Messaging Integration: Better Connections For Fax, Voice and E-Mail Messages

by James Rafferty, Human Communications

In the previous articles in this series, we have explored different trends in messaging integration. We have looked at some of the emerging trends where Internet based technologies promise to forge new links between different messaging technologies. Traditionally, voice, fax and e-mail have been hugely popular ways to communicate, but the products we have used for these different types of communication have been largely independent of each other.

In order to wrest some order out of this potential chaos, many companies have felt compelled to ask a single vendor to integrate the enterprises' different types of messaging. The limitation of this approach lies in the inability to interoperate with products from other vendors or to only do so at a degraded level of performance.

Fortunately, a wide range of open standards are now emerging to fill the breach and expand the number of options available for customers who want to gain improved performance from their messaging infrastructure and provide more sophisticated and automated handling of inbound and outbound messages. Let's be clear. The new standards that may permit a more seamless integration of different messaging types and systems are not a panacea. Many companies may be content to live with the status quo of having the different messaging methods remain independent, where faxes will mostly be sent and received from fax machines, where voice messages reside on a voice mail system which has no connections to other internal or external systems and e-mail predominately consists of text messages. A major disadvantage of having these messaging approaches remain unconnected in this manner is that this forces the company to cope with three separate user interfaces. Users are likely to learn just enough about each to do the basics, or may find one of the methods confusing and refuse to use it altogether. In turn, this approach also requires separate administrative and support functions, and related higher overhead costs.

When considering how to take advantage of new messaging and connectivity technologies and standards, a somewhat cautious, incremental approach is likely to be less traumatic for an organization than attempting to force radical changes in the way people work by totally pulling the plug on existing methods. Indeed, some of the most useful new standards are enabling vendors to offer connections between existing communication methods, so that companies can continue to take advantage of their existing investments in the current messaging infrastructure, while gaining the benefit of new features and additional integration. In the remainder of the article, we will look at some current business problems that could benefit from the implementation of better messaging integration and then review how an organization can incorporate products which use new open standards to help solve these problems.

Integration Problems and Solutions

1. How can facsimile messages be routed directly to an end user's e-mail in-box?
   Fax machines provide a very simple way to send printed documents which also include handwriting and other annotations. The outstanding ease of use for fax senders has been a key reason for the continuing popularity of fax machines among business users. Unfortunately, fax machines do not offer the same ease of use for the recipients of fax messages, since fax machines are typically shared among many users, thus creating the need to deliver a fax message to the intended final recipient once it has been received. Local Area Network (LAN) fax servers have permitted the sharing of fax resources among multiple users, but a large number of the incoming faxes to a LAN-fax server are still manually routed. The EMA computer facsimile committee and its predecessor organization the International Computer Facsimile Association recognized this problem and worked with the US and international standards committees to devise the "subaddress" as a standards based solution to this problem. The subaddress concept is simple; it is an addition to the Group 3 facsimile protocol which permits a fax extension (e.g., 1234) to be assigned to each user on a network. Virtually all of today's LAN fax servers can then take this subaddress, convert it into an e-mail address and package the incoming fax message to be routed automatically to a user's desktop e-mail software. A large number of fax machine and LAN fax software companies are supporting the use of the subaddress and the related ITU-T "recommendation" T.33, so that companies can now begin to gradually update their fax devices (fax machines and LAN-fax servers) to gain the productivity benefits of automatic inbound routing of faxes.

2. What are the prospects for having a single client software package that can be used for most or all messaging operations?
   Historically, each type of messaging has required the use of a dedicated client software package, where each package has its own user interface. The most popular e-mail and fax software packages have all kinds of features and learning to take full advantage of all of the features is a time consuming exercise that most users will resist. The situation for voice messages has been even worse, since most voice mail systems have only been accessible from a telephone handset and users are forced to use a cryptic set of punched keypad codes to retrieve messages and can typically only retrieve them in the order which they were received. There are vendors who have tried some combination of e-mail, fax and voice messaging in one software client, but this often has required being locked into one vendor's hardware and software solutions. However, a universal standards based client is emerging.

   Browser software was originally used only for retrieving information from the World Wide Web, but the popularity and ease of use of this interface has caused its use to be expanded for many different applications. More recent versions of browsers enable e-mail to be retrieved directly via the browser or by accessing a separate e-mail client without leaving the browser software.

   In a novel twist, some LAN-fax server companies have added a layer of software which permits the users to interact directly with the LAN-Fax server using standard web browser software. These products permit users to send faxes and view received faxes directly from the browser. We are not aware of any applications yet which permit users to retrieve their voice messages using a browser, but the emerging standards being developed by EMA's Voice Profile for Internet Mail (VPIM) work group are now being targeted toward use of the desktop, so it only seems a matter of time before users will also be able to manage voice mail messages using a browser if they elect to do so.

   There is also a strong trend toward using web browsers as the client that can be used by administrators to manage the various elements of a network, which can include e-mail servers and fax servers. The standards that enable this interaction are the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) and the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). These standards are being supplemented now by the use of the Java programming language to add additional flexibility and sophistication to web based applications. The browser has emerged as a powerful software metaphor and new related standards work is being done in both the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to continue to improve and extend both HTTP and HTML.

   Web browsers may have some limitations in terms of performance and features when compared to a dedicated e-mail, fax or voice mail software client, but most users are now very comfortable using browser software, so this is likely to reduce training requirements and costs. Browsers are also an outstanding choice for conducting remote business once workers leave the office, due to the near universal availability of browser software and Internet access both within and outside of the United States.

3. Is there any progress toward having standard and widely accepted data formats for voice and fax?
   One of the obstacles to using browsers or e-mail clients to view faxes or listen to voice mail messages has been the number of different formats that have been used by different vendor systems for handling voice and fax. However, this situation is rapidly changing. The Internet fax work group of the Internet Engineering Task Force is very close to agreeing on a stable definition for use of the Tagged File Image Format (TIFF) for facsimile. TIFF has been used for storing fax images on computers for many years, but there has never been a standard definition for the TIFF-F format, so vendors have created many incompatible flavors of TIFF-F. The IETF plans to release a TIFF-F definition as an informational RFC, so that there will be a universally accessible definition of TIFF-F. TIFF-F defines how to store fax images using the most common Group 3 facsimile compression methods for black and white images. The work group is also working on an extended version of TIFF (TIFFPLUS) which will support new advanced ITU-T fax compression methods such as Joint Bitonal Image Group (JBIG) for black and white images, Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and JBIG for color images and a new mixed raster page method for pages which contain both color images and text.

   Similar progress is being made in the area of voice formats. VPIM is submitting a standard definition of a 32KB Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation (ADPCM) compressed voice format to the IETF and is exploring the standardization of at least one more method for use in desktop applications.

   Both the Internet fax and VPIM groups are taking advantage of the strong computer and telecommunications industry movement toward using the MIME (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extension) classification method for registering standard media formats.

4. Will it be possible to use current fax machines to send or receive fax documents over the Internet or Intranets?
   The answer to this question to date has been negative, but this situation is expected to change in 1998. Two of the driving forces for standardizing methods of sending fax messages over the Internet are (1) To devise a way to enable direct communication between e-mail and facsimile users, and (2) To be able to use the Internet or Intranets as "telephone replacement" networks. The focus of Internet fax standards activities has been to enable successful point to point communication of fax messages over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. However, several vendors are working on the necessary "onramps" and "offramps" which will let traditional Group 3 fax machines join the Internet fax party. There are also several companies working on "black boxes" which could be attached to a current Group 3 fax device and provide connectivity to an Internet Service Provider's (ISP) Group 3 fax onramp service. A user could dial a fax phone number in the usual way and then the black box will store the destination fax telephone number and do automatic dialing of an ISP's Internet fax service. A fax gateway at the ISP would then be able to accept a fax message being sent via the Group 3 facsimile protocol and re-package the incoming fax pages as a standard TIFF-F or TIFFPLUS file that will become an e-mail attachment. Then, the destination fax phone number will be encoded as part of the e-mail address, so that the fax message may be routed on the Internet using the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) and sent to an "offramp," where a local or inexpensive long distance fax call can be placed by the offramp to send the fax message to its final destination. There are also plans to have real-time fax transmission over IP networks, so that some of the Internet fax onramps and offramps will first attempt real-time transmission to remote Group 3 fax devices and then fall back, if required, into a store and forward mode.

Summary
The impact of the Internet and related technologies is a massive wave whose effects are still emerging. There are also other standards based technologies that will have a positive impact for customers who wish to make better integration of disparate messaging systems a key goal of their organization's messaging strategy. A key benefit for customers will be the availability of many new options for achieving goals of messaging integration. In this article, we looked at four different situations where open standards will make new productivity options possible. Fax routing can enable fax recipients to receive their fax messages in a timely way, while greatly reducing the need for manual routing and delivery of incoming faxes. The emergence of the web browser as a universal messaging client is an emerging trend that can greatly enhance the productivity of workers in the office and provide excellent remote access to messages when outside the office from any point in the world that supports Internet access. The emergence of MIME as the method for encoding and transporting multi-media content such as fax and voice will greatly increase the likelihood that application software will be able to successfully decode multi-media attachments to e-mail or as stored on web sites. Finally, the work on Internet fax standards and related product and service developments for Internet onramps and offramps will provide ways for traditional Group 3 fax and e-mail users to communicate with each other via the Internet or Intranets, thus greatly expanding the reach of the fax and e-mail networks.