Fax Gets a Face-Lift

D. A.

The great things about fax are that it's easy to use and practically every business has one. However, if you need to transfer an editable word processing, spreadsheet, or image file, fax falls flat: The process of converting a bit-map fax image into a file that you can edit with your word processor or route to a network database places a heavy burden on OCR programs that usually can't approach 100 percent accuracy when recognizing a free-form document.

This spring and summer, developers will release a new wave of products that give fax a face-lift by adding binary-file-transfer capabilities, letting you send files--even files with sound and video--in their original format. "With binary file transfer, we want to take document-image communication and change that to document communication," says Richard Holder, product marketing manager at WordPerfect's consumer-products group. "We want to get rid of that whole [OCR] conversion step." But as often occurs, developers will have their pick of two standards to support, in this case one by the international ITU (formerly CCITT) standards body and the other by Microsoft.

Developers of fax software say that in many ways, the binary-file-transfer fax portion of Microsoft's At Work architecture is better defined than the ITU's evolving T.434 standard. The fax component in At Work, which is currently included with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, is more secure, supporting password and public-/private-key encryption, as well as digital-signature verification. Developers say that the At Work fax transport used for fax LAN routing and for its implementation of negotiation, in which a sending device seeks out the receiving device's capabilities and then stores it for future reference, is also more robust. "At this time, the Microsoft binary file transfer is richer," says Jennie Wan-M ernyk, director of marketing at OAZ Communications (Fremont, CA). But vendors who choose to support Microsoft's binary fax solution in their products will also have to pay royalties to Microsoft.

The TR-29.1 committee of the Telecommunications Industry Association is working on improving the key open issues of implementing the T.434 standard, which are file-attribute negotiation and improving interoperability among different manufacturers' devices, according to James Rafferty, president of the communications consulting firm Human Communications (Danbury, CT). "T.434 will be a royalty-free solution for vendors to implement," Rafferty says. Another point in T.434's favor is that it is a multiple-platform standard, not a Windows-only solution.

"We wanted to get binary file transfer out there today, and so we implemented binary file transfer on top of T.30 [the current ITU fax standard]," says Suzan Fine, product manager at Microsoft's digital office systems group. "But T.434 will slowly be better d efined. If it is widely implemented in the future and is compatible across implementations, we may support it." Most developers we surveyed said they are closely following T.434 and At Work and may support both standards in upcoming products.

Whichever standard wins in the market, however, binary file transfer could make fax even more attractive as a universal communications medium. John Willcutts, vice president of engineering at Atlanta-based Sofnet, which sells fax programs for DOS, Windows, and OS/2, says that, once widely supported, binary file transfer could upgrade fax to "the ultimate file transfer of all time."