Voice Profile for Internet Mail |
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Welcome to VPIM
The goals of the Voice Profile for Internet Mail Work Group include establishing an internationally accepted standard profile of ESMTP/MIME to allow the interexchange of voice and fax messages between voice messaging systems; ensuring that this profile also allows interexchange with non-voice messaging MIME compatible email systems, establishing a directory service to support lookup of the routable address, and establishing a defined mapping specification with other voice messaging.
The effort started in 1995 in the Electronic Messaging Association (EMA) under the auspices of the Voice Messaging Committee. Later, the VPIM Work Group was formed to work out the details.
The Group hosted a concept demo at EMA 96, a product demonstration at EMA'97, an info booth at CT Expo '98, and has been working with the VMA to demo VPIM as part of the Global Voice Mail Service in 1999 and 2000. The most recent event was the VPIM Bakeoff in August 2000. This event tested interoperability between just a few of the vendors that have products supporting VPIM. There are many more products that support VPIM, let us know if you would like your product added to our list.
To provide a framework that will assist companies deploy VPIM the group is also jointly working with TMIA on Inter-Company Voice Messaging Agreements as part of the TMIA Wide Messaging project. The goal is to interconnect voice mail systems both intra and inter (using VPIM) to allow seemless voice mail forwarding, replying and creating.
To ensure the participation of a wide community, the technical work on VPIM has been moved to the IETF with the creation of the VPIM Work Group in early 2000.
The VPIM Specification, version 2, was approved by the IETF as a Proposed Standard. After a long wait for its references to be published, VPIM v2 was published as RFC 2421 in September 1998. Work is in progress to promote this to Draft Standard in the IETF by the middle of 2001.
Internet Voice Mail (IVM) (previously VPIM version 3) defines a new paradigm for the interchange of voice messages between a voice messaging systems. While it has not been approved as Proposed Standard, much work is currently underway in the IETF to complete this by the end of 2001.
There will be several upcoming meetings in the next few months. Click here for details.
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| Updated May 04, 2001 | VPIM.org hits since April 19, 2000 |