Unify for Gmail’s 8.8 release is now available!  This release is all about our newest feature: Speech2Txt^(TM) and Speech2Txt⁺.

What is Speech2Txt? Now U C it! 😉

Speech2Txt adds a text transcription of your voicemail message delivered to your Gmail inbox. Now you see your voicemail, even before you listen to it!

Don’t you hate seeing a voicemail arrive when you can’t listen, and not know what the message is about?

You recognize the caller, you may even be expecting time sensitive information from them.  Or it may be something that can be addressed later.  Who knows?

Now you can discretely preview your voicemails to know for sure.

Special Launch Offer: Get it for Free

All clients currently running Unify for Gmail as a cloud subscription are eligible to receive Speech2Txt for the rest of their subscription’s term.

All new clients purchasing Unify for Gmail as a cloud subscription can get Speech2Txt add on at no charge for the first year of their subscription purchase.  

Current client upgrade requests must be made to support@donomasoftware.com by September 30, 2019. All new purchases must be made by October 31, 2019.

Request Pricing     Request Demo

How Does it Work?

Speech2Txt is an AI-powered transcription service.  It brings the functionality you likely already enjoy as part of your cellphone service to your corporate voicemail.  We’re giving your Cisco voice platform even more value!

As soon as a voicemail is recorded, it is transcribed in seconds. Your familiar email-powered voicemail arrives with the associated transcription within seconds.

What Else Do I Need to Know?

• Speech2Txt offers transcription on the first 30 seconds of each voicemail.  For those needing up to 5 minutes of transcription per message, we also offer Speech2Txt^+_.
• Speech2Txt is an optional add on for Unify for Gmail.  We suspect everyone will want it, but we are providing flexibility for those who don’t want this option, or are running an unsupported version of Unify for Gmail.

More Languages & Idea Sharing!

Speech2Txt is currently offering English-only transcriptions in this release, but we are already planning options for additional languages in the near future.  We want your input on which languages to prioritize!

VOTE HERE TO HELP PRIORITIZE NEXT LANGUAGE OPTIONS!

We’ll share the results on our social media pages, along with fun use-case challenges and discussion.  To join in, connect with us on Facebook or LinkedIn and use the hashtag #speech2txt

Connect on LinkedIn     Connect on Facebook

We mention unsupported versions of Unify for Gmail.  By this we currently mean Speech2Txt is available for those running our cloud subscription version of Unify for Gmail.  Given the price changes on the horizon for our on-premise version of Unify for Gmail, now might be the perfect time to migrate to the cloud subscription.

Now’s the time to start seeing even more productivity from your unified messaging!  

Request Pricing     Request Demo

In the first discussion of our Strategy and Design Series, we focused on providing context and background on cloud native, as well as our implementation of its principals into our solutions. Here in our second discussion, we’ll focus on one of cloud native’s most important components, microservices. On top of providing background and context, we’ll explain the benefits and challenges you can expect to face with the transformation to microservices from a monolithic architecture.

Building Software is Similar to Lego Blocks?

In today’s business environment, user demands, and technological capabilities are constantly evolving and growing. You have to innovate faster to keep up with the changing market conditions. What used to take months to accomplish now has an expectation to be done within in a few weeks.

What if we could build software like Lego blocks and snap them together easily? Industry disruptors and innovators are doing just that by adopting microservice architecture. The plug and play design of the microservices allows for the high velocity software development to respond much more quickly to market demands.

What Exactly are Microservices?

Let’s briefly define microservices. Microservices, also known as Microservice Architecture (MSA), is a software architectural style in which applications are composed of small, loosely coupled services that are focused on doing one single thing and modeled around a business domain. Microservices have its own compute, runtime, framework and data store. In a microservice architecture there is no centralized database – each service has its own data store and can be developed without interrupting other services. Hence the time to market is faster with low risks.

Microservices vs Monoliths

Monolithic application is like a big container where all the components are tightly packaged with minimal options for plug and play. Traditionally, enterprise applications are complex and follow a monolithic architecture. But there are some major drawbacks that come with this type of architecture. Such as:

• Failure of one component impacts the entire system and uptime of the application.
• It’s unable to scale specific components independently.
• Slow software delivery velocity, causing the team to struggle to keep up with business demands.

Today’s end users are expecting a consistent experience across a wide range of devices. Cloud based applications that are quickly accessible and scalable are in high demand. Monolithic approach fails to meet these expectations, leading to many companies embracing the transformation to microservices.

Isn’t Microservice Architecture (MSA) Just Another Name for SOA?

Traditional Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is about sharing as much as possible between components, usually requiring Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for communication. Microservices share as little as possible to create minimal dependencies, and this is achieved through “bounded context”. So, to answer the question, a microservice architecture is not another name for SOA. SOA focuses on business functionality, while MSA is about bounded context.

Bounded Context and Single Source of Truth

Bounded context is a central pattern in Domain-Driven Design. It attempts to define the boundaries of the domain into a business context and is the limit in which a domain model is consistent.

Consider a typical e-commerce application that consists of a Shipping Service, Catalog Service and Order Service. All these services require product information, as well as specific product attributes that are key for each of these services. Catalog service is about product image, while order service is about product price, and shipping service is about product category for shipping.

If a single representation of the product is used, then it ends up being shared data and dependencies between the microservices. The bounded context ensures that the concept of the product is kept internally within each service and not shared externally. This also means keeping multiple sources of truth consistent. Event Sourcing and Command Query Responsibility Segregation are well known patterns to achieve a single source of truth.

Right Sizing a Microservice is Key

Having a good knowledge of your domain and sub-domains before transforming to microservices from monolith is key. Making your microservices too small will require managing large numbers of them. But making them too big will result in the loss of the benefits that comes with a microservice architecture, turning soon into another monolith. Start small and look for components that can be easily transformed and not dependent on other components for eg: the notification service or the print service. These can be easily transformed to microservices and continue to co-exist with the monolith. As you understand your domain better, your bounded contexts will be more fine-grained.

Benefits of a Transformation to Microservices

There are quite a few benefits that come with a transformation to microservices:

• Each service can be scaled independently of the other.
• Since microservices are independent there is the flexibility to experiment with a new technology and not impact the other services. They can be developed using the best technology for its function.
• Microservice systems can be secured against the failure of other services, so that the overall system is robust. Continuous delivery is easier because of the size of the microservices.
• The microservices or modules of the website are only loaded when required so it can make the application faster to load and faster deployment time compared to a monolithic system.
• Microservice architecture enables continuous delivery and deployment. Each service can be deployed without interrupting any other service. Since each service is small in it’s codebase, this makes it easier for developers to understand and maintain each service.
• Breaking a large application into components by business capability enables development teams to focus on one small set of functionalities at a time. The overall coding and testing process for individual services is more precise as a result.

Challenges of a Transformation to Microservices

Many of the disadvantages of microservices are similar to those with implementing any new technology or architecture. Just as with the benefits, the specific disadvantages that might apply to your project are directly related to its specifics, your team, and your organization. But here are some of the main points you need to be aware of as you look into utilizing microservices:

• There is not a commonly agreed upon definition of the size, scope, and boundaries of a microservice.
• Without continuous deployment and orchestration services, managing the deployment of multiple microservices can be challenging.
• Implementing transactions correctly and maintaining their safety can be challenging when multiple microservices are involved. Security of each microservice has to be considered.
• Reliable and fast network connections are required to support the increased amount of network communication from services interacting with each other.
• Proper monitoring and logging tools are a must for microservices deployed in production.
• Being able to choose a different technology stack for various services results in non-uniform application design and architecture. This can increase long-term maintenance costs. Choose wisely and not just because a different technology stack can be implemented.

Conclusion

Microservices have played an integral role in our most recent solution releases. In the first discussion, we briefly discussed the implementation of cloud-native principals into our OneView solution. The solution’s latest release included a microservice that was built around Contact Center Queues. Along with OneView, we also included a microservice into our Unify for Gmail solution, providing the ability to transcribe audio messages using cloud Speech2Txt APIs.

There is still much more to unpack in this Strategy & Design Series. Join in next time as we’ll continue covering the core components that make up cloud native. Our focus will shift from microservices to Continuous Delivery and Deployment.

In honor of our latest major release to Donoma StoneScribe: commentary on Adam Famularo’s recent Forbes article: The Evolution of Data Governance  that looks ahead to the real value of communications data governance.

Data Retention Needs to Evolve.

From its origins in bulky databases sequestered by IT; data retention is poised to become more than a safety net. Its time has come as a means to deliver innovation, along with security and compliance. Retained data is valuable. It can drive insight and collaboration. Create engagement across organizations. A better use of resources than continuing to manage silos of data retained in the hopes of never seeing it again.

More Than Compliance

As Famularo states, “…data governance is no longer optional because it underpins data security, compliance and privacy. While regulatory compliance and risk mitigation are key drivers, the reality is that data governance is a strategic component of an organization’s digital and business transformation journey.”

Yes, litigation and regulations have been the stick; but insight and innovation are today’s powerful carrots. Until now, preservation of electronic communications was driven by a culture of fear, not of innovation. Data was banished into cumbersome retention systems that have more in common with the Eagles’ Hotel California. Data checks in, but rarely does anyone want to see it again.

The Time is Now

Yes, I have a dog in this hunt. Seven years ago, Donoma Software released StoneScribe, a very agile, secure retention product for Cisco Jabber XMPP data. We saw a need not to just fill a niche gap, but to build a more agile retention product. One that could be both secure and easy to use, by people outside of IT. We saw the opportunity to make the data more useful throughout an organization. So, we focused. Refined our architecture. Listened to the challenges of our clients. Embraced cloud and host of new security needs. Then take that capability and go bigger.

Innovate: with a Link to Legacy

With our newest release, we are opening up our communications retention platform to deliver on this vision. We are embracing communication streams beyond Cisco, and soon, beyond XMPP data. All while making it easy to integrate with legacy data repositories.

In the end, the article sums the opportunity of this new engagement model of data best:

“…an organization’s success is not measured by how much data it gathers; rather, it depends on how well it uses it. By embracing data governance as part of the culture, data intelligence can help you ensure that your company’s data is actively being put to good use.”

We could not agree more.

StoneScribe’s Spring 19 Release Heralds Big Changes

Seven years ago, Donoma Software released our first version of StoneScribe to address the very real gap we saw in the market for secure retention of Cisco Jabber XMPP data. Based on our prior experience building solutions to retain voicemail data, we saw a need not to just fill a niche gap, but to build a more agile retention platform. One that could be both secure and easy to use, by people outside of IT. We saw the opportunity to make the data more useful throughout an organization. So, we focused. Refined our architecture. Listened to the challenges of our clients. Embraced cloud and host of new security needs.

With our latest release, we take all that we have learned and we’re ready to deliver what the market has asked for:  StoneScribe’s ability, security and agility with more integration.

Innovation: with a Link to Legacy

With this newest release, we are opening up StoneScribe to deliver on this vision. We are embracing communication streams beyond Cisco Jabber. All while making it easy to integrate with legacy data repositories.

Want to learn more?  Join us Thursday, May 9th at 2 PM Eastern when we’ll discuss what makes this release so powerful and where we plan to go from here.

Learn more: Beyond Compliance: The Dawn of Agile Data Retention

Why is this a big deal? Greater manageability from one administration console and the ability to aggregate licenses for greater discounts.

Now with the capability of Multi-Domain Support, organizations running Unify for Gmail have the ability to distribute the product across all domains associated on a G-Suite account.

Beena Jacob, Director, Product Development

Donoma is always striving to improve the customer experience, whether it’s innovative features; or processes that makes our software robust and scalable. This technical series is designed to shed light on how our team is looking ahead and planning for new functionality, more security, more agility, even how Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be woven into our solutions. Our first discussion will be focused on providing context and background on cloud native, as well as how we’ve already begun to implement its principals into our solutions. Let’s dive in!

Exactly What is Cloud Native?

Cloud native is currently one of the leading trends in the computer industry. As the ecosystem around cloud-native technologies grows, it will become the competitive differentiator that will keep your company relevant in the future.

Cloud native is about innovating rapidly, improving scalability, and reducing operation costs, all while managing risks at a smaller scale. Let’s explore each one of these cloud-native fundamentals.

Innovating rapidly:In the past, the norm was to avoid risk and move slowly and carefully. How about releasing ideas to production within days or even within hours? Cloud native approach helps you get your ideas to the market fast by doing small incremental steps so that it can be reversible if needed. Risks become more manageable while accelerating change.

Improving Scalability:When ideas are released to market faster and as your business grows, you will need to support more users, locations, devices and scalability becomes critical.

Reducing operation costs:When business grows, you’ll need to plan your infrastructure needs and operation costs. With platform-as-a-service you can provision and pay for only what is needed.

So, whether a business is an enterprise or a startup, cloud native is applicable for both. Its strategy is all about reducing technical risks while innovating rapidly. Cloud native can be extremely powerful, but it does involve considerable amount of technical challenges and a cultural shift in your business.

How Does Cloud Native Work?

Cloud Native Can Look Like Many Things!

Like the story of the blind men and an elephant, cloud native might seem like it has different meanings, but this is not the case. The core components that make up cloud native each play a vital role in the implementation of cloud-native applications. Let’s dive briefly into each one:

Microservices:Microservices, also known as microservices architecture, is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services that are loosely coupled, independently deployable, and organized around business domains.

Containers: Containers make it easy to test processes and dependencies, as well as move and deploy.

Orchestration Tools:Orchestration helps with tasks such as scaling, configuration, rolling updates, etc.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service:Services can run on servers that can be provisioned on demand.

Continuous delivery:With automated testing and container packages, deployment to production is continuous.

How We’ve Already Begun Our Journey to Cloud Native

At Donoma, we’ve already begun our journey to cloud native, and are approaching it full-speed ahead. What do we mean by this? We’ve already taken the initiative to implement cloud-native principals into our solutions. We’ll use our product, OneView, as an example. OneView was created to provide insight and analytics for unified communication systems. When we developed the solution a few years back, we had developed it strictly for on-premise installations. Since then we have transitioned from on-premise, to SaaS (cloud enabled), and now to cloud native.

Microservices architecture plays an important role in developing cloud-native applications. For example, our latest OneView release included animated display of call routing within a unified communication system. Implementing this feature involved quite a few moving parts and complex call routing logic. By implementing modules as loosely coupled microservices, we were able to manage the technical risks and complete the feature within the aggressive timeline.

Time for You to Begin Your Journey

As we come to a close in our first discussion, we hope by providing you background and context to cloud native, as well as detailing the ways in which we’ve already embarked on our journey, you’ll be encouraged to now begin your journey. If you are to go ahead and embark on it, it’s important you understand that designing cloud-native applications doesn’t happen overnight. It is rather a journey that requires thoughtful planning and organizational support. There are no hard or fast rules, but it is best to start small.

Don’t go anywhere as we still have a lot to unpack in this Strategy & Design Series. Earlier, we briefly defined the core components that make up cloud native, as well as the role microservices played in the implementation of our latest OneView feature. So, in our next discussion, we’ll be digging even deeper into these core components, starting with microservices. See you next time!

Donoma Unify for Gmail’s latest 8.7.5 release brings productivity enhancements for both end-users and IT administrators.

End-users now have additional response options: Click to Call links within the message makes it easy to launch a return call from within the email; and replying directly back to the message sender within the email client is even easier.

IT Administrators will enjoy the support for Active Directory to bring in and auto-link users, and the web-based Administration portal has been upgraded to offer latest security protocols and browser support options.

Clients can schedule their update by contacting support@donomasoftware.com and our team will schedule a time with you.

Donoma Software is looking forward to one of our most anticipated events of the year: The Cisco Collaboration VT happening this week at Cisco’s campus in San Jose, CA.

Once again, we will be a Sponsoring Partner for this invitation-only technical conference.  It’s where Cisco’s elite Collaboration experts come together to get trained on Cisco’s latest releases, while gaining insight into future product direction, and networking with peers and solution developers from around the world.

Cindy DeHart and Parker Pearson will be on site for our team: available in the Event Hub, and during the Tuesday evening reception.  We encourage you to stop by and learn how Donoma’s suite of solutions are helping organizations to:

• Satisfy Regulatory Compliance & Mitigating Risk
• Provide Visibility Into Customer & Employee Interactions
• Ensure Optimal Voice Network Resources & Performance
• Easily Identifying Optimal Staffing, Workloads & Performance Delivery
• Deliver Real-Time Visibility & Customizable Reporting
• Support Mobility & Productivity for the Gmail & Lotus Notes Environments

Be sure to stop by and see them – or connect on Twitter @donomasoftware to find a time to catch up in person!

See you in San Jose!

This morning, LegalTech News ran a timely story on the case between Central European News and Buzzfeed over allegations of fake news. (Leidig v. Buzzfeed) Fake news is news these days, but what got our attention was discussion of the shifts from the court in the willingness to tolerate improper records retention, that resulted in spoliation, incomplete production, and the assertions from the bench that attempting to hide (or distract) the ball when it comes to E-Discovery is an outmoded strategy that needs to end.

In particular, we noted a couple of key points in the article that surface in some of our technical conversations about our retention solutions.

1. No special effort was made to preserve document concerning the Buzzfeed piece. ”Plaintiff “was instructed by counsel to preserve evidence only evidence only after the lawsuit was filed.”

With the increased ease of communications retention, the argument that it is too expensive or not a high enough priority is one we commonly see. The Information Security and Compliance staff often are proactive in trying to address retention but are often shut down by others in the organization who do not yet see the need. Often the conversation changes radically once a team has had to go through a production effort, at which point data may no longer even exist. Most organizations can expect legal action as a course of business. Judges are signaling that a lack of retention is not an acceptable practice.

2. Metadata was inadvertently modified and deleted when the plaintiff attempted to manually move files to a production repository.

What happened here was spoliation: data was moved from one location to another in such a way that the metadata was modified or even removed. Here’s a real-world impact of what can happen when a technical decision to treat data in a more casual unstructured manner has repercussions to the bottom line. Often people look at our retention solutions; and then try to go and make low cost workarounds that involve pushing or copying data from one system to another without understanding the impact to not only the record, but the impact when challenged in court. We see it time and again, and we’ve yet to see a long term successful outcome when attempting to short-cut proper retention protocols.

However, technology is just part of the issue. In a recent judges’ report cited in this article, “30 active federal judges said the problem with e-discovery for most attorneys isn’t process or technology, it’s an overly adversarial mindset. When asked how attorneys could best improve e-discovery practices, the No. 1 response given was “cooperating with opposing counsel.”

Legal counsel likely fears what exists in their data, or the effort to review and produce. In reality, proactive retention with technology like our Communications Archiving Suite can help organizations respond faster at lower cost because data can be found, and put into context while maintaining good records retention hygiene.

We agree. ” It’s not personal, it’s E-Discovery.”

We’re blushing.  Just a bit.

It’s Valentine’s Day and what better day to give a gift?  Today we introduce a new feature for our OneView CDR & Analytics solution for Cisco:  Trunk Line Utilization Reporting.

For all of you who have always wanted to know how your phone system’s utilization of lines matches up with your telco line expenditures, OneView’s latest new feature is a feature you will fall in love with.  Now you can easily see peak utilization times, details and durations – matched up against your line provisioning.  Now you can be sure your phone lines are optimized based on real time data right at your fingertips.

Want to learn more?  Give us a call, or talk to your Cisco integrator.  We’ll be happy to show you how OneView making communications analytics useful with data-driven insight for better decisions and  better organizational performance.

>REQUEST DEMO/DISCUSSION

> REQUEST PRICING