October 1999

Centuple Communications, Inc.
3989 Central Ave. NE
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55421
Ph: 612-789-1456
Fx: 612-789-2013
Web site: www.centuple.com

Price: $1,699

RATINGS (0–5)
Installation: 4.5
Documentation: 4.25
Features: 4.5
GUI: 3.5
Overall: B+

Traditionally, e-mail, faxes, and voice messages have acted as separate forms of communication. That is beginning to change with the emergence of such products as Midas, from Centuple Communications, which allows a fax to be sent to someone’s e-mail box as a Tagged Image File Format (.TIF) file, and a voice message to be sent to someone’s e-mail box as a .WAV file. To achieve these feats, Midas must be connected to a conventional fax machine, the corporate LAN, and the telephone network.

INSTALLATION
You can get a good sense of how to set up Midas just by looking at the back of the product. The ports are clearly labeled so that you can connect to your fax, the telephone jack on the wall, and to your LAN. Just plug in a power chord as well, and you are ready to go.

After you turn on Midas, you must press the Config key before the main screen appears. For some reason, if you press that key after you reach the main screen, it won’t allow you to enter the configuration settings. Instead, if you want to change these settings, you must turn Midas off and then back on.

Entering the configuration settings is simple. First, you have to enter the date and time, and whether or not you want Midas to automatically change the time in accordance with daylight savings. Then, you must enter the e-mail server IP address, Midas’ IP address, subnet mask, and the gateway IP address. If necessary, you must also enter a DNS server IP address. If the administrator wants to receive notification in case of an e-mail failure, you can add that e-mail address into the configuration settings. We did this and received notification when the e-mail had not gone through because our e-mail server had been down at the time we sent the MidasFax (the name Centuple gives Midas’ sent data).

DOCUMENTATION
The documentation consists of one small user’s guide and some help files. These are sufficient for such a simple product to use. The user’s guide is detailed, as are the help files, which can be accessed via the help button on the keyboard. The only additions that would aid the documentation would be a detailed description about the record-and-play option of Midas, and an index for the user’s guide.

FEATURES
The following is a list of the major features of Midas:

• Can transmit faxes from a conventional fax machine over the Internet;
• Can send a fax by entering the telephone number if the corporate LAN is inoperative;
• Converts a fax or scan into an e-mail attachment (.TIF file), or a voice recording into an e-mail attachment (.WAV file);
• Has an LCD screen with an adjustable tilt angle built into the device;
• Sends an e-mail notification if there is a problem delivering; and
• Has specialized e-mail function keys, such as “com” or “net,” to make data entry faster and easier.

OPERATIONAL TESTING
All of the functionality of Midas is straightforward. To send a MidasFax, all you have to do is press the Star (*) key and then the Start button on the conventional fax machine. After you press the Mail To button on the Midas keyboard, enter the appropriate e-mail address, as well as any message you want, and press the Send button. For a voice message, you just connect a phone to the conventional fax machine, press the Record button, say your message, and press the Stop button. To check your recorded message, you press the Play button. When ready, you press the Send button, and the voice message will be sent with your next MidasFax as a .WAV attachment (voice-annotated fax). You can also send a voice message without a fax, but this can be achieved just as easily using a microphone with multimedia PCs.

Midas comes with the ability to enter e-mail addresses into an address book or into a broadcast group. You can keep track of all the e-mail addresses you use with the address books, and pick which addresses you’re sending to in each given MidasFax. By using a broadcast group, you can send a MidasFax to everyone listed in the group. If you always send particular MidasFaxes to the same people, these broadcast groups become increasingly handy.

Opening a MidasFax is the same as opening an e-mail with attachments. Here, it is worth noting that if you don’t have a .TIF viewer on your computer, you can download one from Centuple. We did this easily, and the viewer worked fine. However, we did notice that the MidasFax still tells you that the attachment to the e-mail is in standard .TIF format even if only a .WAV file is attached to the e-mail. This should be corrected in a future version of Midas.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
The LCD screen comes built-in with Midas, acts like a command line interface for the configuration, and displays the features so that they are simple to use. However, when accessing the features, the next screen sometimes comes up slowly. Also, the screensaver was all black, could not be changed, and was only reactivated by pressing the spacebar (which we had to figure out ourselves). On first glance, we weren’t even sure whether Midas was off or on when in the screensaver mode. Obviously, an improvement would be to speed up Midas’ processor.

What would also make this interface better would be to construct a simple Windows-based interface, although a DOS license is much cheaper than a Windows license. There should also be an option for a more colorful screensaver or no screensaver at all. A port for a mouse should be available as well, so that a user can traverse the interface more easily.

While the screen’s tilt angle is adjustable, we had a problem with it. The metal hinge between the screen and the Midas device seemed too tight for its own good. (An over-zealous TMC Labs™ engineer actually snapped the hinge’s plastic casing when he showed off the new gadget to our publisher, stretching the concept of a “break-in” period a little too far.) The screen still works, but now it is literally attached by just a wire. However, a Centuple representative told us that this only happened because the case was a pre-production version, and that the current production release is made of a new, stronger composite, but for the particular device we tested, it is still a room for improvement issue.

Having Midas integrate with a corporate LAN (to access the Internet) is a necessity for this type of product. However, there should be an option to send a MidasFax via a dialup Internet connection just in case the LAN is down. Midas could also be used from a home office that does not have access to a LAN with an e-mail server connected to the Internet.

One last improvement involves the Config key. A user should be able to change configuration settings without powering the product off and on and pressing the Config key when it first boots up.

CONCLUSION
Midas is as easy to use as a fax machine, and can convert faxes and voice messages into .TIF or .WAV files, which are attached to an e-mail message. In this way, it can act as a scanner, a recorder, or as a conventional fax. Since each MidasFax can be sent through the Internet, it also saves you money on phone charges. Although Midas can be improved, it is still a reliable and practical method of sending and receiving e-mail, faxes, and voice messages.