See your voice mail: Microsoft's next Exchange Server will make speech visible

Perhaps you've heard about this service that carries your voice across wires. It could become all the rage very soon, as new e-mail server functionality will give users the ability to see the text of messages callers have just spoken, and then to speak the contents of menus that users have just now written.

"With Exchange 2007, we introduced voice mail under the term 'Unified Messaging,' which essentially allowed companies to replace their legacy voice mail system and run it all through Exchange. The end user benefit is that universal inbox -- your voice mail, your e-mail, everything comes into your inbox," stated Microsoft's director of Exchange product management, Julia White, in an interview with Betanews. "In [ES] 2007, it shows up as a WAV file and you play it with a little media player. What we've done with Exchange 2010 is extend that. Now, when you get that voice mail in your inbox, it also comes with a text transcription of that voice mail. You still have the player...but it also gives you maybe not an exact transcription, but a very close match of what the voice mail says, so you can quickly triage."

Businesses will get their first opportunity to try this concept today, with the pending release (in mere hours, at the time of this writing) of the first Exchange Server 2010 public beta. Although the extensions to Microsoft's universal inbox feature will not be available until the release of Office 2010 -- whose timeline was formalized yesterday with a broad H1 2010 RTM window -- admins will still be able to see what the new inbox will look like, White told us, through ES 2010's Outlook Web Access feature. For now, it's set up to present Exchange users' Web browsers with the functionality being planned for Outlook 2010.

"With voice mail, literally I can set up [menus] so, if I'm on the road today, the voice mail system can say, 'If you're calling about the press release, press 1,' and it goes straight to my cell phone. 'If you're calling about another topic, press 2,' and it'll go to one of my managers. 'If you're calling about something else, press 3,' and it'll go to my voice mail. It's a quick wizard; as an end user, I can customize it based on what I want, and who I want to get to me. I can forward to different phone numbers, or to different people, or go straight to voice mail."

In other words, an Exchange user will be able to set up almost a kind of flowchart for how his automatic system will respond to communication. It's no longer a catch-all for every incoming caller, like a PBX, but instead a system that can direct calls from specific callers to specific destinations. "Hello, James, I've been expecting your call, so please press 1 to dial me on my cell."
And if recording all those telephone cues takes up too much time or is too cumbersome, White confirmed for us, you can type what you want the system to say when it responds to you. Microsoft's latest automated readers premiered with Office Communications Server 2007, and its functionality will apparently be extended to ES 2010.

"All of the end user capabilities are available through Outlook Web Access," said White, "which comes with Exchange. So you can see when we talk about features such as MailTips or Conversation View, or the really cool things around voice mail speech-to-text transcription, all of those capabilities are available through OWA which ships with Exchange."

Those other new features White mentioned are noteworthy: MailTips, for instance, promises to provide a more conversational front end for Outlook users, providing users with information about, for instance, whether intended recipients are already out of the office before they send a message. And at long, long last, ES 2010 will be able to collect related messages by their conversation topic, as opposed to just their subject line, for a truly threaded view that users can manage like a Web-based bulletin board. Yes, that means certain participants in a conversation can be "muted," and users can even extract themselves from a conversation they're not interested in any more.

"We've been presenting Exchange 2010 to some customers under [non-disclosure agreement," admitted White, "and there's a few things that literally get, like, a round of ovation. One of them is around the mute button." When some of the more conversational office pools launch waves of chatter, by means of non-selective use of the "Reply All" button, individuals often find themselves besieged by relentless banter...but they can't exactly send the CEO or certain other participants to the kill file. With the mute button -- which may be what Microsoft ends up calling it, since it sounds better than "Ignore Conversation" -- Exchange users through Outlook will be able to cancel just the topics, not the senders. "With literally one button, you're off those nightmare chains," she told us.

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