New Products Help Road Warriors Stay in Touch

A new group of communications products seek to improve the efficiency of telecommuters and mobile workers

Dave Andrews

Whether it's voice-mail tag, busy fax machines, or E-mail overload, telecommuters and mobile workers must overcome many hurdles when trying to stay in touch with the main office. Telecommuting professionals must respond quickly to critical business communications or risk lost opportunities. A new wave of products--some complement existing messaging technologies such as E-mail and voice mail, and others ambitiously exploit emerging technologies, like voice recognition--can make it easier for the corporate road warrior to keep updated.

One such product, called the Wildfire Electronic Assistant, uses speech rec ognition to translate spoken commands into a series of contact management tasks that help you connect to key people. Instead of making a series of calls from a hotel or cellular phone, you dial into the Wildfire server. In a single session, you can screen and route calls, dial out to several contacts by saying a name or phone number, return a call immediately after reviewing a message, and schedule reminders and follow-up calls.

Wildfire lets you assign priority levels to contacts so that only important phone calls are forwarded to your phone. If you need to speak to an important client whose voice pattern is in the program's database, you can tell Wildfire to forward that caller to your cellular phone when it recognizes that person's voice. If a caller's voice isn't in the database, Wildfire can prompt the customer to enter a phone number to verify his or her identity. When you are in a Wildfire session, the program will also whisper the name of an incoming caller, letting you accept the call and put your current call on hold or have Wildfire take a message. The system can also act as a virtual hallway. You can ask, ``Who else is around?,'' and Wildfire will provide a list of your colleagues currently in a session. If you like, you can initiate a call to one of them.

Wildfire is not meant for the casual phone user. The system consists of intelligent communications software running on a Pentium-class computer, an embedded version of Unix System V release 4.0, and an object database from Object Design (Burlington, MA, (617) 674-5000). Slated to ship in the first quarter of 1995, the program requires a T1 line. Prices start at $46,850 for a four-port system that handles 12 to 24 users. Developers at Wildfire Communications (Lexington, MA, (617) 674-1590) say future plans for the product include integration with PDAs (personal digital assistants), E-mail, and faxing. For now, Wildfire notifies you of recent messages via an alphanumeric pager and lets you call and interact with your non-Wildfire voice m ail via the traditional Touch-Tone navigation.

Wildfire's reliance on emerging voice-recognition and object-database technologies makes it a new type of communications product, analysts say. ``They've taken a quantum leap forward,'' says Jim Burton, an analyst for C-T Link (Boston, MA), a computer-telephone integration consulting firm for vendors. ``When I look into the future, I see [Wildfire] as the way people communicate.'' Burton adds that the key to the company's success will be the accuracy of the voice recognition, including its performance over cellular phone calls.

More evolutionary is the MSX system from Priority Call Management (Wilmington, MA, (508) 658-4400). Think of MSX as an off-premise extension on steroids. MSX is an intelligent switching system that integrates with your organization's existing phone and data networks. It provides services where a person rather than a dumb extension sitting on a PBX is the destination for voice communications. MSX delivers flexible call complet ion and management to an individual, regardless of a person's location, as long as he or she has a Touch-Tone phone. From any remote location, you can answer, screen, and transfer phone calls.

The MSX system seamlessly routes phone calls over cellular, wireless (i.e., pagers), and wired devices. MSX supports call screening and also lets you receive faxes directly at your regular business phone number. MSX stores the fax, and the next time you call in, the system informs you of the fax and lets you print it at a remote device. ``Unless their workers can work from their homes as if they were at their desktop, companies will be reluctant to promote telecommuting,'' says Andrew Dale, vice president of marketing at PCM. ``MSX delivers to any Touch-Tone phone the enhanced features that you normally get only from proprietary phones that work with your PBX.'' Dale says future versions of the product will offer tighter integration to LANs and will support voice recognition. The pricing for MSX starts at $60,000 .

Both MSX and Wildfire focus on maximizing the effectiveness of your voice communications but don't currently integrate with the types of electronic communications (e.g., E-mail) that fly across a typical company LAN. Companies like 3Com and Shiva have developed remote-node solutions that allow a mobile worker to use a modem-equipped PC to dial into and use the LAN's resources. Air Access 2.0, which is remote-LAN-node software from AirSoft (Cupertino, CA, (408) 777-7500), uses a highly optimized TCP/IP-like transport-level protocol along with caching to minimize the traffic across standard phone lines.

MobileWare (Dallas, TX, (214) 952-1200) takes a different approach to LAN access. The company's namesake software lets mobile users connect to LANs via a modem over wireless or standard phone lines. You can use it to send and receive E-mail, faxes, files, and printed documents between your notebook PC and the server in a single phone call.

MobileWare is sold in five-, 50-, and 250-user pac kages. The price, $279 per user, includes the necessary MobileWare server components for NetWare, Windows client software, and cc:Mail client post office licenses (the company says it will support Microsoft Mail in 1995). MobileWare integrates with existing cc:Mail gateways, includes system administration, and supports DES. However, MobileWare currently does not integrate with Lotus Notes or support cellular networks such as Ardis or RAM Mobile Data.

With MobileWare, one call from Windows client software can spawn multiple communications tasks that the server can execute when you're disconnected, including multiple fax distribution, remote printing, file transfer, and mail exchange. It thus saves time and reduces long-distance phone charges. If you're disconnected during a transmission, MobileWare reestablishes the connection from the point the drop occurred, without losing data.

The products mentioned here address different communications needs, but they all extend users' mobility options beyon d simple voice mail, says Andrew Seybold, editor in chief of Outlook on Mobile Computing (Brookdale, CA): ``Today when people leave the office, they leave three quarters of their communications behind them. Many people rely only on voice mail, but messages come by fax, E-mail, and voice mail.''