Come one, come all to the Salutation Birds- of-a-Feather sessions that I will be organizing for application developers and solution providers who want to capitalize on the benefits that Salutation enabling can bring to their products and services. Learn how Salutation can deliver added value to your customers by enhancing your products, applications and solutions. My objective is to bring together developers who share a common interest such as an industry focus, application area or office product opportunity. Through presentations, expert panels, work groups and round table discussions, these sessions will be enlightening, informative and educational. They will provide the environment to explore the many facets of the open Salutation architecture and protocol and how to apply them to satisfy the networking requirements of your customers.

To maintain the competitive edge in the marketplace there is a need to develop networking solutions that satisfy not only today's but the future needs of customers. In the world of rapidly changing networking environments, solutions that utilize the Salutation architecture are leading edge, because they can deliver the adaptability that all customers want. The timing could not be better, with new Salutation enabled products on the horizon, come and learn how to improve the market demand for your applications, products and solutions.

The objectives of the sessions are: to enable developers to understand the benefits of incorporating Salutation into their applications, give the attendees an introduction/education on Salutation, provide an opportunity for developers to exchange ideas on building Salutation based solutions.

Here are topics that will be included and tailored to the specific focus of these 1-2 day sessions.

1. Application development insight
2. Salutation Concepts and Advantages
3. Salutation Technology Overview
4. Specifics of Salutation Protocols (Discover, Availability, Service for Fax, Print, Scan, Etc.)
5. Current Products and Plans with demo
6. Available Development Aids
7. Product Certification and Testing
8. Brainstorming session on how the architecture might be used both from a technical and marketing prospective.

During the next several months these Birds-of-a- Feather sessions will be provided by the Salutation Consortium and supported by the member companies. We are currently finalizing the focus area for each session, examples include; Fax, Network Scanning, MFPs, Office Applications, Home Networks and others. Please contact me if you have an area of interest that you believe would be an excellent session focus. The announcement and enrollment information for these sessions will be available on the Salutation Consortium web site. You can also contact me via email or telephone and I will send you the information.

In each issue, this section of the Salutation Newsletter will highlight potential uses for the Salutation Architecture. We aim to prod your thinking as you visualize how Salutation might benefit your business. First we'll describe how someone might use Salutation-enabled products and services to solve a problem, then we'll take the covers off and show you how Salutation technology made the scenario possible.

User Defined Device Interface

Bob has just purchased a PDA with infrared interface. He is anxious to try one feature in particular. Bob is a 'Local Area Mobile Worker'; he spends most of his time out of his office on his campus, supporting the local staff. One frustration for Bob has been learning how to use all the different copiers at his location, and because of his wanderings, he has seen all of them. There are 5 different desk top units from 4 different manufactures. There are 6 different mid-range copiers from 3 different manufactures. And then there are those 3 production units with all those buttons, knobs and displays. They all have different interfaces and they all confuse Bob. He says the one button he uses the most is the Reset Button.

But Bob has learned that his new PDA has a generic copier user interface built in; one which he can modify to meet his needs, but will also control every copier on the campus. Using the setup tool provided, Bob builds a graphical interface on his PDA containing the standard radio buttons, check boxes and push buttons. The setup function allows him to place only those controls he uses on his control panel. He selects Copy, Number of Copies, Staple, Collate, Duplex, and Reset. Then off he goes to try out his new productivity aid.

Much to his delight, it works successfully. At the first copier he can find, he points his PDA at the office equipment to assure a connection via the infrared link. He activates his new user interface. His screen lights up showing the interface he created. He notices that the collate, staple and duplex functions are �grayed out'. Examining the office copier, he sees that it does not support these functions. "Cool," he says as he realizes that the interface he created is automatically adjusted for the configuration of the copier. He places a document in the copier's feed station, then sets the copy count on his PDA and touches the PDA screen where the Copy button is displayed. The copier jumps to life, feeding in page after page of his document and producing the specified amount of copies.

For self assurance, Bob decides to do another experiment. He walks to the other side of the campus where the production copiers are located. Again he aims his PDA at the floor-standing copier and activates the PDA's copier user interface. This time, just as he expected, none of the controls are grayed out as these high-end copiers are full-functioned. Again he places his originals in the input tray. On his PDA, he selects the appropriate copy count and this time also selects collate, staple and duplex, "Just because it's there." He then touches the Copy button on the PDA's screen and the production copier speeds through his job to his specifications.

"Couldn't have done it better myself," he says as he wanders away, realizing he never used the reset button

Salutation Behind the Scenes

1.When the PDAs are turned on, an initial Salutation Protocol exchange occurs between the PDA and the copier. This exchange reveals the characteristics of each copier which the PDA equates to the user interface designed by Bob. This information is used to tailor the interface to the specific capabilities of the copier.

2.When communicating with a low function copier, the Salutation exchange does not detect stapling, collation or duplex capabilities on the copier, so these functions are �grayed out'.

3.When communicating with a high function copier, the Salutation exchange detects stapling, collation and duplex capabilities on the copier so these functions are enabled.

4.Salutation Protocol is also used between the copier and PDA, to pass command and control information from the PDA to the copier. The copier will convert the standardized Salutation interchange to the specific command language of the device.

5.This same Salutation Protocol exchange can be used to send status information to the PDA, thus alerting the PDA's user of paper jams and supply problems.

The sixth in a series by Robert A. Pascoe, former president of the Salutation Consortium. Pascoe now operates Senior Technical Staff Consulting, LLC, a consulting firm focusing on interconnection technologies and interworking.

Remember MEGATRENDS, a 1982 best selling book by John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene which posted prophecies for the decade to come? The authors described ten major shifts in social, economic, political and technological trends, with the premise that these shifts would have wide ranging effects on our lives. We have been reviewing these trends to see if the authors' visions have come to pass and what it has meant to our life and lifestyle today. In this issue of Greetings we will take a look at the ninth trend:

9. Hierarchies to Networking

The Trend: The authors of MEGATRENDS predicted a population shift from the rust belt to the sun belt as industries recognized that the crumbling infrastructure of the north could not accommodate the changes required by the move to information economy. On the other hand, the South offered a growing infrastructure and demonstrated a willingness to work with industries to attract the tax base to their geographies. The workforce would recognize the South's quality of life advantages of milder winters and informal lifestyles.

Today: This North-to-South trend has come and gone and has been replaced by the new migration; the West. My family personally rode these trends. We moved from upstate New York to Texas, and then to Utah two years ago. However, location selection is now more �trendy' than �megatrend.' That is, the technologies available to information workers allowing participation in global markets and decentralized teams (e-mail, teleconferencing and video conferencing), also enabled us to work-from-home. The real geographic shift is not to a specific geographic area, but rather the scattering of the work force to the four winds. As noted earlier, being "at work" is about getting the job done regardless of where you are. Proximity to the office is becoming less a factor in selecting the community we live in. If we can work at home, we can select the location of where we live, and consequently where we �work,' based on quality of life issues, (which no longer includes the length of the commute). The challenge here is to convince the remaining management hierarchy that we can fulfill our work-related commitment, even though we are not geographically at their fingertips (and, for me, the additional challenge of staying away from the refrigerator!).

Salutation's role here is to enable the connectivity between the devices, applications and services of the scattered workforce. Salutation can:

• Determine the capabilities of stuff you want to use on the network. This might be your coworkers fax machine, or the production printer at the local Kinko's. Or, it might enable finding the location of the OCR process you need for data conversions.
• Determine the availability of the stuff you want to use. Not only can you tell if the stuff is online, but what's wrong with it if it's not. And if it needs fixing, you can determine the name of the service provider.
• Move data to and from the stuff you want to use. Salutation gives you three levels of support here, Native, Emulated and Salutation Personalities (see this issues Tech Talk). One is right for the job you have.

In The Age Of The Smart Machine �EThe Future Of Work And Power

Shoshana Zuboff is an Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School. Zuboff has compiled a study of the history, psychology and politics of work and how it is affected by the promise, threat and challenges of automation. The author has provided insight to how information technology is altering the nature of work and the dynamics of the workplace. It is an excellent study on the implications of automation on management and organizational structure.

Zuboff published the study in a book titled: In The Age Of The Smart Machine �EThe Future Of Work And Power. In this book Zuboff notes, "The further development of office machinery begets only new and more specialized office machinery. Typewriters, adding machines, filing systems �Eequipment may become more sophisticated, but its function does not change. In contrast, the further development of computer systems unleashes their informating potential. As time frames become more immediate, as more sectors of data can be integrated, as software helps limit inaccuracies, as data entry and access become more widely distributed, and as programmed logic becomes more comprehensible and flexible, the surrounding life-world of the organizations comes to be more comprehensively reflected in a dynamic, fluid electronic text. New methods of automating this textualization process, such as building it into organizational members' natural activities (for example, account officers enter their own data), sharing it among several organizations through interorganizational systems, and relying on increasingly sophisticated automated data-entry devices based on optical character recognition and high-speed communications, mean that fewer people will be needed to accomplish routine transactions in conjunction with the machine system."

The author notes that data entry jobs have been eliminated by such automation technology as Automated Teller Machines and on-line shopping. Here the data entry burden has been shifted away from the clerical staff to the consumer.

Another technology advance connects the computers of customers with suppliers. For example, hospital computers are used to gather patient information and automatically and electronically bill insurance carries for services rendered. The duties of the billing clerk at the hospital and the accounts payable clerk at the insurance company are decreased or eliminated.

• Participate in the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) Meeting, February 3-4, 1998, San Jose, CA.
• Salutation Technical Committee Meeting, February 24-25, 1998, Sharp Corporations, Osaka, Japan. Contact Fumiyo Shimizu (Salutation TC Editor, [email protected])
• Salutation Birds-of-a-Feather Meetings, April 2-3, 1998, Atlanta. Contact Bob Pecora, ([email protected])
• Documentation '97 West, Exposition and The Document Software Conference, Salutation Panel, March 12, 1998, 10:30-12:00, Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA.