Lab Evaluation: Unified Communications Within IP-PBXsLab Evaluation: Unified Communications Within IP-PBXs

Unified communications is a concept that's hardly new. The promise that technology can provide nearly seamless communication in multiple forms, over multiple modes and within a common interface has been with us for more than a decade.

Envisioned over the years, and dangled like brass rings on a carousel, were proposed scenarios where people could easily interact with each other and work from virtually anywhere using various types of devices.

Gone would be the days where road warriors were burdened with toolbelts and briefcases stuffed with enough different gizmos – cell phones, pagers, PDAs and laptops – to make Batman envious. Desk-bound workers wouldn't need to constantly juggle between applications. Efficiency and morale would improve. Costs would be cut.

Miercom’s Consulting Group decided to take a closer look at the status of unified communications solutions that are offered by the leading IP-PBX vendors.

For the first in what will be a series of articles, engineers from Miercom studied the unified communications wares of Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya, two of the industry's top companies (others will follow in subsequent articles). We wanted to assess the state of UC in 2007, to see what the products are now doing. While we were at it, we studied the plethora of endpoints being sold by the two companies. And – knowing that none of the UC bells and whistles can work if the underlying IP-PBX is a dog – we studied the current IP-PBX management offerings from Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya and Cisco Systems. We’ll report on the management systems in a future article.

Are You There?

Today's purveyors of UC products promise easy communication in just about any way we desire. Therefore, to qualify (in our eyes) as a true unified communication solution, the technology must be able to meld all forms of business communications. That includes voice/voicemail, e-mail, instant messaging (IM), fax, audio conferencing, video conferencing and chat. It should easily work from any device: laptop, desk phone or cell phone, and allow us to smoothly roam from the office (Wi-Fi) to the house or car (Cellular).

Even that's not enough. A product can elegantly unify all those distinct forms of communication, but it will not make the grade if it cannot provide one of the most important parts of the puzzle: Presence. Knowing in real-time whether somebody is available, busy or off the grid is almost as important as being able to reach them wherever they are.

It's also taken for granted that a modern UC solution incorporates simple access to other work data including files, calendars and address books. All this diverse communication should take place through a single, simple interface invisibly connected to powerful background infrastructures that automatically convert different modes of communication into the form we desire.

Are we there yet? As we approach the end of another decade, can we truly say we've finally unified business communication?

The Sticky Wicket

If the best efforts of Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent are an indication – and we believe they are – the long-sought Holy Grail of UC is almost in our hands. However, we can't really proclaim that all types of communication have been completely unified. The one hurdle that remains to be cleared is e-mail, a situation that's somewhat ironic since e-mail is one of the oldest forms of digital communication.

Of course, both Alcatel-Lucent's UC offering and that from Avaya provide access, from just about anywhere, to e-mail. However, what they haven't been able to do is overcome the fact that most corporate e-mail continues to be handled by Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes.

Call us purists, but while we're not saying UC programs must handle e-mail on their own (as in an email application written by Avaya or Alcatel-Lucent), we believe the integration can be tighter. The goal of UC should be to plug-into, or integrate with, the e-mail application to such a degree as to have a single interface or application that allows users to, at a glance, see e-mails, faxes and voicemails in the inbox. It should also tell us who is online and who is not; allow us to easily start an IM session, effortlessly launch a conference bridge and manage phone calls with one hand tied behind our backs.

Because it can transparently integrate Outlook, the UC effort from Microsoft -- Office Communications Server 2007 -- comes pretty close to true UC. Indeed, OCS solved the e-mail clumsiness we've been grumbling about. However, we found that OCS came up a bit short on the equally-important voice side, at least when compared to Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent. (For detail, see our earlier test of OCS here on No Jitter.)

Microsoft also has the opportunity to improve in providing a clear, single interface for user presence. Users can conveniently see the status of everyone listed on a particular e-mail, but they do not have a ‘buddy list’ from within Outlook. To get that full buddy list, OCS users still need to fire up Office Communicator. Also, Microsoft is giving mixed messages about its goal when it comes to becoming an IP-PBX player. Though Microsoft claims you don’t have to have an IP-PBX running alongside OCS, they also acknowledge that OCS doesn’t provide the full feature set that a full-fledged IP-PBX offers.

Perhaps it all comes down to semantics. What do you define as UC? If you're willing to overlook the e-mail sticking point, it's clear the UC efforts from Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent and others do excellent jobs consolidating communication. They've squeezed it into as minimal a number of interfaces as possible and they've created very smooth methods of user interaction, be it via hard phones, softphone programs, mobile phones, Web interfaces or thick client applications.

Alcatel-Lucent

We used and tested Alcatel-Lucent's OmniTouch Unified Communications Suite, the latest iteration of the venerable telephony company's evolving UC offerings. The suite showed evidence of a continued effort to enhance the brand's communications offerings through increased integration and new features. We found solid telephony, messaging, one-number and team-working services as well as a capability to provide the all-important presence information. Not the least of the welcome improvements was simplified licensing: The suite requires a single license for all clients instead of multiple licenses for multiple components, and for that we give thanks.

The foundations of OmniTouch Unified Communications Release Five are a Linux-based collaboration server that handles voice, video and Web conferencing -- as well as IM presence -- and a Windows-based UC application framework server for telephony, one-number services and telephone presence. All communications are via SIP, not only to the PBX but also to third-party applications.

For fax services, they have an embedded application that can run on those same servers and supports up to 500 users. Alternatively Alcatel-Lucent offers an external fax server for more than 500 users. In either case, when faxes come in they are converted into images and stored on the mail server. This is important for compliance issues.

On the voice-mail side, Alcatel-Lucent again primarily uses the mail server as a repository for voice messages. The system can also interface with an external voice-mail system.

For the products we reviewed, we found you need to utilize LDAP service so the various unified communications elements can be most easily and effectively integrated. For example in Alcatel-Lucent’s case, an LDAP directory that runs on the OmniTouch IP-PBX can also pull from the Microsoft Active Directory to provide users with a single interface to search multiple databases. to simplify trying to find somebody. The servers can be set up with varying levels of redundancy. On the Linux box they use Red Hat and can do clustering. On the Windows side, they do primary-secondary. They can break out the various services and spread them across up to six different servers for scalability, redundancy and reliability.

We tested the system's latency without traffic, and again with a simulation of 10,000 users. There was no discernable change in its speed in either case.

The OmniTouch UC servers, fax server, LDAP, e-mail server, voicemail server and the IP-PBX all feed into Alcatel-Lucent's UC thick client interface dubbed My Instant Communicator.

Avaya

Avaya's UC solution is composed of a number of different servers that sit on the back end and support the company's UC solutions, now being branded as Avaya one-X (for "one experience"). The Avaya framework is based on several servers, each with specific functions that tie-into the overall one-X offering.

From the Avaya Communication Manager IP-PBX switch, Modular Messaging servers and Meeting Exchange servers, the one-x Portal's Linux-based servers deliver, via SIP trunks, telephony, messaging, mobility and conferencing services.

The core components integrate with directory services, the Web server and an internal database. The one-X portal server arrangements can include a SIP Enablement Server that helps talk between various applications via SIP, and an Application Enablement Server that can be used by professional services folks to build custom applications. The Mobility Services Server handles Avaya's Extension to Cellular feature, allowing you to take a call at your desk phone, press a button and have the call transferred to your cell phone.

Their Modular Messaging Server interfaces with the mail system. It can be deployed in active-active scenario with two boxes both working simultaneously, so when one goes down the other keeps on trucking.

We were impressed by Avaya's one-X speech server. It handles voice interaction with the system, but it does much more than just direct calls based on spoken keywords. You can tell it to read e-mails, and it will do text-to-speech and read you the headers of your voicemails. You can stop the read-backs (by just saying "stop,") and even have the system schedule an appointment with that person. The server will access the Outlook calendar, schedule a meeting and send reminders.

The Customer Event Business Processes (CEBP) server, a Linux-based server running Apache Tomcat application server monitors events and triggers actions. For example, the CEBP can be used to monitor a stock page on the Web. When a predetermined threshold is hit a conference call is initiated based on your instructions. It’s a back-end enablement piece, allowing you to custom program and tie events together with your phone services.

In general, Avaya's systems provide great response times and we observed no noticeable latency when handling a few users to a thousand.

Alcatel-Lucent My Instant Communicator

The primary means of user interaction in the Alcatel-Lucent world of UC is My Instant Communicator (MIC), a thick client program that runs on Windows XP or Vista and is part of the company's Unified Communications Application Suite. MIC replaces, and consolidates under a single license, Alcatel-Lucent’s prior IP telephony, messaging, one-number and collaboration services formerly known as "My Phone,” “My Messaging,” “My Assistant” and “My Teamwork.”

During our testing, we found MIC to be a solid, reliable performer that offers a number of customization options.

The application does well at presenting incoming messages using easy-to-understand icons and audio alerts for voice, IM, email, chat or video. Responses to messages were similarly easy to make, and we liked the simple way we could switch, on the fly and without a hitch, between different modes of communication.

MIC unified the corporate directory and presented to us all available ways of reaching desired contacts and, in most cases, their presence. Colored indicators and icons tell whether a contact is offline, available or busy.

By hovering your curser over an icon in the system tray, the user is presented with a clickable menu which can then be activated to allow immediate access to the call log and voice mail. E-mail could not be accessed directly however.

Alcatel-Lucent strives to provide a consistent user interface regardless of the equipment being used. My Instant Communicator provides information on calls, voice mails, contacts and directory search. The software and associated hardware proved to be solidly reliable, and we particularly liked the way some of Alcatel-Lucent's hard phones come with an integrated, full keyboard that allows users to IM directly from the phone. (The optional My Teamwork solution allows for easy collaboration using video, chat, file sharing and file transfer.

Toast Anyone?

MIC uses various toasts--small, translucent messages that pop up from the bottom of the screen--to alert users of communication activity. The toast alerts come with various action options. Right from the little toast, users can take calls and transfer them. They can monitor their buddies and have the MIC issue alerts when that person signs-on or becomes available. Toasts also alert users to events, such as missed calls or new voice mails. We tried all of these features and found them to work flawlessly.

Stated simply, MIC does a good job of allowing users, wherever they are, to reach out to whoever they want so they can get whatever they desire.

Users can answer calls using the softphone piece installed in the PC. Or they can reply with an IM which can be set up to automatically inform the caller that they're busy. If the user chooses to reply with an e-mail, MIC uses the default e-mail program.

A big goal of any UC vendor these days is to keep the interface uniform across different devices. Alcatel-Lucent did a good job with My Instant Communicator. The interface remains substantially the same whether accessed via the company's IP phones, desktop PCs or Windows Mobile Pocket PCs.

My Instant Communicator also has the ability to dial-by-name. A search box in the toolbar allows users to type a name or number that prompts an LDAP directory search and responds with a list of contacts and their current states of presence. Users can store contacts' numbers in a personal directory that is separate from the corporate directory.

The Soft Side

The Alcatel-Lucent My Phone is a softphone application that can be accessed through a Web page served by the OmniTouch server, or installed on a desktop PC, in which case it is referred to as the Alcatel 4980 Softphone. The 4980 option of the My Phone product offers telephony, voicemail, GroupWare, VoIP and multi-device handling.

My Phone can be used remotely. It can either be used as an IP softphone with VoIP or it can be linked to a physical phone set, which can be a home phone or a cellphone number. When you log into the softphone you are presented with some options asking for your location. If you are in the office, the softphone becomes an IP phone in the office.

If you are remote, you have option to select “remote.” It then allows you to put in the remote number are you at. When you put in that number, calls are routed automatically to the physical phone set you defined. It's more than call forwarding, because it is forwarding both voice and signaling.

For the Web-based version to work, a VoIP plug-in is installed and the PC must be running on Windows. As a security measure the plug-in is deleted when the browser is closed.

The 4980 is integrated with e-mail clients such as Outlook and Lotus Notes, giving telephony service to the mail clients.

Both the Web version and the thick client come packed with useful telephony features including incoming and outgoing call management, call hold, call transfer, conference, speed dial, call identification and dial by name.

Users can make changes to their desk phones functions, and to the 4980's, by using the Web client and vice-versa.

Roam, If You Want To

Alcatel-Lucent's 802.11 wireless phones are dubbed models 610 and 310. Both support G.711 and G.729 codecs, and their basic key layout is very similar to the common cell phone.. They come with a basic set of navigation buttons which allow you to have the same basic UC features available on the wired and Bluetooth phones.

The 610 and 310 have built-in softkeys. The phones are lightweight with navigation that's intuitive. The standard battery is good for four hours of talk time, and 80 hours on standby. An optional extended-use battery doubles those times.

The wireless units offered decent call quality, but Alcatel-Lucent's model 300 and 600 digital enhanced cordless telecommunications (DECT) phones were even better. The biggest difference was the amazingly crystal clear voice quality and absence of noticeable latency.

For workers who come and go, Alcatel-Lucent offers two "My Pocket Communicator" dual-mode software packages: One for Windows Mobile 5 compatible devices and another for Nokia E-65 or E-61 devices. The software enables simple and seamless handoffs between Wi-Fi and cellular. There are subtle differences between the Windows and Nokia versions. Primarily, the Nokia software automatically switches the phone to the best network while the Windows version requires the user to manually make the transfer.

Both units have the basic telephony functions, but the Nokia version has additional features, including call forwarding, call park, sending callback requests and – the one we liked best – the ability to transfer a call to the deskphone by pressing a button. With either package, you get corporate-type functionality including full directory search capability.

Ends of the Line

Alcatel-Lucent offers five desk phone sets: IP-based "hard" endpoints in its "8" series. The Alcatel-Lucent 4028, 4038 and 4068 IP Touch terminals come with alphabetic keyboards that allow interaction with IM, and which access the call-by-name directory. The top-end of the IP Touch line is model 4068, with a 320 x 240 pixel color screen and 10 softkeys. The device is Bluetooth enabled, supports XML applications and comes with two Ethernet ports. The screen itself has graphical tabs across the top. When you add the UC suite of software, you can push out a new tab to the phones that has some UC information in it. A button allows you to change the screen to look at different tabs, one being for the UC goodies.

The devices allow you to see how many voice-mails, faxes and missed calls you had, one-number routing IM and contacts. Clicking on My Contacts produces a list of contacts with their current presence state.

This design allowed us to contact somebody at the same time as the PC running My Instant Communicator was booting up, or after we'd shut it down. Once the PC is running and MIC is open, incoming IMs show up on both the phone and on the PC interface. The conversation can be initiated with the phone and then transition over to the computer. Likewise, when a call comes in you can respond with an IM.

The phones will alert you to voice mails and faxes but not to new e-mails.

The Bluetooth handset, offered as an accessory, allowed greater flexibility for moving around the office. A message-waiting indicator light placed on top of the device is visible even when you aren't in front of the phone. It lights not only for voice mail, but also for call-back requests, missed calls or text messages.

With Alcatel-Lucent's higher-end phones, users can log into a Web portal and assign feature buttons using a picture of the phone. The company offers a number of other phones, including non-IP models, right down to no-frills units ideal for placement in lobbies.Avaya one-X

Avaya defines unified communications as being "the convergence of real-time and non-real-time business communication applications" and the company stresses that the important aspect is that all those applications -- including telephony, conferencing, e-mail, voice mail, IM, video and collaboration – be available on a wide variety of interfaces.

The company's client-facing UC interfaces are being branded with the Avaya "one-X" trademark and all have a very similar graphical design. A hallmark of Avaya's UC position is the way it strives to make its wares work with third-party products. They are really trying to demonstrate their viewpoint that enterprises can make better use of the products they already have.

The company seems driven by providing enterprises with the pieces that are needed to create a custom-built, UC solution instead of saying, "Here's our UC package and here's what you can do with it." This, inevitably, makes their catalog appear more "bits and pieces," but we found that those bits and pieces all work well together and it allows for the creation of customized architectures that you would not get in off-the-shelf designs.

On the Desktop

The Avaya one-X Desktop is a softphone thick client that is installed on Windows PCs and can be distributed from Microsoft management servers. The one-X Desktop is a SIP client that shows call history, messaging and all other common UC features including presence. It primarily uses the G.711 codec and allows workers to use their desk phone "in tandem" with their computer when in the office while also enabling them to direct their voice path to other phones when they are elsewhere.

The user interface shows call history and messages. It alerts you when you have voice mails but it takes an extra step to actually retrieve, and play back. Voicemails can be deleted right from the interface and they can be replicated directly to Blackberry smartphones.: The system can synchronize with the Blackberry and continually update voice mails so messages can be heard even in areas without cellular signal. In essence, Avaya one-X adds a voice part to the robust Blackberry e-mail functionality and provides other unique voice mail features including a visual list of messages, allowing testers to select the calls we wished to hear first.

Unfortunately, the Blackberry-related one-X features do not provide messaging or presence through the handheld device

Home Away from Home The Avaya one-X Portal, a Web-based application that comes with a built-in H.323 softphone, is designed in keeping with the Avaya UC philosophy - a person's location is less important than his or her ability to get things done. The one-X portal allows workers to access their company's communication services from virtually anywhere via a VPN SSL Web connection.

The portal is designed to "complement" the use of an Avaya desk phone when employees are in the office and to allow communication from any Internet connection when they are off site. Indeed, the portal provides an easy access to telephony, conferencing, IM and contact information, and it does so with a pleasant graphical interface which was intuitive regardless of the device being used.

From the portal, we were able to easily access conferencing services, saw which calls were missed, viewed our voicemail messages and faxes. The message-waiting indicator, a icon that flashes at the bottom of the Web portal page, and the click-to-call functionality was helpful. Unlike the thick-client, desktop version, the Portal did not provide presence capability.

As is the case with the Alcatel UC product, Avaya's telephony-centric one-X Portal stumbled a bit when it came to e-mail. You can get to the mail application, usually Outlook or Notes, but doing so is not as seamless as we'd prefer.

Going Mobile

The mobile component of Avaya's UC lineup, appropriately called one-X Mobile, comes in a variety of flavors. There are releases for Palm, Java, RIM (Blackberry), Symbian Dual-Mode, Symbian Single-Mode and Windows Mobile 5. We checked out the Symbian Single-Mode, Symbian Dual-Mode, RIM and Windows versions.

The interfaces for all were the same, clean one-X designs that are found on all Avaya's offerings. Obviously, there are differences between devices, so there are subtle changes. All have a "Visual Voice mail" feature that brings to voice mail many review and management functions normally found on e-mail. The mobile devices running one-X Mobile reflect the voice mail status of your one-X phone back in the office. Similarly, the mobile software enables searches of, and additions to the corporate directory.

A cornerstone of UC, one-number functionality, is present. That means workers have just one phone number and can decide where calls will be directed.

The mobile one-X does not bring a presence capability for the Windows and Symbian versions, but sometimes -- especially when you're out and about -- that's a good thing.

"Real" Phones

Avaya's hard endpoints - otherwise known as telephones - come in many varieties. We looked at the 1600, 4600 9600 and 3600 series, which work wirelessly.. Like most other wireless phones, Avaya's does a decent job. There's a slight latency, but no worse than that found in other vendors' 802.11 entries, and the phones are good enough for most business applications.

However, the sound quality of Avaya's next-generation wireless phone, the Samsung-built 3631, was substantially better. There was no latency and sound quality was crystal clear, and the phone has a nice color screen. It took awhile to get used to waiting for a phone to boot-up, a process that took about a minute. For old-timers, booting telephones is still an odd concept.

We found the Avaya 9600 wireline desktop phones to be pretty impressive, especially the 9640, since the entire faceplate is removable and can be replaced with a number of different colored or custom designed, plates -- for example, your company logo. Also, the 9640's color screen yielded beautifully crisp detail. We were shown how the phones’ displays could be customized by professional services for specific businesses: A 9640 installed in a stadium luxury box can be used to display photos of food (that were clear enough to actually look appetizing) and place orders. Video camera feeds can be displayed, they support the wideband codec and their audio quality was fantastic.

At the low end of the 9600 line is the 9610, a bare-bones, basic lobby phone with no speaker phone and a single port. Other models in the 9600 family have larger screens, a 10/100 integrated switch, are gigahertz capable and some support Bluetooth. The 4600 series includes four models: featuring either color or black and white screens, headsets in place of handsets for call center and other operator type applications and 10/100/1000 switch ports Of note: The 46-10, -21 and -25 models are also available as VPN endpoints. VPN functionality is built into the phone, eliminating an additional VPN tunneling device.

For all their endpoints Avaya offers a plethora of headsets, both wired and wireless, as well as Bluetooth.

Rob Smithers is CEO of Miercom Consulting and Integration www.miercom.com and provides independent testing services for No Jitter. He can be reached at [email protected].