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Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the Oracle Voicemail & Fax system and describes its major features.

This chapter contains the following topics:

• Oracle Voicemail & Fax Overview
• Oracle Voicemail & Fax Features

Oracle Voicemail & Fax Overview

Oracle Voice Mail and Fax is a reliable, highly scalable voice mail and fax system, that provides centralized and secure message storage and retrieval for voice mails and faxes.

Oracle Voicemail & Fax uses the Oracle Email message store for voice mail messages, taking advantage of the Oracle core competencies in providing access to, storing and managing all types of information. Oracle Voicemail & Fax delivers the full power of the Oracle 9i multithreaded database to provide parallel processing, high availability, and rapid response time for thousands of simultaneous users. Using the highly scalable and reliable Oracle Email message store as a foundation, Oracle Voicemail & Fax provides telephone processing, delivery, browser based clients, and administration utilities.

Oracle Voicemail & Fax Features

The main features of Oracle Voicemail & Fax consist the following:

• Voice
• Fax
• GUI Client Access
• Standards Based Applications
• Administration

Voice

Oracle Voicemail & Fax provides a basic DTMF voice mail interface with the ability to change user preferences through the telephone interface. Because Oracle Voicemail & Fax is a single store solution, actions taken on a message or account preferences through the voice channel are visible through all channels.

Fax

Oracle Voicemail & Fax provides inbound facsimile capabilities. Faxes sent to a user's phone number are delivered directly into the user's inbox, where they are available for viewing as message attachments. Faxs are stored as MIME compliant messages that can be printed or forwarded to any e-mail address using standards based clients or the Web clients.

GUI Client Access

Oracle Voicemail & Fax provides access to voice mail through multiple channels including the phone, IMAP4 or POP3 standards based clients, and through the Web. Because messages are stored in industry standard formats (.wav for voice mail and .tif for fax), they do not require a special player. This enables users to access messages from any computer system and the ability to forward these messages to anyone with access to e-mail.

Standards Based Applications

Oracle Voicemail & Fax telephone applications are built on the Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum (ECTF) standards. These standards, collectively known as CT Server, define the infrastructure needed to build and support platform-independent computer telephony (CT) applications and enable Oracle Voicemail & Fax applications to easily integrate with a variety of enterprise and carrier class switches.

Administration

Oracle Voicemail & Fax simplifies administration and management by integrating with Oracle Enterprise Manager, enabling consolidated, Web-based management of the total Oracle environment as well as integration into existing system monitoring infrastructures. Oracle Voicemail & Fax also supports multiple domains with delegated administration on the same system, enabling hosting.