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 Network Technologies, Products, and Services


Universal Fax and E-mail

Carol A. Monaghan and Gary C. Kessler
July 1997

An edited version of this paper appeared with the title "Universal Fax and E-mail" in the November, 1997 issue of Network VAR.

When telephones were first introduced as a tool for business, there might have been a single telephone in a small office or just a few per floor of an office building where individual phones were reserved for only the most senior management. For the past several decades, however, telephones have been routinely placed on people's desks because they have become integral to doing business. It has been years since anyone has done a cost analysis to justify phones as a necessary tool for doing your job. Facsimile (fax) machines and electronic mail (e-mail) have seen — and will continue to see — a similar trend as telephones, but they are at different places on that timeline.

Facsimile

Fax machines, in particular, have been available for twenty years but it has only been in the last ten or so that a fax machine in the office has been a business necessity, even for the smallest company. Before we got a fax machine, how many of us gave out a business card and heard "What's your fax number?" Obtaining a fax machine may have only served to saved us from appearing like a Luddite but they soon proved themselves and became an essential piece of office equipment.

It is estimated that sending a fax in the traditional sense takes about 5 minutes, taking into account printing of the document, waiting for the fax machine, sending the fax, and then returning to your office. For organizations that send a large number of faxes, you can see why they would be looking for alternatives to traditional methods.

Software-based fax capability for PCs and Macs have been available for many years, making a "desktop fax machine" a reality. But while this capability is obviously useful for several reasons, it is unclear that it is desirable from a managerial — or corporate image — perspective. The software cost is low (or free) but now every user "administers" their own fax system. Most of the fax software interfaces with a fax/modem so that a dial-up line is required; this is usually not an onerous burden since it can share the office's telephone line. But without careful management, it is difficult — or impossible — to enforce a corporate standard or fax format. It is also impossible to control fax usage.

One possible solution is a LAN-based fax server. This service allows a client user to create a fax and send it (at LAN speed) to the server, which is in turn responsible for sending the fax to the intended destination. This scheme allows central management and administration, consistent formats, and eliminates local system bottlenecks. In addition, the server's logging capabilities make it much easier to reconcile telephone bills and control/monitor usage.

Fax software in combination with LAN-based fax servers, offer many capabilities which can be huge time savers. One very popular application is fax-on-demand, which allows your customers to retrieve only the information that they need on a 24-hour-per- day basis. Another significant time saver is the ability to do "fax merges." This allows an organization to send out a large number of faxes in a batch and to personalize each one; conceptually, this is identical to the mail merge function available in most word processor applications. There are even service bureaus that will do your faxing for you.

Products that support fax services must comply with the appropriate standards. For basic faxing, there are relatively few standards to worry about. Most fax/modems and software already comply with ITU-T recommendations for Group 1, 2, 3, or 4 transmission. Group 3 (G3) is most commonly used today on analog lines and transmits at speeds up to 14.4 kbps; G1 and G2 faxes are also analog, but transmit at lower speeds and less image clarity. G4 fax is digital and transmits at 64 kbps over an ISDN B-channel. These specifications also define the transmission format of the fax data.

One approach to faxing that is becoming increasingly popular is faxing over the Internet. Why is faxing over the Internet becoming all the rage? Simple — the reported cost savings can be quite substantial, reportedly up to 40 percent compared to traditional means, by some estimates. IDC estimates that the global fax transmission market is $38 billion per year. By faxing over the Internet, a company should be able to realize huge cost benefits, particularly for international faxes. Internet faxing basically would work as follows: you make a local call to an ISP and send your fax; it is routed through the Internet to the closest location to the final destination of the fax. When it has reached the closest location a second call is then made to complete the fax transmission. You also pay for the second call at the end of the route. This is where your savings come into play because if the provider has enough coverage, the cost of the phone calls will be for local calls at both ends. One question to ask any Internet fax provider is how many fax servers they have and in how many countries. There are a growing number of partnerships that are developing in which service providers will carry each others fax traffic. Find out what their global coverage is so that you really will be able to realize the most savings. Note that in this case, the Internet has only replaced the telephone network as the transmission medium; this does not describe an end-to-end Internet fax application.

There appear to be two different approaches to cost cutting in regards to faxing with the Internet. One approach is to keep it all transparent to the users. The benefit to this is that users do not need to be trained on anything new. They still will be taking an average of 5 minutes to send a fax, but the transmission of the fax will offer cost benefits by avoiding a network that charges differently for local, long distance, and international calls. Devices are typically attached to the fax machines so that users have no ideas that their faxes may be routed over the Internet or Intranet based on least cost routing algorithms. An example of this type of device is the PASSaFAX converter from Radlinx (www.radlinx.com).

The other fax-Internet approach actually integrates fax technology with the messaging technologies of the Internet, namely e-mail and the World Wide Web. Before discussing how these two technologies integrate, e-mail will be briefly described.

Electronic Mail

E-mail has been used in many companies for over a decade, usually as part of the LAN or host operating system, and usually for intra-corporate communication. Although public e-mail services have been available for a decade or more, and interconnections between those different e-mail service have been available since the late-1980s, e-mail for inter-corporate communication was still an oddity in the typical business environment even just five years ago. But in the last few years, before we got externally-accessible e-mail, how many of us gave out a business card and heard "What's your e-mail address?" Obtaining e-mail may have only served to saved us from appearing like a Luddite but soon proved itself and has become indispensable for many. Today, e-mail is a business imperative and business cases are rarely needed to justify its acquisition. E-mail is, in fact, cited in some user surveys as the primary reason to use the Internet. (E-mail typically jockeys for position with the Web as the primary reason to use the Internet.)

E-mail, of course, is centrally administered since the corporate information systems department or Internet service provider runs the mail server. And it is impossible to control outgoing content; users need to learn appropriate e-mail netiquette. Nevertheless, e-mail is a critically important desktop tool.

----------              ----------
| E-mail |      |       | E-mail |      |
| Client |<-----+------>| Server |<-----+----->( Internet )
|        |      |       |        |      |
----------     POP/     ----------     SMTP
               IMAP
 

FIGURE 1. Protocols used for Internet-based messaging.

Internet-based e-mail uses the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) between the local mail server and remote systems (Figure 1). E-mail messages using a proprietary protocol must first pass through an SMTP gateway before they can be sent on the Internet.

The Post Office Protocol (POP) is commonly used between an e-mail client and the local e-mail server. The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is a newer client-server mail protocol that is growing in popularity because it provides the user with more control over their mailbox at the server. IMAP is particularly useful in those environments with remote users and/or users with multiple systems that they employ to read mail.

SMTP is designed and intended for the exchange of simple text e-mail messages. To send non-text information, such as word processing documents, spreadsheets, graphical images, executable files, or even audio and video clips, the actual binary file must be sent as an attachment to the e-mail. Attachments to e-mail messages are typically encoded in one of three main formats:

  • Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME): Internet-standard format for attaching many file types and formats to basic e-mail messages.
  • UUencode: Commonly available file encoding scheme based on the Unix-to-Unix file transfer protocol.
  • BinHex: Commonly available file encoding scheme, usually found on Macs.

For security purposes, users should take care not to allow auto-execution of any program received by e-mail. In addition, some Internet firewall products filter and convert e-mail attachments, making them unreadable by BinHex, MIME, or UUdecode.

There are a large number of e-mail clients and servers available today, all of which support POP, IMAP, SMTP, and various file attachment formats. Popular e-mail clients include Eudora (Qualcomm) and Microsoft Exchange, as well as the mail reader in Netscape Navigator; these companies also provide e-mail server software.

Fax/Internet Integration

As fax and e-mail have become essential tools for business communication, it is no wonder that there are a plethora of products supporting these applications. But in a new twist for the network manager, more and more of these products integrate these services. Better, many support a mixture of services, providing the same user interface for fax and e-mail, delivering e-mail as a fax, or delivering a fax as an e-mail attachment.

The second approach to fax savings with the Internet, then, is to take advantage of the numerous computer based faxing options that exist. There are products which allow users to fax from whatever interface they prefer. Faxes can be sent via email, via web browsers, or via proprietary faxing software. Incoming faxes can arrive in the e-mail inbox, in an electronic fax inbox, at a physical fax machine, and even may be printed out on a printer. E-mail packages typically deliver the fax as a MIME attachment. Some fax servers offer the capability to convert incoming faxes into usable text via OCR. One trend (as with everything else today) is the ability to send and receive faxes via a standard web browser; users are able to upload binary files which are then sent out as a fax.

The fax-on-demand market is taking advantage of web-enabled faxing as well. The ability for interested customers to receive an organization's information 24 hours a day has always been a great marketing tool. By using the web for a fax-on-demand service, a company can get more information about their customers, since requesters have to enter in their name and fax number. This is a huge benefit for sales force follow up.

Most major fax servers currently available have a number of features in common. Most will provide address books, the ability to do bulk transmissions, auto-redialing of busy fax numbers or fax machines that do not answer, the ability to track the status of a fax, the ability to schedule the delivery of faxes in order to decrease the cost of transmission. Some systems even offer the ability for managers to view all faxes before they are sent out.

One of the next steps in the faxing arena may not be faxing at all, but actually printing documents at a remote location. Several companies, including Adobe, HP, and Tektronix, have announced printers that will be accessible via the Internet. These printers would then seem to alleviate the need for faxing over the Internet at all; since the printer itself becomes an IP host on the Internet, a user would be able to print at a remote location and therefore have a higher quality output than a traditional fax. Of course, there's also a downside; concerns about printing over the Internet include unauthorized printing, which could include the junk faxes that virtually every office receives. These unauthorized faxes could burn up important resources, such as toner and paper, and also tie up a corporate printer, just as they already tie up network bandwidth; more nefariously, they could be employed as part of a denial of service attack. Different vendors are adopting different solutions to this problem, such as password protection and limiting the network address domain for transmissions.

Facsimile communication has proven over the years to be reliable and inexpensive, and it is already in wide-spread use for global communication. As the Internet has become pervasive, integrating fax and Internet services seems to make sense as a way to reduce costs and increase application functionality. Responding to the need, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Application Area formed the Internet Fax (fax) Working Group (http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/fax-charter.html). The fax working group intends to create a number of specification relating to moving fax messages over the Internet.

The most basic model is to exchange faxes based on today's e-mail standards. Like e-mail, so-called messaging-based faxes having high latency in terms of end-to-end delivery. Several Internet-Drafts have been written employing a version of the Tag Image File Format (TIFF); the fax is converted to a TIFF file, encapsulated in MIME, and sent as an e-mail attachment. Coupled with the capabilities of IMAP, a user could download only a portion of a fax rather than necessarily have to receive the entire document. The working group is also preparing informal requirements for fax-Internet gateways, which will allow a fax message to be sent from a traditional fax machine and delivered on the Internet, and vice versa.

But the primary model by which people send faxes today is a session-based one, where a real-time connection is established via telephone. The ultimate goal of the fax working group is a similar Internet-based session-oriented fax communication protocol. In addition to defining protocols for data representation and addressing, additional communication protocols for this application need to be developed. Existing Internet protocols and data specifications are sure to be used as much as possible.

Several ISPs are already offering fax-over-the-Internet services. PSINet, for example, started their Internet Paper service in late-1996, supporting PC-to-PC and PC-to-fax transmissions. In mid-1997, UUNET Technologies introduced UUfax, which supports PC-to-fax, PC-to-e-mail, PC-to-PC, and fax-to-fax transmissions. Both services use a single vendor's equipment and transmissions are limited to the carrier's own IP network. Ostensibly this is to provide a more reliable service, but the services are sure to expand to support inter-ISP communications once standards are in place. Indeed, fax will undoubtedly follow the IP network just as telephony has grown as an IP application.
TABLE 1: A Sampling of Internet Fax Products
Company Product Integrated with Browsers Integrated with e-mail Phone Web site
Copia FaxFacts No Yes (800)689-8898 www.copia.com
Global Village FaxWorks No Yes (800)736-4821 www.globalvillag.com
Infinite Technologies Connect2FACSys No Yes (410)363-1097 www.ihub.com
Omtool Fax Sr. Yes Yes (800)886-7845 www.omtool.com
OpenPort Harmony Pro No Yes (800)OPT-Fax1 www.openport.com
Rightfax Rightfax Web Client Yes No (520)320-7000 www.rightfax.com
Rightfax E-mail gateway No Yes
SCH Technologies Merkur No Yes (888)724-6736 www.sch.com
V-Systems VSI-FAX Gold No Yes (800)556-4874 www.vsi.com


Universal Messaging

We are all living in the age of information overload. How many of us start our daily routine with checking email, voice mail, and scanning through any faxes that we may have received. By the time that you check these various information stores, it is time for the morning coffee break. The very tools that were meant to make us more efficient are burying us!

Isn't there a way to simplify the way that we receive information? Rather than checking e-mail, voice mail, and fax software/ fax printouts- wouldn't it be nice to have one interface to check it all? Well this is becoming a reality.

Unified messaging seems to have adopted Burger King's "Have It Your Way" slogan. The question is "How would you like your information delivered to you?" And the answer is "Yes, we can do that". Unified messaging just makes sense. Why check three different messaging applications when you can check one unified message store? There are differing approaches to this concept of a universal inbox. Some store all of the different message types in one database repository; others will store the messages on different servers, but provide one interface into the different message repositories. One of the ultimate benefits for administrators for the universal inbox will be the ability to setup only one directory instead of setting up separate ones for e-mail, voice mail, and fax.

The bottom line for users is that now instead of having to check three different systems, they can now check one and can choose how they would like to receive their messages. If they would like to have all of the messages sent to e-mail, that can be done. Faxes will show up as attachments that can be read with a graphical viewer, and voice mail can be delivered as a WAV or TIFF file. If a user prefers to get all of their messages via the phone, that too can be accomplished — e-mail and faxes can be read to a user by taking advantage of text-to-speech technology, a boon to sight-impaired individuals. If the user prefers the web, all of the messages can be accessed via a web browser.

The Electronic Messaging Association (http://www.ema.org) is extending the unified messaging concept even more. The Voice Profile for Internet Mail (VPIM) specification (RFC 1911) is a way to link together different v-mail systems over the Internet using the TCP/IP protocols. VPIM provides a significant opportunity to integrate — or unify — v-mail, e-mail, and fax over the Internet using standard means.

This integration of messaging systems into a single software application or interface is the Holy Grail for future network-based messaging, or "non-real-time communications." Just as MIME allowed image, audio, and video to be integrated into "e-mail," unified messaging systems will make fax, e-mail, v-mail, and other messaging services appear as a single system to an end user. Just as MCI's commercials show how they can integrate the telephone, v-mail, and paging into what appears to be a single service, unified messaging will make the mode of the sender's document as transparent to the receiver as the receiver's mode of message receipt is to the sender.

And, after all, that really is the intent of all open systems. Just as TCP/IP makes the type of communicating hosts on the Internet transparent to each other, messaging systems are designed so that people can exchange messages, without having to know — or be limited by — the details of the messaging system. The point of the message is the content rather than the mode of communication.
TABLE 2: Integrated fax, e-mail, and v-mail products.
Company Product Fax E-mail Voice mail Phone Web site
Active Voice Repartee Systems with TeLANophy Yes Yes Yes (206)441-4700 www.activevoice.com
Applied Voice Technology CallXpress3 CallXpressNT Yes Yes Yes (206)820-6000 www.appliedvoice.com
Callware Callware Yes Yes Yes (800)888-4226 www.callware.com
Centigram Commuications Corp. OneView Yes Yes Yes (408)944-0250 www.centigram.com
Digital Sound InfoMail Express Yes Yes Yes (800)366-0700 www.dsc.com
Lucent Technologies INTUITY Universal Messaging Yes Yes Yes (888)584-6366 www.lucent.com
Microsoft Exchange 5 Yes Yes Yes (800)426-9400 www.microsoft.com
Novell Groupwise 5 Yes Yes Yes (800)453-1267 www.novell.com
Octel Communications Unified Messenger Yes Yes Yes (408)324-2000 www.octel.com
SphereLink TraveLink Yes Yes Yes (888)774-3731 www.spherelink.com

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Carol Monaghan is the Network Administrator at Hill Associates, a telecommunications training and consulting firm with headquarters in Colchester, VT. Gary Kessler is the Director of Information Technology at Hill Associates.

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