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E-mail messaging has evolved over the last 15 years from proprietary systems to standards-based systems and now includes extensions for multi-media support.
E-mail systems started as islands of services providing intra-company e-mail messaging. Different e-mail vendors introduced their own proprietary products and touted their value-added features, hoping to capture the market.
As e-mail matured, it was clear there was a need for message exchange between companies and between different vendors' products. This need created a new market for gateway products that allowed different e-mail products to exchange messages. In addition, Service Providers introduced value-added e-mail services for secure message exchange between corporations.
The Internet was the catalyst for creating universal e-mail messaging. Universal e-mail allows anyone to e-mail anyone else, regardless of whose product you use and the service to which you subscribe. Examples include intra-company and inter-company communications, as well as communications between consumers and between businesses and consumers. The Internet introduced a set of open standards for messaging that allowed customers to implement different products (from different vendors or freeware) that adhered to the open standard interfaces and ensured they would be able to communicate with others.
Now vendors differentiate themselves by how their product is implemented and priced, not by the proprietary nature of the interfaces. For example, some products are free and distributed on the Internet. These generally do not provide extensive support and are geared towards smaller deployments. Other products are focused at carrier class deployments and can scale to millions of subscribers with high availability and manageability. Still others may focus on the user interface design, system performance, or security.
It is becoming clearer to the industry that e-mail standards must be expanded to include support for multi-media messaging. Standards such as Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) and Voice Profile for Internet Messaging (VPIM) are laying the groundwork for message exchange of voice, fax, and video as attachments to standard e-mail.
The uOne product is accelerating the evolution of the voice messaging market by leveraging the advances in the e-mail messaging market. Clearly there is a need for these two architectures, as well as others such as fax messaging, to converge. This is what Cisco's uOne is all about.
Figure 1 shows a standard Internet messaging environment. The standards highlighted are widely adopted throughout the industry. Table 1 lists the standards that the uOne application supports.
| Standard | Description |
|---|---|
LDAP | Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a software protocol for enabling anyone to locate organizations, individuals, and other resources, such as files and devices in a network. LDAP is a "lightweight" version of Directory Access Protocol (DAP), which is part of X.500, a standard for directory services in a network. Unlike DAP, it is designed for IP networks. The uOne application uses LDAP to provide a platform-independent presentation of subscriber profile information and application-specific data. |
IMAP | Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is a method of accessing electronic mail that is kept on a mail server. It permits a "client" e-mail program to access remote message stores as if they were local, when in fact, that e-mail may be manipulated on a server miles away. IMAP is different from Post Office Protocol (POP), another access protocol, because IMAP stores all messages on a server. On the contrary, POP users access the server, and POP stores the messages in their inbox on their local system. It then deletes that mail from the server. You can find more information about IMAP at http://www.imap.org/whatisIMAP.html |
SMTP | Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a protocol used to transfer electronic mail between computers. |
MIME | Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is a standard for multi-part, multimedia electronic mail messages. |
SNMP | Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a set of standards for communication to and management of devices connected to an IP network. Software for managing devices using SNMP is available for every kind of commonly used computing device and is often bundled along with the device it is designed to manage. |
SNPP | Simple Network Paging Protocol is a software protocol for paging over an IP network. |
Cisco allows you to implement the uOne application with no investment in proprietary systems. For many, uOne can simply be an extension to their existing e-mail system.
By utilizing off-the-shelf components you have more choice and are not held captive to a single vendor. You can leverage the best technology available and do not have to pay a premium for proprietary products. Cisco does not become a technology bottleneck for all aspects of your service.
It also allows you to deploy a variety of applications that share a single set of backend services. This reduces the cost and support issues of having different access, directory, messaging, SMS, and paging servers for different applications. It also reduces the need to synchronize data between applications.
By utilizing a common message store, you can act on voice, fax, and e-mail messages in a common manner. All Cisco messages are stored in MIME format. Other systems offer integrated messaging store voice in one format, fax in another, and e-mail in yet another. Each of these requires a separate server. To uniformly act on messages in these other systems, a great deal of custom development is required, and you must rely on each of your messaging vendors.
If your organization understands e-mail, it will be well positioned to understand uOne. Since we implement voice and fax services through standard e-mail facilities, your team already has the fundamental skills to gather requirements and engineer, design, implement, and support a uOne solution.
Innovations, such as Internet, Intranets, Webs, and client/server applications, are enabling individuals to move beyond the limits of their desktop computer. There is a movement from asking "which services are available from a given device (e.g., PC or telephone)" to "how can a multitude of services be provided to people no matter where they are or which type of device they have". Imagine providing access to traditional PC applications from the most ubiquitous device, the telephone.
Computing moved in the 1980's from being host-centric to being desktop-centric. Today it is becoming network-centric. Web technologies are making the location of applications and data transparent, spread among multiple servers and networks.
The term "fat client" refers to applications that require the majority of processing to occur locally on the client, for example a word processing application on a PC. A "thin client," on the other hand, splits application processing from the user interface presentation. This enables applications to run on the latest high-performance backend servers while the user interface is presented at the front end.
Cisco has extended the standard Internet messaging environment to support the "ultimate thin client", the telephone. Now the telephone, a relatively dumb device with a 12-key keypad, can access the same set of Internet Messaging services as the PC.
Figure 2 shows how the uOne product fits into the Internet messaging environment.
Posted: Mon Sep 25 19:34:29 PDT 2000
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