Integrated typically means the product has it's own proprietary database that it syncronizes messages with the target customer's backend. In other words they have a database that can swap messages with Exchange, Domino, whatever... They push voice messages into Exchange and pull emails out into their own database for TTS access and the like.

Time to market for an integrated system is much faster (lots easier to do it this way) however the resulting product is less desirable. The network traffic is much heavier since you have to "poll" the target mail system for updates to message status, deleted messages and new messages and then drag them all across the network. With lots of user all that polling can get expensive. It also means MWI/Notification functionality is delayed. If the polling time is every 10 minutes you could have 10 minute delays in MWI and pager dialouts etc... something folks don't generally appreciate.

A unified system stores it's message natively in the target message store (no two copies of messages to be synched) and gets change notification from the message store directly when a new message is left or an existing messages is read or deleted... virtually instantaneous notification of state changes with no polling.

An integrated system also typically has two directories (one for their subscribers and one that the customer already has in place such as AD). Most companies have figured out this is really not a good idea and have worked around synching up with AD/Ex5.5/Domino directories but you still have a few out there that haven't got this one down yet.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)