Building blocks of a Unified Communications deployment – part 3

In part 2 of “Building blocks of a Unified Communications deployment”, I talked about the demands that would made on the WAN and on the need for a corporate directory. In this post we will discuss the email/messaging platforms and gateways.

Email platforms come in many flavours, but the types that we will need to consider have the following characteristics:
- obtain the users’ information from a corporate directory so that there is no redundant information stored on the network and so that we have one authoritative source of information
- a calendaring function should be available as a source of free/busy information about a user, which can be used to feed into the ‘presence’ engine of a UC platform
- the mailbox of the user will be used to store his voicemails and faxes as they are sent to him. This is generally called Unified Messaging (UM).

The most common messaging platforms are Microsoft’s Exchange Server platform and IBM’s Lotus Domino. We should also consider Cisco’s attempt to provide UM through the purchasing of an email platform called . Cisco’s attempt to provide UC to its customers looks more like un-unified communications, because its components do not typically integrate well together.

On the other hand, gateways -voip gateways- will be a necessary ingredient of your communication strategy. As discussed in my 1st post and 2nd post, gateways will interface with the PSTN cloud, help you integrate with the PABX and provide you with an interface into the h323 world of video conferencing.

In other words, they will accomplish the task of converting the session control protocols from sip to h323 (and viceversa) as well as from g711 or g729 to rta for audio realtime codecs and from h264 to rtv.

Conversion to rta and rtv is only necessary if a Microsoft OCS deployment is performed. The rta conversion can be done on a OCS mediation server role, or on a gateway if the manufacturer has obtained a license from Microsoft to implement the rta protocol.

The rtv conversion is only necessary to implement when interfacing with a video infrastructure that does not understand it – typically all solutions bar the OCS platform.

In a next post, I will talk about databases and other related matters, such as monitoring and archiving and reporting.

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Tags: LinkedIn, media gateways, microsoft exchange, session control gateways, uc, uc interoperability, unified communications, voip gateways