Eric.Burger@centigram.com
Thu, 23 Mar 2000 17:55:31 -0800
Unlike a VPIM system, an IVM system can receive an arbitrary message from
the Internet. However, there's no guarantee it can render the message to
the desired presentation medium. Because of this, we have the NDN and
PNDN.
The point of IVM isn't that the desktop can play a message from a legacy
voice mail system. The point of IVM is that the legacy voice mail system is
more likely to play a message from the desktop. I have a lot of flexibility
at my desktop. I can even figure out how to play raw G.726, even on a Mac.
However, I don't have much flexibility at my legacy voice mail system.
On IVM -> VPIM back-off: My premise is that IVM is something different from
VPIM. If IVM was still VPIM v3, then it would make sense to say that a v3
system should fall-back to v2 protocols when interacting with a v2 system.
However, I don't see legacy voice mail systems using IVM for inter-system
communication. This is because all of the things that are important to
voice mail systems, like privacy, guaranteed delivery, return-receipt when
the subscriber actually listens to a message, and so on ARE NOT PART of
IVM. These things break in the real Internet mail world.
VPIM v2 and future vXen define how voice messaging systems interact with
each other over the Internet. In this case, the far-end voice messaging
system is a specialized, profiled, and limited Internet mail end-point. We
break some rules of Internet mail, because the market requires us to
provide voice mail semantics to inter-system messaging.
IVM defines how voice messaging systems interact with generic Internet mail
end-points. We cannot break any rules of Internet mail because, as
general-purpose end-points in the Internet mail system, we have no control
on the far-end end-point.
[snip]
> I propose we state that if a voice
> messaging system wishes to receive arbitrary messages from Internet
> clients, it must implement IVM. This renders the IVM back-off to VPIM
> issue
> moot.
>
I do not see how this makes it moot.
First, an IVM system may not be able to receive an arbitrary message from
the Internet. What if it is in some special codec that you can't deal
with?
What IVM is doing (I hope) is allowing more clients the ability to play a
message and also the possibility to create one. The IVM profile is
unlikely
to be the default setup on all desktops. Still an IVM system is more
likely
to be able to play a 'voice email' than a VPIM system.
Second, the IVM to VPIM back-off is intended to define another piece that
needs to be standardized. It is always useful to suggest an appropriate
fallback mechanism.
Finally, it does not make sense to have a new voice mail system that cannot
communicate with the old voice mail system. That is, an IVM VM system that
cannot 'back off' to communicate with a VPIM VM system. Despite the fact
that everyone will not implement this, I think it is still an important
feature to standardise. Else we those of us who want to implement this
will
come up with different ways of doing it.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Fri Mar 24 2000 - 04:52:19 IDT