Meridian Mail

Last updated

Meridian Mail is one of the early all-digital voicemail systems, running on Meridian1 / SL-1 digital PBX systems from Northern Telecom (later known as Nortel).

Contents

In the early 1980s Northern Telecom introduced the Norstar. The Norstar was the first all-digital system suitable for small-sized offices (up to 192 lines), and became one of their major product lines.

The Norstar is powered by a 16 MHz Motorola 68000, and uses only a fraction of the CPU's power. Nortel executives were interested in finding ways to use that excess power, as long as their customers paid for the privilege. Nortel asked their research arm, Bell Northern Research (BNR), to look for ways to spend those cycles. Meridian Mail was developed as a result.[ citation needed ]

Meridian Mail was discontinued by Nortel, [1] and has been replaced by CallPilot, which in fact uses the same features and codes as Meridian Mail, but unlike Meridian Mail, allows newer features such as Unified Messaging. Unlike older Nortel systems, where the Meridian PBXs were assigned Meridian Mail and the Norstar systems were assigned Norstar VoiceMail or Startalk Flash VoiceMail, CallPilot was branded for both the Communication Servers PBX and Business Communication Manager Hybrid/Key telephone systems.

CallPilot is one of the products acquired by Avaya in their purchase of Nortel Enterprise Solutions in 2009.

See also

Related Research Articles

The Digital Private Network Signalling System (DPNSS) is a network protocol used on digital trunk lines for connecting to PABX. It supports a defined set of inter-networking facilities.

Voicemail

A voicemail system is a computer-based system that allows users and subscribers to exchange personal voice messages; to select and deliver voice information; and to process transactions relating to individuals, organizations, products, and services, using an ordinary phone. The term is also used more broadly to denote any system of conveying a stored telecommunications voice messages, including using an answering machine. Most cell phone services offer voicemail as a basic feature; many corporate private branch exchanges include versatile internal voice-messaging services, and *98 vertical service code subscription is available to most individual and small business landline subscribers.

Bell-Northern Research (BNR) was a telecommunications research and development company established In 1971 when Bell Canada and Northern Electric combined their R&D organizations. It was jointly owned by Bell Canada and Northern Telecom. BNR was absorbed into Nortel Networks when that company changed its name from Northern Telecom in the mid-1990s.

Business telephone system Multiline telephone system typically used in business environments

A business telephone system is a multiline telephone system typically used in business environments, encompassing systems ranging in technology from the key telephone system (KTS) to the private branch exchange (PBX).

DMS-100

The DMS-100 is a member of the Digital Multiplex System (DMS) product line of telephone exchange switches manufactured by Northern Telecom. Designed during the 1970s and released in 1979, it can control 100,000 telephone lines.

SipXecs

sipXecs is a free software enterprise communications system. It was initially developed as a proprietary voice over IP telephony server in 2003 by Pingtel Corporation in Boston, MA, and later extended with additional collaboration capabilities in the SIPfoundry project. Its core feature is a software implementation of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which makes it an IP based communications system.

Nortel Meridian

Nortel Meridian is a private branch exchange telephone switching system. It provides advanced voice features, data connectivity, LAN communications, computer telephony integration (CTI), and information services for communication applications ranging from 60 to 80,000 lines.

Nortel's Switch56 was a networking protocol built on top of the telephone cabling hardware of their Digital Multiplex System and other telephone switches.

The Nortel Norstar, previously the Meridian Norstar, was a small-office digital key telephone system introduced by Northern Telecom and later sold to Avaya. It supported automatic call distribution and other features, but possibly supporting a total of up to 192 phones and with limited processing power. In the United Kingdom it is sold by British Telecom, rebadged as the BT Norstar.

ROLM Corporation was a technology company founded in Silicon Valley in 1969.IBM Corp. partnered with the company, and ROLM Mil-Spec was sold to Loral Corporation and later to Lockheed Martin in 1996 as Tactical Defense Systems. IBM's ROLM division was later half sold to Siemens AG in 1989, whereupon the manufacturing and development became wholly owned by Siemens and called ROLM Systems, while marketing and service became a joint venture of IBM with Siemens, called ROLM Company. After nearly 30 years, phone products with the name "Rolm" were discontinued in the late 1990s, as sales dropped in markets dominated by new technology with other products or other companies.

Unified communications (UC) is a business and marketing concept describing the integration of enterprise communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, voice, mobility features, audio, web & video conferencing, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), desktop sharing, data sharing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging. UC is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.

Avaya IP Phone 1140E

Avaya IP Phone 1140E in telecommunications is a desktop Internet Protocol client from 1100-series manufactured by Avaya for unified communications. The phone can operate on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) or UNIStim protocols. The SIP firmware supports presence selection and notification along with secure instant messaging. This device has an integrated 10/100/1000BASE-T auto-sensing Ethernet switch with two ports and an integrated USB port, and is Bluetooth capable. The SIP version of this phone has full IPv6 functionality and only requires 2.9 watts of power.

LANStar (Lanstar) was a 2.56 Mbit/s twisted-pair local area network created by Northern Telecom in the mid '80s. Because NT's PBX systems already owned a building's twisted pair plant, it made sense to use the same wiring for data as well. LANStar was originally to be a component of NT's PTE product, which was a sort of minicomputer arrangement with dumb (VT220) terminals on the desktop and the CPUs in an intelligent rack in the PBX room. The PTE was to have several basic office automation apps: word processing, database, etc. Just as NT was doing Beta testing of the PTE, PCs and PC networking took off, effectively killing the PTE before it completed Beta.

The Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) was a telecommunications alliance between Microsoft and Nortel, created in July 2006, to co-develop, integrate, market, sell, and support unified communications products. The goal of the alliance is to make integrated hardware and software solutions that join together voice, video, and data communications without requiring gateways or middleware. Microsoft and Nortel share developing technologies and patents for unified communications products.

CT Connect is a software product that allows computer applications to monitor and control telephone calls. This monitoring and control is called computer-telephone integration, or CTI. CT Connect implements CTI by providing server software that supports the CTI link protocols used by a range of telephone systems, and client software that provides an application programming interface (API) for telephony functions.

Callware Technologies, Inc. (Callware) is a software company in the telecommunication industry, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. It specializes in developing unified communication and unified messaging solutions for the US Department of Defense, government, educational institutions, and mid to enterprise business.

The 1100-series IP phones are 6 different desktop IP clients manufactured by Avaya for Unified communications which can operate on the SIP or UNIStim protocols. The SIP Firmware supports presence selection and notification along with secure instant messaging.

References

  1. Retirement notice, 2006 Archived 2008-12-07 at the Wayback Machine Discontinued