Staying on top of incoming messages from a variety of sources while alternatively working from home, office, and on the road can become a tedious and time-consuming chore. While the ways in which we can communicate has grown and diversified, so too has the number of devices we must use to receive all the messages people are sending us desk phones, cellular phones, fax machines, alphanumeric pagers, and e-mail systems, to name a few.

The emerging concept of universal messaging is intended to bring order to this communications chaos by consolidating the reception, notification, presentation, and management of what have until now been standalone messaging systems. This capability is provided through message servers that are connected to carrier switches. These servers can have a distributed architecture, allowing universal messaging services to be added incrementally throughout the carrier's network as market demand warrants, or they can have a hub architecture with enough capacity to serve a large number of subscribers. The benefits of message service consolidation can be extended to residential subscribers, telecommuters, and home-based entrepreneurs, as well as small and large businesses.