The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Fax and Internet Convergence Peter Stanski peter.stanski@csse.monash.edu.au

In this article we show you how these two technologies are competing within the office and the home. We present their coexistence on a day-to-day basis and show you how existing systems are merging the two technologies.

Some Background

Most people are familiar with the operation of a fax machine. In reality it is just a fancy black and white scanner; a printer with a built-in modem and a phone, rolled into a single unit. Some have other handy features such as answering machine or voice mail, calling number display, fax on demand (incoming callers can request documents to be faxed to them), group faxing facilities (fax to a list of numbers, e.g. regular clients) and the like. This is not very impressive to most people who use these every day, especially those in the business of computing and information technology (IT).

The Present

Today's small office/home office (SOHO) businesses can often get by without a fax machine and rely heavily on their desktop PCs. Especially since a PC with a fax modem can easily emulate the features of a fax machine, there is little need to own one. Several years ago several software vendors introduced fax server software, which enables users to share one modem to send and receive faxes just as simply as email. 

Instead of an e-mail address such as me@home.net.au, a user would enter a username@phone number in the To: field. The fax server would process the e-mail, dial the phone number and send the e-mail as a fax. This simple idea effectively enabled any office staff to share the fax machine without the need to print a document before faxing it out. Perhaps the greatest benefit here was that nobody had to walk up to the fax machine any more. Everything the user required was driven from a standard e-mail client, which years ago was a very impressive feature.

At the receiving end, the traditional fax machine would simply print the message like it would any other fax. Alternatively, if the receiving side was a PC fax server, the system would process the incoming faxes and direct them to their respective recipient's e-mail/fax account. All other general faxes would go to a standard account accessible by all staff.

This process enabled faxes to be treated like e-mail, which made life easier for the user, but often proved costly for the organisation. Erroneously addressed international faxes often cost the firm huge amounts of dollars in lost revenue. This was mainly owing to the simplicity and availability of access to an expensive resource. Here, users dealing with faxing applied similar behaviour that they were accustomed to in sending e-mails. Even local faxing often drove the phone bills to astronomical figures. But, beyond ease of use, there were more benefits of going digital - the benefit of auditing everything and everyone.

With the centralised fax server, everyone's activities could be tracked, so that personal faxes to Honduras or Kathmandu could quickly be linked to your account. Furthermore, backing up the server often meant backing up all the sent and received faxes. In some fax server systems, stored faxes could be searched for keywords, sorted according to a criterion, converted back to plain text or even converted into a Word document for reediting. This was something never before possible with fax technologies, and this is how much of the computer telephony integration (CTI) revolution started. The idea of linking the telephone, some existing hardware such as a fax, and the desktop computer into one unified system brought much imagination into the minds of numerous system solution providers. (See Figure 3)

A lot has happened since the term CTI was coined. CTI is a vast topic that does not only integrate fax solutions but many computer telephony integration permutations. Upon reading numerous trade publications, one quickly realises that CTI is a rapidly growing industry with numerous innovative solutions.

User-Driven Technology

Today we still have the humble fax machine and the desktop PC with a fax modem sitting side by side in many SOHOs or larger organisations. This is reflective of the legacy of existing systems and perhaps their relatively inexpensive cost. CTI systems are much more expensive and often unaffordable, or perhaps too cryptic and complex for the average user to configure. Many of today's high speed modems not only have the basic fax option, but even boast voice mail, fax on demand, operating without the PC being powered up and the like.

This often surpasses the capabilities of most cheap fax machines, but people still keep on using them.

What about the ability to easily carry a piece of paper from A to B, or the ability to scribble on the faxed paper document? This simple and more human friendly usability factor is unsurpassed by any of the existing software tools that currently exist. And for those who firmly believe in being digital and keeping everything electronic, they find too often that they do a lot of printing just because they need to hold something at a meeting or even sign a document as being read.

So what is the big benefit of these technologies if we still revert to something printed on paper in the end? Many of CTI vendors have long been aware of these and other issues. The bottom line is that people need to hold and handle things with their hands and not everything can be an icon on a desktop or a file on your hard drive. Therefore, much of the work in the area of integrating fax and electronic systems has paid close attention to this while new and evolving integrated fax solutions are developed.

Innovative Technologies

One interesting variation of the above fax system solution has been to leverage the power of the Internet. In the brave new world of being online around the clock, many companies have begun to discover the benefits of sending faxes over their network connections between branch offices, or across the world using the Net. These companies have their fax server software running within their organisations, but their servers are not only attached to a fax modem, but also to networks.

The network attachment may be through the network card or another modem connected directly to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). These systems send and receive local faxes through the fax modem, while long distance faxing is done through the network connection. They may connect to a remote fax server at a given domain such as "myoffice.com.au", where faxes are received much like traditional e-mail. These solutions potentially equate to large savings on long-distance international charges that were previously unavoidable.

Old Look, New Feel

Alternatively, these fax gateways as they arc commonly called may also have traditional fax machines attached to them. Should anyone still need to do things the conventional way with paper, they may do so. The only difference in this case is that the fax machines always call the local fax gateway instead of the long-distance number. This is a little more complicated, as faxes do not directly interface with the fax server.

Therefore, some clever tricks are often performed with the PABX (local company switch/exchange) to achieve this. Once received, the gateway converts the fax into an electronic format, which traverses the digital computer network. It is then received by the remote fax server and forwarded to the local fax machine or PC clients.

Flexibility

This doesn't sound so complicated when you have a look at it. To the users, nothing has changed, they still punch in numbers as before, but the system and network is sufficiently smart to figure out the best cost routing for fax delivery. Enormous cost savings are possible for organisations that have virtual private networks (VPNs) or trading partners who already leverage the Internet for their e-mail and Web access.

The beauty of these gateways is that they do not necessarily require the same system to be at the other end. For Internet/intranet-based solutions translations to e-mail are also possible so that organisations that do not have these facilities can still receive faxes as e-mails, and vice versa.

Long Term Benefits

These systems are an everyday reality for thousands of large organisations that can afford the infrastructure of sometimes very expensive systems. However, the long-term costs often outweigh the initial investment. Some organisations add more things such as video conferencing, streaming video, pushing of event notifications to individual user desktops, and even integrating the phone within the desktop machines. Some emerging solutions even incorporate Web services, which enable users to request information to be e-mailed, or faxed to them. These ideas and their permutations with emerging technologies are converging the networks, services and software in a most unusual manner. We have not yet fully converted a great number of telephony and computing activities, but these are continually ongoing. The next few years will bring a wealth of change, benefits and also significant confusion for many.

The power of going digital and the availability of broadband data channels opens many exciting opportunities for many of us. Not only for those of us who use this technology but especially those who are yet to experience it. The one thing that we can be certain of is that the future will be utterly fantastic.

About the Author
Peter Stanski is just about to finish his PhD at Monash University. In his spare time he thinks up and writes articles for PC Update to share some of his unused knowledge and experience. In the past he has worked as a game programmer, consultant, contractor and now as a full-time researcher who is about to return to industry.

Reprinted from the November 1999 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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