Global Village's One World fax server gives a Mac network an easy shared fax solution
Howard Eglowstein
Somehow, I missed it. When I wasn't looking, the word fax became a verb. Several times a day I find myself faxing articles to authors, information to readers, or design documents to my partners in an ongoing development project. Increasingly, this is from the Mac on my desk, so I no longer have to print out the pages first and try to get our cranky fax machine to cooperate.
BYTE's editorial LAN has a Global Village One World fax server: a shared device that sits quietly on the network and provides shared fax (send only) services for any number of people in your organization, using only one or two phone lines. One World handles the details; imaging the pages, spooling the output, and queuing the jobs for transmi
ssion.
If the One World fax server sounds suspiciously like a standard fax modem, you're half right. It's a petite 6- by 10-inch box with a 16-MHz 68302 processor, 1 MB of RAM (expandable to 9 MB), sockets for one or two of Global Village's PowerPort modem cards, and an AppleTalk network connection (either LocalTalk or Ethernet wiring).
Installing one of these critters is simply a matter of finding a handy spot with a network connection, phone line(s), and an outlet. I had no trouble getting the test unit installed in our network wiring closet within minutes of opening the package.
The Trouble with Fax Cards
The alternative for a busy office, providing dedicated fax modems for everyone, can be a system administrator's nightmare. Assuming most people want to send faxes without tying up their voice line, there's the hassle (and cost) of providing an extra phone line to each desk. Now add the cost of a fax modem and the time it takes to get everything wired correctly. Installations wi
th 10 or more people can likely justify buying a fax server on installation costs alone.
Faxing documents long distances during the day can cost a bundle. Most companies would be amazed at how much they spend on faxes if they had an accurate accounting of their fax activity. One World keeps a detailed log of who sent what to whom and how long it took. And consider the cost savings your company could realize if people scheduled their noncritical documents to go out at night when the phone rates are lower. The server's queue deals with the pending jobs and automatically shuffles them out through the modem cards in order.
Client Software
One World's client software comes in two parts. The first looks like a printer driver to any standard Mac application. To fax a document, you simply ``print'' it to the fax server, give it a phone number, and provide some scheduling details, and your document is away.
When your fax comes up to the top of the queue, a status icon appears in the system
menu bar to tell you how your fax is doing. If you like, you can have the phone-line sounds come out of your Mac's speaker while the connection is established. Your pending faxes are stored in a special folder on your Mac. A buffer in the fax server stores as much of the fax as it can during the actual transmission but is fed from the data stored on your hard drive. Thus, to send a fax, your Mac must be on.
The second part of the software is a status monitor that normally installs into your Apple/DA (desk accessory) menu. Fax Center (see the screen) lets you examine jobs in the queue, delete or reschedule any of your faxes, check the server's history log file, or define cover sheets. Fax Center's Envelope function lets you group a number of documents together and fax them as a single operation.
Making a Connection
I installed the One World fax server on the mixed Ethernet/LocalTalk network in BYTE's Peterborough editorial offices. The evaluation unit was the 2EN model, with both LocalTalk
and 10Base-T Ethernet wiring and a pair of Global Village's PowerPort Bronze II modems installed. The PowerPort Bronze supports faxing at data rates of up to 9600 bps. If you want your faxes to go out faster (and you're sending to a 14.4-Kbps fax machine), you can replace one or both of the modems with Global Village's 14.4-Kbps PowerPort Gold modem card. The less expensive 1LT server model ships with one Bronze modem, one empty modem slot, and no Ethernet connection; to expand later, you can add a second modem. The 1LT doesn't have an Ethernet upgrade option, so if you have an Ethernet network or plan to upgrade an existing LocalTalk network, consider the more expensive 2EN.
BYTE has 50 to 60 machines sharing the network wire at any one time, and about one-third of them are Macs. At any time, the traffic is a composite of AppleTalk, Novell NetWare (IPX), and assorted Unix machines running TCP/IP to a number of NFS (Network File System) file servers. Between the Unix machines and the design department
's heavy AppleTalk use, the network can get very busy at times. To operate, the One World server depends on a steady stream of data from the faxing client, although a built-in cache provides buffering for periods of heavy activity.
One World doesn't support the TCP/IP and IPX network clients, but I wondered if the high traffic on the network would create a problem for the fax server. After working with the server during several periods of extra-heavy traffic, it appeared that the standard 1 MB of cache RAM was sufficient for the network configuration. If it wasn't, the 1 MB could be expanded to 3 MB (by adding two 1-MB SIMMs) or 9 MB (by adding two 4-MB SIMMs). We have a fair number of bridges and routers in place to help cut down on the network chatter; I suspect our network traffic is typical of many small-to-midsize offices.
Almost Too Easy for Words
Operating the One World GlobalFax client software is as easy as it gets. Select Fax from your application's menu (it replaces the Print o
ption when you have the fax server selected as your printer) and choose a cover page and one or more phone numbers. Then click on Send.
GlobalFax comes with a selection of cover sheets that are automatically filled out with your name and other relevant fax information. You'll probably want to build your own, though, with a company logo or a cute graphic. To do that, simply create the graphic in any drawing program (I used Adobe's Photoshop) and save the image as a PICT file. GlobalFax imports the PICT file and lets you add the dynamic fields.
Pay close attention to your PICT file's resolution. I inadvertently saved my first cover page in Photoshop's default screen resolution (72 dots per inch). The horizontal resolution of a standard fax machine (200 dpi) looked terribly jaggy until I resaved the cover-sheet graphic at 200 dpi. Besides the usual resolutions, Standard (100 by 200 dpi) and Fine (200 by 200 dpi), One World also supports gray-scale faxing (on Mac SE/30s and better). I tried sending
several gray-scale images to my gray-scale-capable Brother 780MC fax machine, and the output was surprisingly good.
I had only one recurring problem trying to get GlobalFax running on a number of Macs. The software tries to be smart about handling dialing codes for your phone system. The idea is that you tell the software how to get an outside line (often by dialing 9 first), how to dial long distance, and what your local area code is. If you enter all your phone numbers with the area codes into the fax software address book, GlobalFax is supposed to be smart enough to strip off the area code from local calls and dial long-distance codes when necessary. In practice, I never did get this feature to work correctly.
At $1499, the One World fax server is an effective way of providing a virtual fax machine to every Mac user in your organization. With as few as 10 users, you end up with a less expensive and possibly more capable solution for sending faxes from your office Macs. The best part is that u
sing a fax server frees up your dedicated fax machine to receive incoming faxes. Now if they could just invent a fax machine that throws out all those junk faxes I keep getting....
The Facts
One World
with software for 30 users:
1LT (Local Talk, one modem) $999
2EN (Ethernet, two modems) $1499
Additional user licenses are approximately $20 to $25 each, depending on quantity.
System requirements: Any Mac with 4 MB of RAM, System 7.x, and a Phase II AppleTalk network connection
Global Village Communication
685 East Middlefield Rd., Building B
Mountain View, CA 94043
(800) 736-4821
(415) 390-8200
fax: (415) 390-8282
Automated technical info by fax: (415) 962-9550
Illustration: Fax Center is a One World application that controls the fax queue and provides access to activity logs and cover sheets. As faxes start up, the queue manager displays the status with a fun animation--highlighting the entire package's friendly, nonthreatening approach to
shared fax services.
Howard Eglowstein is a developer for Penmanship, Inc. (Incline Village, NV), and a BYTE consulting editor. He can be reached on the Internet or BIX at
heglowstein@bix.com
.
One World, One Fax
