January 1998

01 Communique Laboratories, Inc.
1450 Meyerside Drive
Mississauga, Ontario
Canada, L5T 2N5
E-mail: [email protected]
Web site: www.01com.com

Price: List: $149; Catalog $80.

Communicate!, a software program aimed at the SOHO market, completely integrates voice, email, fax, and data communications. It also comes with a built-in contact manager, graphics editor, auto attendant, GUIbased dialing, and OCR capabilities. To use this product, which is meant for use with one telephone line, you need a 100 percent compatible Rockwell-based or U.S. Robotics Class 1 or 2 data/fax/voice/speakerphone modem. To access the product’s features, you work with the main interface, a user-friendly screen which resembles a telephone. Here, you will find icons that let you quickly and easily perform faxing, speakerphone, voice mail, recording, and other functions.

INSTALLATION/DOCUMENTATION
The software, which came on a single CD-ROM, was a snap to install. We didn’t encounter any problems. The documentation was just as good. The manual had a good table of contents and an excellent index. Even better: step-by-step instructions, along with accompanying screenshots, gave lots of details on how to use each feature. Thus, learning to use this product was a walk in the park.

FEATURES
Send and Receive Faxes

• Send faxes from within any Windows application.
• Send documents from different applications as a single fax.
• Scan and fax from any HP or TWAIN compatible scanner.
• Traffic Monitor re-schedules, holds, or cancels outbound faxes.
• Re-send and re-queue capabilities.
• Merge with Contact Manager to broadcast faxes to an unlimited number of recipients.
• View incoming faxes onscreen, and print or forward them to another fax number.
• Compress fax images, saving valuable hard disk space.

Voice Mail And Telephony

• Unlimited number of password-protected voice mailboxes.
• User-definable voice menu with unlimited levels.
• Pre-recorded greetings for system navigation.
• Call screening, quiet mode, conversation recording, autoreceive.
• Music-on-hold and speakerphone capabilities.
• Caller ID informs you of who’s calling before you answer.
• Distinctive ring auto-routes calls to selected mailboxes.
• Up to 30 speed dial entries for quick calls.

Fax-Back/Fax-OnDemand

• Create an automatic fax-back or fax-ondemand service easily with voice prompts.
• Callers can retrieve documents by entering document numbers from any touch-tone phone.
• Unlimited document support for faxback or fax-on-demand services.

Fax Viewer And Graphics Editor

• View with a zoom up to 2,000 percent, which supports pixel-level fax and graphics editing.
• OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts faxes to editable text.
• Import TIFF, BMP, GIF, and PCX graphics for faxing.
• One-click stamping of signature or letterhead on outbound faxes.
• Customizable cover pages.

Remote Management

• Manage mailboxes, passwords, greetings, and administrative options.
• Listen to voice messages.
• Retrieve and forward faxes to your location.

Contact Management

• Unlimited number of phone books and contacts.
• Over 100 predefined and 10 customizable fields store telephone, fax, Internet e-mail, URL, BBS, pager, cellular numbers.
• One click to initiate fax, data, or voice calls from phone book.
• Sort by any phone book field in one click.
• Search feature sorts contacts according to criteria you set.
• Import DBF, SDF files, and existing phone books from WinFax Pro and ACT! for Windows.
• Print predefined Avery labels and custom labels.
• Hot-list feature reminds you of scheduled events.
• Distinguishes between local and long-distance telephone numbers, even within same area code.

E-Mail And Data Communications

• Send and receive Internet email.
• Supports MAPI.
• Supports popular file transfer protocols including X (-1K, 1KG), Y (G), ZMODEM, ASCII, CompuServe B+, and Kermit.
• Attach binary files to your messages.
• Unattended mini-BBS capability with user passwords, greetings, dialback, and call logging.
• Built-in log-on scripts for many popular online services.
• Modem indicator lights show file transfer and connection status.
• NSI and TTY terminal emulations. Log Book
• Universal inbox automatically logs all fax, data, and voice communications.
• Re-submits unsuccessful broadcast jobs to queue.
• Comprehensive search feature sorts appropriate log records for chargeback accounting.

OPERATIONAL TESTING
Communicate! makes it easy to get in touch with your contacts. Select the person you want to reach and the method of delivery (fax, Internet email, voice, or data transfer). That’s it. Communicate! responds by sending the information according to your specifications. With Communicate!, you need but a single phone line to receive incoming voice calls, faxes, Internet e-mail, fax-ondemand requests, and data transfers. Communicate! detects the type of incoming call and answers it appropriately. The universal mailbox makes it easy for you to keep track of all inbound and outbound messages (Figures 15A and 15B).

Contact Manager
We found that the contact manager let us easily manage all kinds of contact information, including voice numbers, fax numbers, street addresses, email addresses, and other information (Figure 16). In addition, Communicate! has a multiple search feature, hotlist capabilities, as well as predefined and customizable information fields to help you manage your contacts. We were able to create targeted fax, email, and voice broadcasts quickly and easily using the contact manager. In one of our tests, we sent a voice mail broadcast to an answering machine. Since we didn’t have one handy in the lab, we sent the voice mail broadcast to an answering machine owned by a CTI magazine editor. When the editor got home, he confirmed that Communicate! had successfully delivered the recording to the answering machine. We also tested how well the contact manager worked with caller ID. We found that Communicate! brings up the phone book with the record on an incoming call, provided a record exists in the database. However, the main GUI (the phone interface) says “UNKNOWN CALLER” even though the caller is, in fact, known.

Auto Attendant
Communicate! converts your PC into an auto attendant which will automatically manage your voice and fax messages. Communicate! answers your calls with your own prerecorded message or standard greeting while you’re away. You can also customize your voice mail system to hold an unlimited number of password-protected mailboxes. Calls will be answered and routed to the appropriate mailboxes.

In one of our tests, we examined the auto attendant’s ability to distinguish an incoming voice call from a fax call. First, we called by voice and were able to leave a voice message in one of the configured mailboxes. Next, we faxed into the Communicate! system. The program detected the fax tones and then automatically received the fax. The fax was then routed into the inbox which we could then access.

Fax Features
With Communicate!, you can retrieve and forward your faxes to wherever you happen to be. You can also create an automatic fax-back service to provide your callers with information via fax.

When we attached a few Word documents to an outbound fax, Communicate! automatically converted and then faxed the documents. We liked this automatic document conversion which allowed us to fax a document without actually having to print it to a special fax printer driver from the Word application.

Customization
From the main GUI you have the option of choosing which input and output device you wish to use. Thus, you can opt for a microphone, speaker, handset, etc., for either input or output. When we tried to customize the columns in the universal inbox (that is, choose which items of data we wished to have displayed), we found that learning how to move the columns was a little tricky. Normally, when you customize column entries, you are presented with two arrows (up and down) which you can click on to change the order of the entries. However, with Communicate! you must click and drag the entries to where you want them.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
You can have multiple numbers associated with a contact, but they aren’t used in the caller ID lookup. Only the primary phone number is used in the caller ID lookup! We’d like to see a more robust caller ID functionality which uses all the phone numbers associated with a contact.

CONCLUSION
Feature-rich, powerful, and easy to use, Communicate! will fulfill all of the SOHO user’s voice, fax, data, and contact management needs. Seldom has a product designed for use with a single phone line demonstrated such tight integration of multiple messaging types. If you’re in a SOHO situation, Communicate! is definitely worth a look.