experience even more compelling. All of the features described below require an account on an Exchange 2010 server, and work with both Outlook Web App and Outlook 2010. There is also more to Unified Messaging with Exchange 2010 than I’ve mentioned below, so look for more information about the complete set of new Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging features.

Voice Mail Preview: Using Microsoft Speech technology, every time you receive a new voice mail message, the Exchange Unified Messaging server creates a transcript of the voice message and adds it to the voice mail message in your Inbox. With Voice Mail Preview, you can read what the caller said without playing the voice mail message. This is especially useful when you are somewhere that you can’t listen to the audio (like reading your messages during a meeting).

The preview text is not always 100% accurate due to the limitations of automated speech recognition technology. To accommodate for this, you can easily click a word in the preview text and the voice mail audio around that word is played. This lets you jump around in the audio to only the words that seem incorrectly transcribed. This feature is great when you want to double-check a phone number, date, or other key word that is important in the message.

Protected Voice Mail: One of the biggest points of feedback we heard last release about voice mail in Outlook was that IT administrators wanted a way to prevent voice mail messages from being casually forwarded to other employees. This release, we’ve added support for using Office Rights Management to protect a voice mail message marked private (or if your corporate policy mandates all voicemail messages be marked private). When a message is protected, it cannot be forwarded, but still has the same rich experience in Outlook and OWA.

Call Answering Rules: Another great feature that’s new to the Outlook and Exchange 2010 release is the Personal Call Attendant. The Personal Call Attendant gives you the flexibility to control how your calls are routed when you aren’t at your desk. For example, you can build a call routing guide to give callers the option to contact another employee (perhaps your manager or your back up), forward the call to your mobile phone, or leave a voice message. You can even customize which options callers receive based on whether they are in your contacts list.

This is just a quick look at some of the new features provided by Unified Messaging in Outlook and Exchange. If you’re interested in more details, take a look at the Exchange blog or TechNet.

Ryan Gregg
Outlook PM