Unified messaging is now easily available -- and affordable. Its price tag hovered around $50,000 when it first starting making waves in 1997, but now you can unify your office's messages at a far lower cost. For some, it's even free.

For software-based systems: Expect to pay an average of $100-$250 per user.

For web-based services: Most services run $10-$50 per user per month. This fee includes:

• a phone number to access your inbox

• an email address

• the service that will manage getting those messages into your inbox.

The more features you want, the higher your cost. For example, for $10/month you can get a basic service that includes a phone number to access your voice mail and to listen to your email and faxes. You may also get an extra or two, like stock updates or sports scores.

But for $30/month, your service could include extras (which you may or may not need) like:

• new message notification

• fax forwarding

• conferencing

• space to host a personal web page.

Even more sophisticated services include voice-recognition technology, so you can actually speak your commands ("read message", "delete message") rather than use a keypad or a web browser.

Don't forget the hidden costs
Activation fees. Web-based services commonly charge activation fees (around $15) to get you started with the service.

Fax transmissions. You can be charged about 15 cents per fax transmission.

New message notification. Being notified when new messages arrive can cost five cents each.

As should be standard practice, make sure you've got the skinny on all the fees before signing on the dotted line.

And for free...
Free unified messaging is increasingly available from Web-based services -- for very basic messaging needs, of course.

If fancy features don't matter to you and you don't need to handle a great deal of incoming messages, there's nothing wrong with free. A few caveats, though:

• some of these services make you call a long-distance number in order to access your inbox

• you may have ads placed on your faxes

• your space for storing messages could be very limited

• you may have a limit to the number of messages you can receive per day.