The Impact of Salutation on Tomorrow's Fax Applications

The Salutation Consortium held its first technical focus session earlier this month. Called "The Impact of Salutation on Tomorrow's Fax Applications," participants in the two-day workshop heard manufacturers of fax devices, fax servers, and multi-function devices detail progress in applying Salutation technology to distributed printing, image capture and transmission, and Internet fax.

Twenty-three attendees representing 16 companies saw demonstrations of Salutation products and development tools from IBM Japan, Mita, Muratec, STS Consulting, LLC, and XtraWorX, LLC. Keynote speaker was Pete Davidson, Davidson Consulting, affiliated with International Data Corp. and Buyer's Laboratory. Davidson, editor and publisher of FaxWire, said, "There is a definite need for Salutation and nothing else is in this space. Salutation is a good answer for solving some very real needs. Without Salutation there will be less market for vendors to share."

In addition to presentations and breakout discussion sessions, attendees visited the Salutation demo center to see Salutation hardware and software products from IBM Japan, Mita, and Muratec demonstrate an integrated office system based on Lotus Notes.

Edgar M. Tompkins, Mita marketing manager for the Integrated Document Imaging Division briefed attendees on Mita's Salutation fax machines now available in Japan. "Salutation enables users to fax directly to an email address, without intermediate scanning steps. A recipient can retrieve an image via email from a remote location. Customers are pleased with their ability to support mobile workers with convenient, secure access to information," said Tompkins. The Mita fax is marketed in conjunction with IBM Japan's Salutation extensions to the Lotus Notes office system. According to Tompkins, the company is looking to expand the platforms supported and plans to launch the product in the US.

The Muratec fax with Salutation, demonstrated to workshop participants, is also marketed in Japan with NuOffice, the IBM Japan Salutation extensions to Lotus Notes. NuOffice provides a complete office system for large customer sites with many mobile or telecommuting users. The Salutation extensions to Lotus Notes enable users to send fax and e-mail messages to the device which affords the most convenience for the recipient.

Salutation development tools demonstrated were XtraWorX Port of Entry and STS Consulting's Salutation API Driver, both now in beta test. Port of Entry bridges legacy desktops and peripherals to Salutation and presents a consistent access format for network peripherals. The API Driver graphically builds API calls on Windows, teaches programmers the Salutation interface, and demonstrates API call attributes and responses.

Manufacturers of fax server products led discussions about the need for security and standards in the network environment. The attendees noted that Salutation is a thin layer which facilitates integration with existing standards and delivers additional user capabilities. Global Village Communication director of engineering Steve Urvan said, "We're interested in how the Salutation vision of standardized APIs for capability discovery could extend the potential for our LAN fax server."

In each issue, this section of the Salutation Newsletter highlights 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.

Just The Fax

Leslie needs to get some information to Dick ASAP! This is Leslie's usual mode; everything's left to the last minute. She relies on her fax machine for her emergency transmissions. But faxing doesn't always work for her. Although her fax transmissions are received perfectly by Dick's fax machine, sometimes the messages are picked up by the wrong person, and therefore, are not delivered promptly. Then, there are times when Dick is traveling; his fax machine doesn't travel with him, so Leslie's messages just pile up. Leslie has invented a three step process to ensure her messages are received -- 1. She calls Dick to tell him a fax is coming, 2. She sends the fax, then 3. She calls Dick again to see if he has received the fax. Good plan, but her cost of delivery just went up by a factor of three -- three phone calls instead of one.

But Dick has just installed a Salutation Fax Machine. This device supports receipt notification, inbound routing, and read confirmation. Now when Leslie sends her emergency document, it is received and held by the fax machine until Dick logs in. It doesn't matter where Dick is -- in his office, at home or on the road. The Salutation Fax machine recognizes his user ID and password, then reports to him about any faxes received since he last logged in. Dick can then direct the fax machine to route the messages it is storing to his location. This includes sending to his LAN printer at the office, to his personal printer at home, or to his lap top while he is on the road. Since the fax machine has Salutation, it is able to detect the capabilities of the devices at the various locations and reformat the stored faxes accordingly. There is even a feature that will perform a text-to-speech transform, if it detects that Dick is calling in from a phone. After Dick retrieves his messages, the Salutation enabled fax machine will provide a read confirmation to the sender of the original fax as a call-back fax to the originating device's phone number.

All this technology is too much for Leslie to comprehend. But she knows that faxing is once again a one step process, with Dick receiving her messages wherever he is, and she gets a confirmation message when he has read it.

Salutation behind the scenes

The final 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.

We have been reviewing 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. Up to this point, we have reviewed the first nine trends:

1. Industrial Society to Information Society

2. Forced Technology to HighTech/High

3. National Economy to World Economy

4. Short Term to Long Term

5. Centralization to Decentralization

6. Institutional Help to Self-Help

7. Representative to Participatory Democracy

8. Hierarchies to Networking

9. North to South

In this final installment, we will look at the last trend, Either/Or to Multiple Option.

The Trend: This trend focused on the movement away from conformity towards freedom of choice. It was suggested that individuals would not be bound by political, religious or other doctrine, but would formulate opinion and take action based on readily available information.

Today: I view this as the mega-megatrend. The information society and high-tech/high-touch information appliances provide us with access to the world in decentralized, self-help communities, allowing us to participate in decision making networks from where we choose to live and work. As a result of the trends predicted by Naisbitt and Aburdene, we now have greater choices of where to live, where to work, how to vote and how to invest, all based on the availability of and easy access to information.

Summary: So what's the score? It looks like Naisbitt and Aburdene did very well in their predictions. But challenges remain. As noted, the abundance of information is not the problem, managing access to it and using it to our advantage -- creating knowledge -- remains the key. High priority requirements for the information technologists are:

- Filters: preprocessing information to provide us with only what we need, when we need it and in a form we can use. Salutation enabled applications can determine the capabilities of target devices, allowing for the filtering of information to meet the capabilities of the device.

- Agents: taking action on information without our intervention. Salutation enabled applications can find devices with specific capabilities, and route information through transform services, work flow processes, or other services as may be required, all without the intervention of the user. Salutation fax devices also support receipt notification and read confirmation of fax messages.

Mita Salutation Fax server for Lotus Notes was one of the devices on display at the Salutation Fax Conference held in Atlanta April 2 and 3, 1998. The Mita Fax server consists of a PC connected to the LAN which is running the Fax Server software, and a Mita Fax machine connected to the PC via a serial cable. This product interfaces with IBM's NuOffice, a Salutation Server for Lotus Notes. This configuration provides automatic inbound routing of received Faxes via Notes e-mail, with read confirmation returned to the sender when the recipient opens the e-mail message. These confirmation receipts can be held at the Mita Fax Server and sent as a group, thus reducing connect time and toll charges. The Fax Server can also reduce toll charges by supporting multiple recipient for a single image transmission, if the recipients are all Notes users. Notes can also use the Mita Fax machine as a scanner and printer, using the Salutation protocols to find and activate these devices.

Working Smarter with Salutation and JetSend

by Nancy Cox

At first glance, Salutation and HP's JetSend protocols look like competing technologies. Both protocols enable devices to work smarter by interoperating without user intervention. Salutation and JetSend let you send information from one application or device such as a digital camera or a scanner directly to another application or device such as a copier or fax machine without having to manipulate the format or drivers of the end device. Both are supported by prominent network product manufacturers such as Cisco Systems, Canon and Matsushita.

Although the two protocols have a common goal to increase the intelligence of networked devices, they have implemented their design concepts in different ways. Salutation has a rich discovery ability that lets you launch a broadcast query over the network to find and determine the capabilities of devices that suit your requirements. In contrast, JetSend is a device-to-device content negotiation protocol. Once you have selected the device to perform a print function, for example, two JetSend-enabled devices will connect, negotiate the optimal data types, and then exchange information to print the document. JetSend does not provide the ability to find other JetSend devices through network searches as does Salutation.

JetSend supports the "ad hoc" communication environment, where the user is focused on sending information rather than "printing" from an application. For example, JetSend offers solutions if you have a requirement to ensure that a document is delivered. With JetSend, you can send a color document to a black and white printer, but you may not know that it was not printed in color. JetSend's focus is on communication of content, not on the traditional "printing" model.

On the other hand, with Salutation you determine the capabilities of the device by searching for the one that supports your requirements, or make a sender based decision to use functions lower than you need. With JetSend the mapping of document to function is performed by the receiver, so the receiver determines the quality of the output that they choose to receive.

Salutation was developed by an industry consortium as a device and network independent protocol. JetSend was developed by one prominent vendor, HP, so not all hardware manufacturers will agree on certain tradeoffs. For example, JetSend suggests that all JetSend enabled devices support a minimum of 300x300 pixel resolution. This aligns well with some FAX machines on the market, including HP's but is less than optimal for the large volumes of existing equipment that support 200x200 or less.

Salutation's capability discovery provides benefits in environments with a central directory such as Novell's NDS or Microsoft's Active Directory for NT5. These solutions need to know what is connected to the network so that the devices can be managed by the administration software. According to Jim Hammons, Alliances Programs Manager, HP, in addition to working with Salutation, HP is committed to making any changes the market requires to take advantage of directory services as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).

Members of the Salutation Consortium, including HP, recognized that to include JetSend in Salutation would extend the reach of both protocols and provide dramatic benefits including increased functionality and ease of use. As a result, HP and the Salutation Consortium have launched two initiatives. The first will identify JetSend technology as an attribute of current Salutation Functional Units. A "Functional Unit" identifies a capability such as printing regardless of the device providing the function. A copier, for example, may have a printer functional unit. This approach allows a Salutation user querying the network for a printer or fax machine to include JetSend-enabled devices in the search.

The second initiative investigates the creation of a JetSend Functional Unit. This will allow Salutation users querying the network to locate all JetSend-enabled devices, including printers, fax machines, PCs or copiers. JetSend would then allow the devices themselves to negotiate the best way to share information. This integrated approach lets you discover and select devices that are JetSend enabled.

JetSend has made significant progress in two key areas that Salutation will be able to leverage; JetSend Lite Protocol and infrared capabilities. Currently, the Salutation specification and implementations define an architecture that supports BOTH 'client' and 'server' products. But there are devices that might want to work only as a server (digital camera) or client (palmtop). A subset of the Salutation Architecture to address these devices would enable a lighter weight implementation. HP predicts that JetSend Lite will only require 40K to 50K of memory.

Although infrared is an industry standard interface, it lacks the ability to determine what is on the other end of the 'light beam'. JetSend, which already supports infrared, can build interoperability between different devices. Salutation, which specifies infrared, but lacks an infrared implementation, can give a more detailed capabilities exchange allowing for better device modeling.

HP is also working on adding more devices and supporting more network protocols and operating systems as well as the capability to let JetSend enabled devices communicate through a corporate firewall.

What is the future of these two protocols? According to Barry Tepper, Sr. Consultant for Converging Digital Peripherals with CAP Ventures, ideally, both protocols should be merged into one that is completely open and free of charge to the vendors. "Vendors shouldn't have to support both protocols in the same machine." Merging the two protocols would provide interoperability with all devices similar to the Group III standard for fax machines. "Fax's brilliance is that it always works."

In contrast, Jim Hammons confirms that JetSend is not in the broadcast query market and so would not compete with Salutation. He recommends that vendors continue to support both protocols, where appropriate, for the value added functionality that their combination provides. "The complementary relationship of Salutation and JetSend gives users on the network the mutual benefits of smarter devices and a much easier usage model. We look forward to continued work with the Salutation Consortium to better meet the needs of users of both technologies."

Reprinted with permission from the Feb. 3, 1998 edition of the Mercury News, by DAN GILLMOR, Technology Columnist

HOW'S this for blunt: "You're all wrong, and this industry is all wrong, and it's time for a change."

The speaker was Don Norman, director of the design center at Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Consumer Products Group, and he talking to hundreds of technology-industry executives and engineers at the annual Demo conference here.

Some in the crowd looked perplexed. Some shook their heads in disagreement. And some actually applauded.

Norman was talking about the industry's unpleasant truth: The personal computer is too complicated and, as he put it, ``no bullet will fix it.'' Only before a crowd like this, where the cutting edge is considered normal and where many people actually understand the enigmatic error messages that so frequently pop up on our screens, could there have been any serious disagreement.

Now, the personal computer is not a bad device. It's actually quite wonderful, given the wide variety of tasks we expect it to accomplish And for some purposes, the PC remains the tool of choice.

Norman bluntly told this PC-centric crowd what normal consumers have implicitly known for years. What people really want are information appliances, devices that work reliably and as designed when we take them out of the box.

Any digital wristwatch fits this category. So does a calculator. But two enormous forces -- constantly speedier and smaller chips, plus the communications lingua franca of Internet standards -- have changed the landscape.

In recent times, Demo (http://www.demo.com) has been the launch venue for several products that fit this description. Most notable, two years ago, was the PalmPilot, a personal-information manager that is still the market leader in its breed of handheld devices.

The Pilot was a breakthrough because Palm Computing, now part of 3Com, understood what it was supposed to be: a peripheral device that did a few things very well and reliably, and in a case that fit into

your pocket. It also connected -- this was crucial -- to PCs to exchange and synchronize information.

Demo 1998 brought some evidence that at least a few companies understand the infinitely greater possibilities of information appliances. In a number of technology demonstrations -- actual products won't arrive for a while -- the possibility emerged that consumers could soon begin to see the kinds of devices that we really want.

Data General's advanced development group is demonstrating what looks like a practical way to hook up a wide variety of info devices to the Internet and each other. The device, with the ungainly name of ThiiN Line Network Utility Box (http://www.thin.com), is attached on one side to an Internet connection -- via a regular phone line, ISDN, cable modem or whatever. It communicates with the info devices in the home (or small office) via wireless radio. The company emphasized the ability to share Internet connections among the various devices, but an equally interesting ability is the ability to share files and data among the devices themselves.

Consider the possibilities this kind of service could spawn. I don't particularly want a PC in my kitchen, but I wouldn't mind a simple touch-screen appliance from which I could retrieve recipes stored on a PC or Internet site, assuming it was cheap enough, or a combination device that would let me use a stylus to make notes and shopping lists, with the latter automatically zapped into the credit card-size device I carry in my wallet. (What devices would you like to see?)

Data General says its box will sell from $500 to $1,500, depending on configuration, and the device hookups for about $20 each. That's too expensive right now for normal consumers, but the Moore's Law will help fix that before long.

Sun Microsystems showed off what it calls a ``Persona'' info appliance (http://www.sun.com), designed to be a central resource for all of your messaging -- from voice mail to e-mail to faxes. Use phone to retrieve your messages, and a data-to-voice translator reads back the sender and subject of an e-mail, not just voice mail. Or use a Web browser to check your multimedia in-box. And so on.

Here's another info appliance I might like to own. The A.T. Cross pen folks and IBM have teamed up on the CrossPad (http://www.cross-pcg.com), marrying a legal pad, pen and computer into a device that lets you take notes by hand and send them into a computer. The device learns your handwriting, and can hold about 50 pages of notes. The early version I saw at Demo seemed a bit clunky, but I'm counting on Moore's Law here, too, to give engineers the power they need to solve the problems.

One industry, probably more so than any other, has already taken the information appliance to heart. That's the music industry, where computers are at the heart of a slew of devices that have utterly transformed the field, from synthesizers to mixers to recorders and much more. I used to play music for a living. You won't be surprised, then, to know that I find this gear irresistible beyond its appeal as information appliances. I'll tell you more about music technology in an upcoming column.

Hewlett-Packard's Norman, whose common sense was the highlight of the first day of this year's Demo, credited the music business for its adoption of the appliance model. I hope the tech industry -- or, more likely if the tech crowd keeps missing the point, the consumer products industry -- takes his advice seriously.

Our kitchens are full of electric motors, he pointed out. But when we use a blender we don't pause to reflect on the fact that it contains an electric motor. ``The name is the task,'' Norman said.

Words to the wise; a warning to the complacent.

Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. Contact Dan at the Mercury News, 750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, Calif. 95190 or via e-mail: [email protected].

Salutation Presentation at IrDA meeting, April 15, 1998 in Osaka, Japan

Salutation Consortium Board of Directors Meeting; April 21 in Tokyo, Japan (Firm)

Salutation Architecture Presentation at TR29.1 (Protocol) meeting, Tuesday May 5, in Atlanta (Tentative)

Salutation Presentations at AIIM'98 Exhibitors Hall (Fujitsu Booth) May 12-14, 1998; Anaheim Convention Center, 800 West Katella Avenue, Anaheim, CA (Tentative)