Messaging Merger

Integration of Enterprise Fax & E-mail Systems

by Jeffrey Morrison, Siren Software

Look at any business card today and you are very likely to see two relatively new ways to reach an individual: by fax and e-mail. Contacting people via the traditional methods of telephone and postal mail is being challenged in popularity by what is commonly called an electronic message. And messaging is arguably becoming the hottest topic in computing today as we witness the explosive use of the Internet to reach people around the globe.

What is quietly emerging as a companion form of messaging is the personal use of the existing fax technology to send images to the 30 million fax machines around the world. Supplementing these fax machines is the use of a fax modem and personal software which turns ordinary telephone lines into a transport system for fax messages. Whereas e-mail has been predominantly textual messages, the fax message is better suited for an image of multiple types of document objects, including graphics, charts, tables and formatted text. Faxing answers to the question of how one can reach another quickly when an Internet connection is not available.

Many people today view the two technologies, fax and e-mail, as inseparable transports of electronic messages. Users are demanding the greatest degree of flexibility in communicating with associates, customers and partners. This will bring the worlds of e-mail and fax closer together in the years ahead. Eventually, all computing devices, whether they are mobile or stationary, will be equipped with user agents designed to access and exchange information over both message transports.

Individuality of Fax and E-mail Technologies

Fax and e-mail are really quite different message transport technologies. When a message compose "send" button is pushed on an e-mail or fax user agent, very different events are triggered. In the case of e-mail, what happens next is:

The information is "published" in a format that follows the protocol of the e-mail system. An envelope is created for transportation, with the destination address, the return address and the contents packaged according to the rules of the e-mail system. Most systems ensure that anything transported is in the form of simple ASCII (7 bit) text to ensure the safety of the message through often unfriendly e-mail gateways and transports.
The e-mail message is sent to a local agent that delivers it to the messaging transport service, often the Internet. The routing of the message at this point is handled automatically by the addressing scheme and network operating system.
The transport system delivers the e-mail message to the recipient's delivery agent which has the ability to lookup e-mail addresses and deliver to the appropriate mail box.
The recipient, who may not have the same e-mail system or user agent, reads the message in the best way possible. Information that was encoded at the sender's side to ensure its safety must now be decoded so that it is readable in the recipient's environment. This is often futile when sent between different e-mail systems.

Upon pressing "send" on the fax user agent, the message is also packaged for sending by first capturing the important addressing information. There are several important distinctions for a fax message:

The addressing information is captured and processed in a cover page, or the first page of the fax message. The cover page holds the addressing information much like the envelope in an e-mail system. The "To:" field is used to designate the recipient on the cover page. The "Fax number:" field is read to begin dialing the recipient's fax machine.
The document is processed into an image acceptable for faxing, known as TIFF/F. This is the format that fax machines understand.
The recipient receives a printout on his fax machine. The printout is a series of bits, or dark marks on the paper, that represents the image of the original document.
The data on the fax, including the address information on the cover page, is unable to be read by the receiving machine since the bit marks on the page are not in intelligible form. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) products are available that can be used to turn the image into machine-readable ASCII text. Without this automatic recognition, an administrator must look at the cover page to identify the recipient and route it accordingly.

When both fax and e-mail technologies are available, users have the greatest flexibility in messaging. When urgency is not important, the exchange of information through the Internet is often the first choice. But when the message recipient is not connected to the Internet, the message sender can select one (or many) of the 30 million printers in the world--printers using thermal paper known as fax machines.

Integration of Fax and E-mail Tools

Some LAN-based e-mail systems have provided users with fax services for some time, either through third-party gateway products or products of their own. These components allow users to send a fax that looks just like an e-mail message. Some even provide for the capture of addressing information for populating a cover page at the server. But users often want to do more than fax simple text messages.

The popularity of single-user fax software products in recent years has raised the bar of performance and features of computer faxing. Now from the same desktop devices that serves their e-mail, users want to have the following network fax capabilities:

Full cover page editor, complete with graphical editing tools;
Sample and templates with pre-built logos and graphics;
Drag and drop file attachments for faxing with the cover page;
An address book for storing fax numbers and other useful information;
In-bound fax receiving capability;
A folder manager for storing faxes;
Viewers for reading faxes and thumbnail sketch viewers for scanning and previewing a number of faxes.

Common Sets of Services and Tools

A quick review of the list of features above reveals that there are a number of common services and tools between user's existing e-mail system and their preferred fax application. These common tools can cause users to have duplicative efforts and provide a source for confusion. On the other hand these common tools offer an opportunity to make better use of existing resources and combine the power of multiple technologies.

Common Address Books

Many of today's software products come with their own address book module to enhance the product's capabilities. Consequently, one can find themselves with one for their daily planner, their personal information manager (PIM), their e-mail user agent, their fax product, their contact management program and their organizational calendaring and scheduling application. Each address generally has its own format and they are usually incompatible.

Even if the data formats of each address book were the same, the problem of database synchronization is a headache. Changes in one address book must be repeated in the others. Since that is very time consuming and difficult in the harried pace in which we work, the data is often out of synch. Corporations already have this very problem between disparate e-mail systems, each with its own addressing scheme.

An integrated fax and e-mail system should provide users with one common address book accessible from either application. In fact, the address book should provide a message-initiation capability that allows users to mark a name for sending a message and differentiating each as to which type of message will be sent. Now when sending a message to multiple parties, some of whom are not on the Internet or the local e-mail network, individuals can send their message as a fax.

Common Folder Manager

Messages come in, messages go out. E-mail users love to store copies of the messages they receive. The concept popular today is that of folders. Folders are logical groups of messages stored together, such as all those received from your boss. People threat fax messages the same way: they wish to save them for later use and group them in folders.

Often users get so accustomed to saving messages to folders that the management of the folders becomes a problem. Thus the need for a folder manager. At a minimum, the folder manager for fax messages should have the same look and feel as the folder manager for e-mail. But now users are asking why the folder manager cannot be the same for both types of messages. The answer is that it can be!

Single In-box for All Message Types

There is much discussion on the subject of the single in-box for messages. These messages are of all types: fax, e-mail, voice and soon video. Much like the forces pushing for a common address book, users are demanding the creation of a single in-box for messages. Got a new voice mail message on your phone system? A reference should be simultaneously sent to the message in-box on your computing device alerting you to its existence. A click should activate this message's agent for delivery. The same should be true for the other types of messages.

What is keeping this from happening? Nothing really. The question rests on how quickly disparate technologies from multiple vendors can be integrated as one. The in-box itself can be nothing more than an index of message headers. (Today it is often the headers plus the message body, with objects attached in some form of encoded encapsulation). The index points to the database on which the particular message resides. Faxes might reside on a separate fax server, video on a video server. Voice messages might reside on the message switch provide by the telephony vendor. And of course, e-mail resides on the mail message server.

The capability of such a system exists today. The Internet's MIME specification provides an excellent foundation for such a system. MIME describes a message Content-Type called Message/External-body that has a powerful capability. The message index is a set of Internet-style (RFC-822) e-mail messages with MIME external references. The references are to the various objects stored in their own message store. As users trigger the message from the in-box, the external reference sends a request to the appropriate server to retrieve the object and send it to the user's computing device. The object could be a voice message, a video clip, a fax or a simple e-mail message with a multimedia document attached.

It is also possible to automate the in-bound message distribution to this single in-box. Once the message type arrives in its temporary message store, a lookup function can determine the address of the recipient. With fax, this must be done via OCR or by using a unique direct in-ward dialing (DID) fax number for each individual. Upon performing the lookup of the routing address, the message is sent to the single in-box as an e-mail message with the reference to the storage location of the object. With the recent advances in message application programming interfaces (APIs) such as the Microsoft API (MAPI) and the Vendor Independent Messaging (VIM), the hand-off to the mail system is greatly simplified for software engineers.

Interaction Between Fax and E-mail Systems

Even without the tight integration described, the e-mail and fax systems can use each other for greater functionality. Users of a network fax product, like the client-server products beginning to emerge in the market, want to know the outcome of their fax jobs. Many products provide a real-time status-checking window to the server but often the actual result must only be noted or recorded. In this environment, an e-mail confirmation notice of the outcome of the fax job is an important record that the fax did (or did not) reach its destination fax machine.

Fax servers can also be configured to alert users and administrators to problems with any of the fax system components. Should a fax telephone line be down, a modem broken or the whole server malfunctioning, an e-mail message to the people affected is a timely notification of the problem. If a more instantaneous alert is required, the e-mail message can trigger a paging device to notify the people necessary.

With all this integration of the fax and e-mail systems it is only as matter of time for the convergence of the two user interfaces into one. As pointed out earlier, today users can send mail messages to fax servers for faxing. And an e-mail message can ship a fax image as an attachment (TIFF/F) to a remote location on the Internet. But why not merge the two functions into one user agent?

This proposed universal user agent, capable of faxing to some and mailing to others, is closer than you think. With the common folder manager, the common address book, the MIME standard for handling attachments and enclosures in e-mail, the foundation is there. The user agent must be smart enough to route the message to the right sending component: the e-mail transport engine for mail and the fax scheduler and queuing server for faxing. Objects in the e-mail would be encoded using MIME and rasterized into a TIFF/F image for faxing.

What You Can Expect in the Months Ahead

The integration of e-mail, fax and other message types is at our doorsteps today. Industry standards such as SMTP/MIME (for Internet mail and enclosures), MAPI, VIM, TAPI (Microsoft's Telephony API) and TSAPI (AT&T's Telephony Services API) are all helping to bring the pieces together. The telephony industry has been notoriously slow to open up their environments for this type of integration, so voice and video may lag behind. But the integration of fax and e-mail is here today and available from a number of vendors. The single in-box and the universal user agent for fax and e-mail will be appearing from these vendors in short order. This will be an important advance for distributed client-server computing in large organizations aggressively searching for productivity gains to improve performance. Don't be left behind!