December, 1996
Come Together
Fax machines are as common as flowers in springtime. But the puzzle remains: How to fit fax into the bigger imaging picture? Lots of new products are starting to fill in the missing pieces.
Someday, your grandchildren may ask you what a fax is. And you may say, "I'm busy now, e-mail me that question."
Electronic messages and the Internet are gradually taking over the planet. They may one day replace fax machines.
But in the meantime, the world is addicted to fax. There are about 60 million fax machines in the world, of which 12 million were sold in the last year, according to a report from Giga Information Group (Nowell, MA 617-982-9500) called "Fax Integration: Hardware and Software for Messaging and Workflow." There are about 40 million fax modems in the world. A half-billion people have access to a fax machine or modem. By one estimate, 176 billion pages of plain paper faxes will be transmitted in 1998 alone.
People like fax. Fax is reliable. When you put a letter in your fax machine, you can be sure that the recipient's machine (if it's not busy) will immediately spit out a slightly fuzzier version of the same letter. Your margins, tabs and fonts will not change the way they might if you use e-mail. Fax machines are easier to use than e-mail or PC fax software. They're more social. Unless you have your very own fax machine, as you toddle over to the machine, you probably pass the coffee machine or a friend along the way and catch up on what's going on.
That's exactly what employers don't like about standalone fax machines -- they kill too much time. It takes 10 minutes to send a fax from a fax machine, versus less than a minute from a PC. PC faxing has other advantages over standalone machines as well. It produces better-quality faxes. It helps you track faxes and figure out the cheapest times to send them.
This helps explain why fax machine sales in the U.S. have slowed and why most new machines are replacing old ones or going into small offices and home offices. Sales of fax boards, fax modems, fax server software and other PC fax equipment, on the other hand, are growing about 25% a year. The software and hardware are getting more sophisticated, easier to use with other office software and easier to grow with your network.
The Comradery of Images and Faxes
"Fine, but what does this have to do with imaging?" you may wonder. Fax and imaging have always been very close. After all, a fax is an image (usually lower resolution) that you send to somebody by phone line. Often, you want to fax an image or image-archive letter or drawing you've received by fax.
Once, standalone fax machines did their own thing while scanners and imaging software were off somewhere else doing their own thing. Now, they're living together in desktop PCs.
"What you're seeing in the market today is fax and imaging becoming part of everybody's operational business applications. They're no longer an adjunct or add-on," says Sue Ryan, senior manager marketing multimedia products at Lotus. "It's like years ago, if you bought word processing software, you had to go buy a dictionary and a thesaurus to go with it. Now, these automatically Come Together."
Proof can be found in the two PC operating systems that are starting to dominate corporate America: Windows 95 and Windows NT. Future versions of these operating systems will include Wang's (Billerica, MA 508-967-5000) Imaging for Windows software. (Those who already have Windows 95 or NT can download this free program from Microsoft's or Wang's Web site -- www.microsoft.com or www.wang.com.) The software lets you import and read images and faxes that come into your Microsoft Exchange mailbox in Microsoft FAX, BMP, DCX, JPEG, PCX or TIFF format. (Actually, only Windows 95 has the Microsoft Fax utility. To fax from an NT workstation, you'd need to buy fax software that's NT-compatible.)
Imaging for Windows offers a taste of the features full-fledged imaging software provides. Navigate an image. Zoom in and out. View thumbnails of other pages while seeing the full view of one page. Store your faxes in your normal folders in Microsoft Explorer or e-mail them to others who have Imaging for Windows. To send a fax to a Mac user or someone else who doesn't have Imaging for Windows, you use the Microsoft Fax feature of Microsoft Exchange to fax the file to your friend's or associate's fax machine.
Object linking and embedding technology in the software lets you drop images and faxes into other files in your PC, such as Word and Excel files. Wang's Imaging for Windows also lets you turn computer documents into faxes, view them as faxes and fax them out.
The fortý of the Imaging for Windows software is its annotation features. Write freehand notes on your fax or image with a stylus and pen. Type text messages on it. Highlight a section by drawing a rectangle around it. Attach sticky notes to it. Import a text or bitmap file (such as your corporate logo) into the image. Use a "rubber stamp" to date or approve the document.
None of these annotations are burned into the image unless you say so or until you fax it to someone else. Access privileges to look at and put notes on images and faxes follow whatever rules apply to your filing system.
Imaging for Windows doesn't let you modify a bitmap, nor does it do the communications or spooling tasks a fax application does. It simply lets you deal with a fax once it's delivered.
At some time in the future, this Wang software will contain an interface to Visioneer's (Palo Alto, CA 415-812-6400) PaperPort keyboard scanner.
Lotus Notes is another example. The IBM groupware and its e-mail brother, Lotus cc:Mail, have quietly provided a fax utility and imaging features for more than four years. "Even though we've had Notes integrated with these things for years, we're only this year starting to see companies use them more," says Ryan. "We actually see fax as the first step in imaging. Where we see fax installed, we see imaging."
Lotus' Image Viewer is a Windows application that lets Notes and Lotus cc:Mail users display any image file, incoming fax or OLE image document that's created with Lotus Notes. The Viewer can zoom, rotate, print and mail any image document.
The Print-to-Fax driver lets Notes and cc:Mail users send faxes from any Windows application. "There's no additional interface, no additional administration work," says Ryan. "Once you know how to use Notes, you automatically know how to fax from Notes."
Beyond Bundled Fax Software
All told, about 1.2 million PCs a month ship with fax and imaging built into them. All this preinstalled faxware could potentially compete with the independent fax software products out there.
Mark Cann, Symantec's (Toronto, CN 541-334-6054) general manager of communications, the maker of market leader Delrina WinFax (the latest version of which, WinFax 7.5, costs $100), doesn't feel threatened. "That creates more awareness for faxing," he says. "The software that comes free is very basic. If you send more than the occasional fax, you need more fax management." He compares it to the word processing software built into some computer operating systems, which usually lack pagination, spell checking and other basic features.
WinFax Pro, for example, lets you reconfigure your location so that you can receive faxes no
matter where you are. It gives you detailed reports on your fax calls. It has phone books built into it. It provides 200 cover sheets and also lets you make your own. It has built-in optical character recognition so that you can convert a faxed document to a text file.
A Macintosh version of the software lets Mac users send, receive and manage faxes without leaving their application.
For the local- or wide-area network, several fax server software products support multiple users faxing from their PCs. These are a few examples:
Symantec's WinFax PRO for Networks lets workgroups of less than 50 people share a fax modem. It supports inbound routing, both automatically, if you've set up direct inward dialing through your phone company, and manually, so that a designated receptionist can route incoming faxes to anybody in the network. The software works with e-mail systems like Microsoft Mail.
RightFAX (Tucson, AZ 520-327-1357) makes fax server software called RightFAX for Windows NT and OS/2 that costs about $1,500. This software lets you transmit and receive faxes across a network of PCs connected by Windows NT, Novell NetWare, IBM LAN Server or IBM's OS/2 Warp
server. The PCs can be a mix of DOS, Windows, OS/2, Mac and Unix machines. Because RightFAX supports the Binary File Transfer protocol, you can fax any type of file in your database, not just fax files. Store image files on the fax server's hard drive or the network file server's hard drive. An add-on module called E-mail Gateway lets you integrate your faxes with cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Mail or Novell GroupWise.
A Unix-based system from SCH Technologies (Cincinnati, OH 513-579-0455) called Merkur (which means "Roman messenger of the Gods" in German) lets you add enterprise-wide faxing on top of a legacy system. The company's first US customer uses Merkur to let SAP users generate and send faxes without leaving their applications. The system has built-in interfaces to SAP. SCH is building interfaces to PeopleSoft's and other enterprise software. An installation of one fax server that serves five users costs $1,500.
Fax Liaison from SpectraFAX (Naples, FL 941-643-5060) is a hardware and software fax server that runs on Windows NT. Liaison
integrates voice and fax communications into e-mail and other information management systems. It uses 32-bit threading. It comes with workflow templates that let you create fax-broadcast, fax-on-demand and invoice-
processing applications. An intersite-routing feature uses Microsoft Exchange to choose the best path for fax transmissions. Faxes can be routed over a local-area network, a wide-area network or the Internet. A centralized monitoring feature lets you know if there's any trouble with a fax, if a storage disk is getting full or if a port is not working, among other things. The price starts at $16,000 for a four-port system.
Companies that fax an enormous number of documents, such as insurance companies and credit card companies, turn to a high-volume production fax server like Teubner's (Stillwater, OK 405-624-2254) Faxgate software. The software is typically sold turnkey -- in a Dell Pentium 166 PC with Brooktrout or GammaLink fax boards and a network adaptor as well as 24-hour telephone support -- for $10,000 to $70,000.
One Teubner server can handle multiple networks and computing environments, including CICS, TCP/IP and LAN networks. Faxgate attaches as a native environment to SNA mainframes, AS/400s and Unix machines. It supports IBM's Advanced Function Printing architecture that lets you printing huge volumes of documents.
A strength of Faxgate is its inbound routing, which goes beyond routing to an individual to workflow-style routing between departments. A bank client sends credit applications to a credit bureau and back to an underwriter in less than 15 minutes using Faxgate.
Fax Fun With Forms
The application that probably makes the most efficient use of fax and imaging is forms processing. People fax loan applications, sales orders, or tax returns to a forms processing system. The system manipulates the image of the form, captures the data, processes it, produces a result and maybe faxes the response back to the person.
A catalog company could automatically accept incoming faxed order forms, pull the information off them and process the orders automatically. This could make the nightmare month of December, when many catalog merchants do 50% of their business, much easier to handle.
Many forms processing systems have built-in fax features. TELEform from Cardiff Software (San Marcos, CA 619-752-5200) is one hot-selling example. (The latest version costs about $1,500.)
It accepts forms that have been scanned or faxed -- provided the original form wascreated using the TELEform software.
TELEform searches for landmarks built into the forms. During the process of faxing, a form may be shrunk or altered in a way that throws the data fields out of whack. Even if this distortion occurs, the software can still find the right fields.
TELEform reads hand print with intelligent character recognition and machine print with optical character recognition. It uses artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic to interpret messy and oddly written characters. It also reads barcodes and check marks.
In April, Cardiff introduced a version of TELEform for Windows 95 and Windows NT, as well as a more powerful version, TELEform Elite ($5,000). Elite lets you collect information from forms you have created with non-TELEform software that are faxed in or scanned. On those forms, it picks out lines, logos, and prominent words and uses them to find data fields. It can handle up to 25,000 forms a day.
Also in April, Cardiff rolled out an add-on program called TELEform Filler ($350) that lets you put a form up on the Internet. People log onto your Web site and fill out the form online. TELEform collects the information and processes it.
A heavyweight contender from Lucent Technologies (Murray Hill, N.J. 908-953-2600) will enter the fax/forms processing ring in December with a price tag of $50,000 to $60,000. The Fax Image Recognition System (FIRST) comes complete with forms design software, a document workflow system, a fax server, an ICR/OCR engine and an image processor.
The system tries to read a fax, no matter how badly it has been stretched, shrunk or otherwise distorted. Forms created in FIRST have big dots on their edges. When forms come in through the fax server, FIRST finds the dots and uses them as a map to figure out the location of the needed data fields.
The software optically reads the incoming forms, whether they contain hand-written or machine-printed characters. If it has any questions, it presents them to an operator with a window showing the data field up close in a zoom window. The system then compares the information filled in on the form against a SQL database for accuracy.
Workflow software keeps the form moving from capture to OCR to verification and to all the steps thereafter. A flowchart shows the system administrator where the form is. It also lets that person add a procedure or change the order in which the form goes through different steps.
FIRST's back-end server is Java-enabled. Call up a fax image from any PC running any operating system via Netscape Navigator.
Another good application for fax is as part of a document imaging system. Several big imaging system vendors have incorporated fax into their scheme of digital documents. This lets you broadcast fax images to customers and offer imaged documents on demand via fax, among other things.
FileNet's (Costa Mesa, CA 714-966-3400) Watermark Enterprise Series integrates paper documents and fax transmissions with electronic mail, groupware, mainframe applications and development tools. They've offered fax features for several years. "We thought fax would be the killer application a few years ago," says Kirk Lecompte, manager of product marketing. "It's just taken off in the past year."
An add-on package called Watermark Fax Router lets anybody in the system receive faxes on their PC. The system can route faxes through direct inward dialing, where the software relates each person's individual fax number to their e-mail inbox and puts their faxes there.
A subscriber ID feature lets the software guess who a fax might be for based on who it's from. For example, a salesman might have the fax ID numbers of all his clients tied to his inbox. OCR built into the product can also recognize the fax's intended recipient.
File Magic (about $2,000/user) from Westbrook Technologies (Branford, CT 203-483-6666) can accept incoming faxes in any industry-standard fax file format, including TIFF, PCX and DCX files. File Magic lets you specify where the faxes should come from, usually a local fax card or fax server. Then you can OCR, index, archive and print or fax out the incoming fax document -- just like any other file.
Epson America puts spec sheets, schematics, user manuals, service manuals and other materials on a File Magic system. When customers call with questions, customer service reps in Torrance, CA and Toronto, CN look up the right section in a manual and fax a few pages out to the caller.
Highland Technologies' (Lanham, MD 301-306-8200) HighView imaging management system has a fax component called HighView/FAX Server. The overall HighView product sits on a relational database (which can be an Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingres or Microsoft SQL database) and it manages any number of high-volume imaging applications you may need.
The FAX Server unit lets users fax while doing other things. They can send group faxes, create customized fax cover sheets and schedule their faxes to go at off-beat times to get off-peak rates.
Faxes in Cyberspace
Like so much else in life, all roads of PC faxing lead to the Internet. A few companies offer faxing on the Internet now. Many more are jumping on the bandwagon.
They intend to get more customers by offering them cheaper rates. While sending a fax to Japan from a US fax machine or modem could cost you $5, Internet fax providers promise charges like 15 cents a page for faxing to anywhere in the world.
The first company to develop Internet faxing technology was Netcentric (Cambridge, MA 617-720-5200). Their FaxStorm software lets Internet service providers offer their customers point-to-point and broadcast fax transmission over the Internet. Users get a cheaper fax transmission cost -- without having to install their own fax servers.
FaxSav (Edison, NJ 908-906-2000) has linked their worldwide discount fax network to the Internet to offer cheaper fax rates. Through a free software program called FaxLauncher, users can send faxes from any Windows program. FaxMailer lets them convert e-mail to faxes. The rates may or may not be cheaper than a discount you arrange through your telecom provider.
Symantec is adding links to the Internet to WinFax Pro. They're developing technology with Netcentric that will let users fax in real time over the Internet. The user will watch pages pass over the Internet in WinFax. The pages will arrive on the recipient's desktop at the same time. "Every other mechanism is store and forward," says Symantec's Cann. He hopes to get the price of WinFax Internet faxing down, too. "The Nirvana we want to reach is charging five cents a minute," he says.
The company has licensed RSA encryption. When you send a file over the Internet, it hops from one computer to another. Anyone at any hop can try to grab it and read it. The encryption code scrambles your fax and makes it unreadable to anyone who lacks the right key.
Symantec plans to publish a protocol for real-time faxing over the Internet. They also intend to fax-enable Web browsers.
Brooktrout Technology (Needham MA, 617-449-4100) introduced their IP/FaxRouter ($6,000) in June. This small network peripheral uses TCP/IP protocols to send faxes over the Internet. Once you've set up the configuration and management software, people continue to use fax machines the way they always did. The fax router identifies the least-cost way of sending a fax, whether it's redirecting it over a local phone network or routing it over the Internet. If it sends a fax over the Internet, it digitizes the image first.
IP/FaxRouter uses store-and-forward technology, storing a fax on the hard disk until it can make a reliable Internet connection. Brooktrout promises to release an API soon that will let developers of computer-based fax interfaces work with IP/FaxRouter.
The Internet Fax Server for Windows NT from Black Ice Software (Amherst, NH 603-673-1019) lets companies send faxes over their own intranet or over the Internet. Pricing starts at $1,000 for an installation with 50 users.
The client portion of the product, SendFax, works like a normal PC faxing software package, but it sends faxes to a remote fax server, instead of directly to the phone line. The software tells the sender where the fax is at all times. This software is targeted at companies that do a lot of overseas business and could benefit by not having to pay long-distance charges.
Despite all these developments, the Internet has not yet become the perfect fax messenger. Internet gateways (connections between Internet servers and the network) are still immature. Sometimes messages get scrambled. As files hop from one computer to another across the Internet, they sometimes get damaged or compromised.
"Some of the same problems that have plaguede-mail are happening to faxes on the Internet," says John Taylor, GammaLink's (Sunnyvale, CA 408-744-1400) general fax division manager. GammaLink makes multiport boards. "Some attachments are not readable if the recipient doesn't have the right plug-in.` One fundamental problem that hasn't yet been fixed is how to equate e-mail addresses with fax addresses and route information seamlessly between those two. Standards need to be set to remedy this," he says.
The Rigors Of Routing
A lot of attention has been paid to sending faxes out -- fax broadcasting, fax-on-demand, etc. Now vendors are starting to focus on more sophisticated ways of receiving faxes.
There are several ways to route faxes. You can use direct inward dialing (DID). With DID, each person who receives faxes gets his or her own fax number. Even though it's a faux fax number, because it doesn't represent an independent fax line, the centralized fax server reads the incoming number, matches it up with the right recipient and puts the fax in that person's inbox. You pay your phone company a monthly fee for this service.
A new Group III standard (ITU T.30) lets fax users type in a phone numberextension (also called a subaddress) that helps the fax server identify the rightrecipient, even if the person doesn't have a private fax number. However, for this to work, both sending and receiving machines need to support the new standard.
Your fax server can be set up to recognize the calling subscriber ID number at the top of each fax. You could give it a list of people to whom faxes from certain numbers should always go. For example, if Bob Jones is Patti Smith's account rep, faxes from Patti's number shouldalways go directly to Bob.
If you're receiving incoming forms that you've put barcodes on, you can read the barcodes to determine who should receive the faxes. You can also OCR the To: field in the text and match that up with an employee directory.
In a variation of the OCR option, Nestor's (Providence, RI 401-331-9640) N'Route software ($2,500 for a 50-client local area network) uses intelligent character recognition to route faxes through e-mail systems. It can identify keywords or find a name or alogo on a document to decide to whom it should go.
It works with MicrosoftExchange, Lotus Notes, GroupWise, Microsoft Mail and other e-mail programs.
Mitek's (San Diego, CA 619-635-5900) NiF Fax-Share also automatically reads incoming faxes and routes them through cc:Mail, Lotus Notes and Microsoft Mail. It reads the cover page of a fax, whether it's typed or handwritten, finds the recipient's name and routes it to that person. If there's no name on the fax, it gets routed to someone designated as the FaxShare postmaster, who decides where it should go. NiF FaxShare also lets you send and broadcast faxes from your PC. A five-user starter kit costs $700.
Fax-On-Demand For Self-Service
A good time-saving use of fax in imaging is fax-on-demand (which can also be called fax-back). In a business where people call a lot asking for spec sheets, reports, marketing information, or other types of general information, fax-on-demand lets you offer a phone number people can call and just punch in the documents they want faxed to them, as well as their fax number.
Copia International (Wheaton, IL 630-682-8898) both offers and uses fax-on-demand. If you dial 847-923-3030, you can ask the company to fax product literature to you.
Copia's FaxFacts server software (which starts at $600 per phone line) runs on DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and Windows NT platforms and on all major PC networks.
Its interactive voice response component lets people retrieve information from a database. It recognizes some speech, such as "yes" and "no." This server also lets you do other things, such as broadcast faxes and viewincoming faxes so you can route them.
The Future of Fax
With the rise of e-mail and the Internet and the ease of sending digital files, are the days of facsimile numbered? It depends on who you ask.
"Fax as a proportion of business communications is likely to decrease. Fax as afinite number of documents is likely to increase," says Tony Grimsditch, Wang's desktop and collaborative products director of marketing.
"The death knell of fax is the Internet. Who do I really want to communicate with who doesn't have access to the Internet?"
Some people think the opposite. "E-mail and Internet won't be the death knell of fax," says Maury Kauffman, author of Computer-Based Fax Processing and managing partner of The Kauffman Group, Cherry Hill, NJ.
"When TV came around, everyone said that it would kill radio," he says. "When cable TV came around, that was supposed to kill the networks. Then we were supposed to get 500 channels and what's happened to that? Fax is another communications medium, just like radio and TV, and it's here to stay."
John Taylor at GammaLink says fax is the method people will prefer for a long time. "We all like to read things, touch things," he says. "When you look at the most sophisticated e-mail, imaging, document management and inbound routing fax systems, you see people spit things out on paper, put them in their briefcase and take them home."
Related Articles:
