June 1998

BY ALEX KLENERT

Solution Vendor: Optus Software, Inc.

We're hearing a lot these days about cutting-edge CTI technologies such as voice over IP. But the early beneficiaries of CTI are the companies getting creative with traditional communications venues -- like fax. Trusted, proven, and familiar, fax has morphed from stand-alone boxes to server-based solutions that can revamp procedures in areas such as customer service while maximizing technology investments across the enterprise. Network-based fax can provide the integration power needed to marshal resources such as document management, messaging platforms, archiving systems, and more onto a streamlined communications platform.

 Many organizations are striving for a paperless, or at least "less paper" office, and as a result an "electronic trail" must replace the paper trail to ensure documentation. Three companies using fax in innovative ways are Tessco Technologies, a wholesale distributor of wireless communications equipment; the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Legislative Affairs; and the Apartment Connection, a real estate company linking tenants with vacant properties. Even as the memory of the line to use the office fax machine pales, these users are realizing solid cost- and time-savings benefits by leveraging fax in conjunction with archiving systems, document management, and databases.

BURNING ORDERS: SERVER TO CD-ROM
When you get 8 to 9 thousand faxes per month -- and lots of them are orders -- the pressure to distribute incoming faxes quickly is rivaled by the need to keep detailed records. Such was the case for the Customer Relations Department of Tessco Technologies, a wholesale distributor of wireless and communications equipment based in Hunt Valley, Maryland. Prior to restructuring its system around network fax, many of the incoming orders from railroads, government agencies, telecom service providers, and other customers poured into six stand-alone fax machines, creating tracking challenges. The Customer Relations Department did its best to collect the faxes and to distribute them manually, and archiving and retrieving copies were also done piecemeal.

To reign in this fax system, Tessco installed a network fax system. All faxes are received by a server and printed centrally on a network printer that cranks out forty pages per minute. Eventually, Tessco plans to have incoming faxes delivered in electronic form to recipients' PCs.

Besides improving the logistics of distribution (and regaining the space taken up by the old fax machines), Tessco's system has realized major archiving benefits. Archiving is now a drag-and-drop procedure. Documents are taken off Windows Explorer and dragged to a separate server. The faxes are automatically archived -- the system takes more than 100,000 pages at a time and burns their data onto a CD. "It takes about one hour to copy a month's worth of information," says Hal Kuff, Tessco's technology services manager.

The system also expedites the retrieval of paper copies of individual orders from the files, a procedure that had been tedious and time-consuming. "The primary drive in our move to FACSys was to be able to automate the archiving of inbound faxes," Kuff says. With the new system, the receipt and archiving of inbound faxes is carried out automatically by FACSys and individual faxes can be accessed quickly and easily from a CD.

Installation
Kuff installed the system himself in a single afternoon with the help of a local reseller. According to Kuff, the collective stress level in the Customer Relations Department is much lower and the system has proved worry-free. "It has never once failed, crashed, or hung up since its deployment two years ago," Kuff says.

Stand-alone fax machines are still used to handle outbound faxes, but a separate server will ultimately take over that task. Kuff plans to deploy the system so that the new server mirrors the server handling inbound faxes, thus increasing redundancy.

UPGRADING FOR MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY
Employees at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Legislative Affairs, in the Pentagon send and receive quite a few individual and broadcast faxes, as well as e-mails. Today, faxes are sent from networked desktop PCs via a FACSys system that's been running since late 1996. A previously installed workstation-based network fax application running on an out-of-date Macintosh network had proven troublesome, according to Dave Snipes, senior systems engineer for Universal Systems, Inc., which has the contract to maintain the office's computer systems.

"We had to babysit the [previous] fax server, which crashed frequently," Snipes recalls. "Every morning when I came in, my number one duty was to check if the e-mail or the fax server had locked up. If either was locked up, I rebooted the server and prayed that the disk wasn't so corrupted that everything wouldn't come back on line."

Snipes' primary objective was to convert the Mac network over to Windows NT to better accommodate and track the high volume of information disseminated by Legislative Affairs via fax and e-mail. "Before installing FACSys, I'd come in at 7 in the morning and would not be able to leave until 9 or 10 p.m. If we were sending out a broadcast fax, we had to wait to see if the faxes went out OK." Master distribution lists and sub-lists now reside in FACSys, making it easy for users to designate and tailor groups of legislators receiving broadcast faxes.

As with Tessco, streamlining inbound faxes was a major goal as well. Legislative Affairs now captures inbound faxes on an electronic document management system based on Documetrix software from Universal Systems. The paper documents are scanned into the system and stored as an image. Network users can then easily retrieve the digital image of the document, which is stored in TIF format, for outbound faxing. An Iomega tape drive is used to back up the images every night.

Installation
"Everyone knew how to send e-mail and network faxes, so the training for FACSys was among the easiest we've ever had," said Snipes. Things are easier for users, too. The FACSys Version 1.1 Fax Connector for Microsoft Exchange lets users send faxes with a few keystrokes and receive them from the Exchange GUI. Once an employee inputs the "send" command at the desktop, he or she can then work on another application while the fax is placed in the queue to be sent by the server. And of course, users get a receipt with the status of the fax.

KEEPING DATABASES CURRENT
The Apartment Connection deals with one of our basic needs: shelter. To do so, the company has sought the corporate equivalent of a basic necessity: a state-of-the-art communications infrastructure. As part of its strategy, the company uses network fax in providing service to prospective tenants and landlords.

Based in Fairfax, Virginia, the Apartment Connection helps link people looking for apartments with vacant properties. The company began using FACSys at their headquarters in early 1996, and expanded the system to its Philadelphia office last year. Rental consultants use the system to quickly fax information descriptions and lease agreements housed on a FoxPro database tightly integrated with FACSys.

When a customer calls looking for an apartment, the agent inputs rental preferences on a networked PC. The information provided by the customer is then matched against the database, which includes detailed data on hundreds of available apartments. The database usually returns about a dozen matches for the renter to review. Using DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange), a monitoring software program that resides on the rental consultant's PC, the rental list is sent from the consultant's PC to a fax server. The individual rental consultant handling customer inquiries is not aware that FACSys is responsible for faxing. All the user knows is that the fax heads on its way after clicking on "send fax" on the screen.

Users in the Apartment Connection's two offices generate thousands of pages of outbound faxes daily. The majority of faxes range from 5-10 pages. In addition, each property owner receives a monthly summary via a fax broadcast. Even with the high volume of faxes being sent and the varying quality of machines on the receiving end, the Apartment Connection has about a 94 percent success rate with completing FACSys-based fax transmissions. Transmissions that are not completed are always due to difficulties at the receiving end, Parker says.

FAX IN UNIFIED MESSAGING
Before fax can serve as the jumping-off point for a high-powered integrated communications strategy, attention must be paid to the network piece. While the bells and whistles of many systems look the same, the part of the system that's transparent to users can make the difference in how well applications perform. As evidenced by the increasing efforts by Lucent, Microsoft, IBM, and the leading fax, e-mail, and application providers, the age of unified messaging is upon is. For many organizations such as Tessco, the Office of the Secretary of the Defense, Legislative Affairs, and the Apartment Connection, fax is ushering it in.

Optus Software, Inc., has been integrating fax communications into data networks since 1989. It introduced FACSys in the LAN marketplace in 1990. Optus works closely with leading corporate solutions partners such as Microsoft, Citrix, FileNET, Onyx Software, SAP, and Xpedite to help IT departments effectively exploit the convenience and ubiquity of fax for fast, reliable, and effective business communications. For more information, contact the company at 732-271-9568 or visit their Web site at www.facsys.com.