Texting Law is No LOL Matter Outlook Voice Access Comes to the Rescue

When Gov. Granholm signed the new Texting Bill into law during a live
appearance on the Oprah Show on April 30, more than a few of us road
warriors started looking for practical answers to staying legal.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American spends over 100 hours each way commuting to work every year, surely a fraction of the time most road warriors spend on the road. I have to admit, I have done my share of texting while driving.
What’s the safe bet? In my opinion, “Unified Messaging” may be the answer. On the server side, Unified Messaging (UM) delivers a complete suite of voicemail functionality, but Outlook Voice Access (OVA) may be the best part of the package. OVA allows users to interact with their e-mail, contacts, and calendaring information through any telephone or mobile phone.

Among the features in OVA:

Voice Commands Keep You Hands-Free and Legal

The speech recognition technology in the Outlook Voice Access system lets you use voice commands to access your calendar and get meeting details, call the organizers, or send a message notifying attendees that you will be late. Then you can access your address book, find related messages from the sender, or call the senders directly. This system may be the best efficiency tool since the PDA. Another solution is the Cisco Unified Communications platform for small businesses, a complete package of hardware and software for integrating voice and email. Beyond integration with Microsoft’s technology, Cisco offers its own software packages to manage voice mail, email and calendaring, and even integrate your customer relationship management database.

On the leading edge for many small businesses is the concept of managed phone systems, which allows a company to outsource its phone service and system to a third-party provider. The Cisco system allows small businesses — restaurants, service intensive companies or those with disparate staff — to take advantage of the features of enterprise phone systems without the capital outlay.

Using a Virtual Private Network connection — essentially a secure, dedicated connection delivered over the Internet — managed phone service routes business calls and faxes to designated phone lines, and manages the storage and retrieval of messages. Employees can check any type of message from the same inbox — either the voicemail box, accessed from a phone, or the e-mail inbox, accessed from a computer.

Similarly, a growing number of IT companies are providing hosted (or cloud computer based) Exchange Servers that deliver similar functionality to Cisco’s managed phone systems. Keep in mind, those that currently offer Outlook Voice Access usually provide a streamlined feature set in keeping with Exchange Server 2007.

To get the system off the ground, your company will need to start with a systems analysis to understand your business needs as they relate to a newer phone system. Companies with older business phone systems may need to upgrade to take advantage of this new Outlook Voice Access technology. If your company currently uses Exchange 2007, you can take advantage of most of the Exchange 2010 features if your phone system can be integrated with the server.

If you think Outlook Voice Access will make you a more responsible road warrior or save you from one of those $100 tickets, we advise that you act now as the texting law took effect July 1.

Chad Paalman is Vice President, NuWave Technology Partners.