ese
systems is drag-and-drop support of attachments. With Faxination, for example, you can attach Word, Excel, and RTF files, while Faxit supports a list of 40 file formats as attachments.
However, "a fax gateway for Exchange is only the first step," says Wim de Koning, the president and CEO of Fenestrae. "We're also currently working on a consistent gateway architecture for Electronic Data Interchange [EDI], X.400, GSM Short Message Service [SMS], and Telex." Koning says that the company's Interpersonal Messaging Server will extend the Faxination kernel and also include end-to-end addressing; access security, such as logging, tracking, and support for firewalls; and connectivity to major business applications, such as SAP's R/3.
Tobit
(Ahaus, Germany) is taking another approach: turning its NetWare-based fax server, FaxWare, into a universal communications platform. Code-named David, the system has a central multimedia archive for incoming faxes, e-mail, and other d
ocuments that can be accessed via LAN, fax, phone, or Web. This concept lets a company's employees access all kinds of personal documents with a variety of media from anywhere in the world. Tobit also plans to support paging services, SMS, and text-to-speech output. Says Dieter van Acken, marketing manager at Tobit: "Universal inboxes like David will soon be the core of many virtual offices."
Four-fifths of the U.K. businesses polled would rather give up their
e-mail than their fax systems. The reason: the ubiquity of fax
machines. Only 42 percent of the small companies surveyed use e-mail,
while 79 percent of large ones do, says market-research firm
International Data Corp. (IDC).
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Tobit's fax-server technology is turning into a universal message inbox.
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