Email administrators at most companies are struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing storage demands of email. A frequently raised question is: What is the main force driving the consistent increase in email traffic?

A review of the data quickly confirms some of the usual suspects:

• Spam
• Document sharing
• Mailing list subscriptions
• Personal emails, and
• General overuse of email

There is however a notable addition to this mix: Voice mail messages sent as “.wav” attachments via email.

Unified Messaging now also referred to as Unified Communication is slowly but surely making its way into the enterprise. Maurene Caplan Grey had a good take on the difference between unified messaging and unified communication posted in a recent blog entry:

“What’s the difference between unified messaging and unified communications? From a purist perspective, UC means near real-time communications (instead of store-and-forward), which integrate with line-of-business processes and workflow. However, with the mushrooming of UC hype, the difference between UM and UC will be semantics. UC sounds sexier than UM, yet UM dressed in the UC emperor’s clothes is still UM.”

While initial implementations were expensive and plagued by integration issues, modern on-premise and hosted VOIP telephony solutions all offer some sort of voice mail to email forwarding capability.

However, that is just the beginning. Both IBM and Microsoft have committed to the development of unified communication solutions, in essence integrating their existing email, IM and collaboration products with telephony. I think it is fair to assume that email will remain the medium of choice for storing and transporting voice mail messages.

The primary concern when deploying VOIP is typically focused on network issues, specifically QoS to guarantee voice quality. Companies planning the deployment of these solutions must carefully evaluate the impact on the entire infrastructure before embarking on a full-scale rollout. The secondary impact on email traffic and storage can be significant. A 30-60 second voice mail generates on average an email of 100kB in size. Legacy PBX voice mail doesn’t allow to store an unlimited number of messages for an infinite time. Email integration changes that.

Lastly, let’s not forget the compliance implications. Many companies are now archiving their emails, in some cases for up to seven years. The voice messages stored as emails will add to the archiving volume and makes you wonder what kind of cost it would add to potential e-discovery projects.

Bottom line: Unified Communication is coming. Make sure you consider all of the cost factors when planning a deployment.

Technorati Tags: unified communication, unified messaging, VOIP, voice mail, email archiving, email storage

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