You received an interoffice e-mail saying your company has purchased some new equipment. Ricoh Aficio 450 digital imaging devices have been located on the 5^th and 7^th floors, and Muratec F-120 fax servers have been installed on the 3^rd and 5^th and 9^th floors. Other products from Canon are to be delivered shortly.

"Just great," you think. "Now I'll have to wait for the IT department to come to my office and load the device drivers for these new devices. That will take weeks!"

But then you notice something strange in your Lotus Notes electronic in-basket. It says it's a FAX from one of your suppliers. "A Fax in your in-basket? That's new!" you say under your breath. "How did that get there?" Normally, you pick up your faxes at the FAX machine out by the Administrative Assistant's work area.

You click on the in-basket entry and an image document opens, showing the FAX message.

"Hmmm. You can forward e-mail, do you think you can forward this new FAX message?" you think to yourself. You give it a try. You forward the fax-note to Doris in the office next to yours. Off it goes. Then you wander over to her office to see if it arrives.

Sure enough, your work mate gets the FAX message you forwarded. "How'd that happen?" you ask.

Doris tells you that your company has installed NuOffice for Lotus Notes, which supports the Salutation Architecture functions of receipt notification, inbound routing, and read confirmation for all inbound fax information. "Coupled with the Muratec F-120," Doris says, "it doesn’t matter if you are at the office, at home, or on the road. NuOffice recognizes your user ID and password when you log-in, then notifies you of any faxes received since you were last on-line.

"As you already discovered", she continues, "you can direct NuOffice to route the messages to any e-mail location. You can also route them to a LAN printer at the office, or to your personal printer at home. After you retrieves your messages, NuOffice will provide a read confirmation to the sender via callback to the originating fax machine."

"What will they think of next!" you exclaim.

"Well," says Doris, "you can already print to those new Ricoh devices."

"But they haven't been installed on my machine yet," you note, "and I don't know how to do it."

"No need to 'worry-up and wait'," says Doris. "NuOffice has a feature that will automatically install the Ricoh drivers you need so you can begin working right away. Here, I'll show you."

Doris elects to print the FAX you forwarded her. The Note's printer selection menu appears. There are two new selection options, one for each of the new Ricoh Aficio devices. Doris selects the device that is on your floor and printing begins.

You are amazed. But Doris says there is more. She shows you how you can use the Notes interface to determine the features that are installed on the Ricoh machine. Doris says that the Salutation Architecture that forms the basis for the NuOffice product allows you to view the capabilities of devices connected to the corporate network. When the new Salutation-enabled Canon products are installed, you can use this same technique to see what features they offer. It's like having an on-line brochure advertising the machine's functions.

"Anything else I can help you with?" she asks.

"No, that's great!" you say to her. But, to yourself you say, "Yeah, how did you find out about this before I did?"