Yesterday on TechCrunch, Michael Arrington wrote a rather interesting post about the death of voice mail. Since I work for the phone company, I have a particular interest in voice mail. Since SquawkBox had their turn discussing this post (without me!), I would like to get my thoughts out too. My opinion is that I quite frankly hate voice mail. It is a slow, legacy practice that requires us to unitask. The only thing I dislike more than voice mail would have to be a standing meeting with no agenda.
I do see value in receiving messages, but what I hate is not controlling how I receive those messages. Telephony vendors are constantly trying to push their proprietary versions of unified communications on us. I have talked before about the importance of Penn State not getting trapped by vendor-specific features when standards can do the job. The existing voice mail system at University Park only works for the existing phone systems at University Park. We don't have the capability to expand that existing system without furthering our dependences upon vendor-specific solutions. So now what?
- Why not instead leverage the standard systems that we have available?
- Do you use voicemail or something else?
- Would you rather get voice messages some other way? If so, how?
- Why restrict voice mail to Penn State University Park? Why not all of PSU?
Since it is unlikely that I will get to kill voicemail entirely, I would like to see a voice mail system that connects to all of our telephony services and delivers messages to you how you choose to get them. If you don't like the telephone interface, no problem use a web interface. If you want the messages to follow you, get them via email. If you need some menu options for your mailbox, help yourself. It won't happen overnight, but go ahead and ask. We should be trying to get there.
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