Whatever Happened To...

Microsoft At Work?

Nick Baran

In the summer of 1993, Microsoft announced a new architecture called At Work to enable connectivity between Windows PCs and office devices. For example, a Windows user would issue commands to a copy machine from the PC, and the copy machine would send back various status reports.

Few products bearing the Microsoft At Work moniker have come to market. Microsoft's Personal Systems Division continues to work on a hand-held PC companion. At Work printers based on the Windows Printing System have been released, but they only send bidirectional feedback to a directly connected PC (not across the network), unless you use the JetAdmin utility included in the CD-ROM version of Windows 95 with HP printers or print servers. But, Microsoft says Microsoft At Work is still alive an d well. Josh Herst, a product manager at Microsoft, says the basic goals of Microsoft At Work still exist, but they've been distributed into different product groups (originally, Microsoft At Work was a separate entity at Microsoft). For example, Herst's group is working on a Windows 95 component called Microsoft Fax that will integrate with Microsoft Exchange, the universal in-box utility in Windows 95. West Caldwell, NJ-based Ricoh says it will ship its long-awaited IFS-66 At Work fax machine, which supports binary file transfer and inbound fax routing with other At Work fax machines, this fall. Microsoft says it currently doesn't plan to port the At Work kernel to non-x86-compatible processors.