Unified Messaging Service: Another form of virtual office?

JAKARTA (JP): How do we communicate? Let us count the ways. We communicate face-to-face, through letters, or by using telecommunications technologies such as the telegraph, telex, telephone, fax, pager, cell phone, e-mail or short message services (SMS).

In today's fast-moving world, you need to be able to communicate from any place, any time. Perhaps, more importantly, people must be able to communicate with you -- no matter where you are -- at any time.

And, believe it or not, it is getting more and more common for people to carry more than one cell phone, each for a different group of people, in their pockets,

Family members, for example, are to call you at one cell phone, while important clients are given another cell phone's number.

If you are a celebrity, journalists would be given yet another cell phone's number, in case they want to ask for your comments.

This is also the reason why, as reported by Taipei Times earlier this month, the number of cell phone accounts in Taiwan is amazingly larger than its adult population.

Today, with a sophisticated gadget like the 9210 Communicator from Nokia, you can be accessible most of the time.

You can receive faxes, read e-mail messages and even download data without having to get tethered to a network. However, a type of web service called unified messaging, which is gaining ground, can make you even more reachable.

This unified messaging service collects all the messages for you from a variety of sources, including your different e-mail accounts, paging services, multiple cellular and landline telephone numbers, SMS and faxes.

All of these collected messages are stored in one central inbox, which you can easily access with your WAP-enabled cell phone, for example. Each time a new message arrives at your inbox, the service will send a notification to the device of your choice, whether a pager, cell phone or a PDA.

You will need to enter a PIN to access your messages, of course.

In the future, sophisticated technologies such as voice commands, text-to-voice synthesizer, Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and Internet-to-phone will make it even easier for you to access your messages, or more precisely, for your messages to chase you.

This more advanced type of service is called unified communication.

In the horizon is universal messaging, a technology that will enable messages to be delivered to anyone in the world regardless of the type of communications device he can be contacted with.

For now, what we have is unified messaging.

Providers for this type of communications service include, Visto (www42.visto.com), Unified Messaging Ltd. (www.unifiedmessaging.com) and TEMS (www.tems.com).

Visto combines its unified messaging services with its Personal Information Management (PIM) services, thus making it like a secretary who looks after all your schedules and communications. Whichever service you choose, the bottom line is, people will always be able to communicate with you -- no matter where you are. Does it not sound like a virtual office?