NO LONGER A LUXURY, BUT A NECESSITY

As dusk begins to settle on the 20th century, global business continues to experience a sea of change every bit as significant as the industrial revolution that occurred some 200 years ago. The advent of computer technology has spawned a true global marketplace where information is regarded as a commodity and technology is considered the cornerstone of the organization. The result is a sprawling, decentralized business climate where information flows thousands of miles at the flick of a keystroke and complex business transactions are discussed, executed, and paid for instantaneously, even if the two parties are continents apart.

But in a world where Buicks are designed in Seattle, built in Singapore and sold in South America, it's no secret that budget conscious executives are throwing nickels around like manhole covers. Corporations are cutting back and the heat is on for MIS directors to use technology to alleviate the higher costs of doing business today and to deploy computer resources in a way that assures an organization's competitive advantage.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more evident than in the AS/400 environment. One of the primary challenges for AS/400 managers is to ratify budget decisions with the escalating costs of transmitting critical corporate information across local, regional, national and international boundaries. Buried under mountains of invoices, purchase orders, sales orders and quotes, and mass marketing materials, many high-tech managers are meeting this challenge by choosing technologies that enable PC and AS/400 fax operations to be centralized under one roof. The technology of choice for these managers? The AS/400 fax server.

The AS/400 fax server represents the integration of fax and computing technologies. With AS/400 Fax, users can create, send, receive, and manage faxes directly from the AS/400. According to BIS Strategic Decisions, a Norwell, MA-based market researcher, 36,000 fax servers were shipped in 1993, which is more than double that of 1991. By 1997, this figure is expected to reach 379,000 units.

WHY AS/400 FAX?

As with any new technology, regardless of the promise and potential, it's the savvy technical manager who examines the likely return on investment before cutting a check. After all, in business, time is money. AS/400 Fax pays for itself quickly, often within 90 days. It cuts overhead, speeds communications, and increases productivity, and can often mean the difference between recording your annual ledger in black ink rather than red.

With AS/400 Fax, there are four primary benefits to implementing the technology - all of which share cost savings as a common denominator. The benefits are as follows:

Reduced Hardware Costs

With AS/400 Fax, a company may eliminate most of its existing fax machines and, therefore, the supply and maintenance costs associated with them. By replacing the fax machine with a centralized electronic device that has no moving parts, the cost associated with downtime can also be virtually eliminated. It's important to note, however, that the entire cost of faxing is not eliminated by the use of AS/400 Fax, because most technology vendors charge for software and hardware maintenance. That service charge is more than offset, though, by the reduced number of stand-alone fax machines in the organization.

While stand-alone fax machines still provide value in handling the transmission of items that don't route through the AS/400 - such as magazine articles or hand-written memos or letters - their prominence in office environments, by and large, is redundant given the fact that the majority of items that are faxed by businesses are generated on a computer. Therefore, turning every terminal into a virtual fax machine is significantly less costly than departmental fax machines.

Productivity Enhancements

By the technology's very nature, every terminal or PC attached to the AS/400 is turned into a fax machine. Consequently, the traditional hang-ups associated with standalone fax use - waiting in line to use the machine, making copies of documents to be faxed, undoing paper jams or reloading fax paper, standing around to see if a fax goes through on the first try, or simply waiting in line to fax - are eliminated, replaced with intelligent, on-line software. Often, this process can take 15 minutes or so, wasting valuable company time.

With AS/400 Fax, an individual simply taps a few keystrokes and the documents are safely and quickly on their way to their appointed destination - all in 20 seconds or less. Complete control of the fax process remains in the hands of the creator of a fax.

Off-Hour Phone Savings

Most fax transmissions occur during the day, when employees are on the job and, unfortunately, when the phone companies charge the highest rates. AS/400 Fax can act independently and intelligently by sending faxes after hours when phone rates are less expensive. They will also retry numbers until the transmission is completed and prepare "batch" faxes that are destined for the same fax number by making one - instead of multiple - phone calls. As any phone operator knows, the most expensive part of any phone call is the first minute. With 24-hour-a-day availability and built-in intelligence, savings from AS/400 Faxes are upwards of 40%.

To calculate the savings expected by using AS/400 Fax, an MIS director can examine his or her current phone statement. Simply estimate the percentage of non-priority faxes that could be sent during off hours, and multiply that percentage against the off hour savings offered by the company's phone carrier.

While the total savings from sending faxes during off-hours will depend on the number of local calls versus long distance calls a company makes and the charges associated with the plan, it is not uncommon to save 20% from mid-day phone rates. Subsequently, the annual savings for an average customer who sends 150 faxes per day can result in tens of thousands of dollars in savings in the first year alone.

Reduced Printing and Mailing Costs

The advent of AS/400 Fax has precipitated a decline in the use of pre-printed forms, as well as the envelope and postage costs of mailing the document. Given the high costs of postage and significant labor costs associated with sending mail, this advancement is significant at companies who ship documents through the mail in high volumes. The cost of sending out a single pre-printed form averages about $1 when you include the cost of creating, printing, bursting, folding, stuffing, and mailing the document. Compare that to the 15 cents it costs for overnight faxing via AS/400 Fax, where the document arrives immediately instead of three days.

For a company that prints and mails 100 forms per day, at a processing cost of $1.25 per form, such expenses would result in savings of $125 dollars per day. AS/400 Fax will eliminate most of the paperwork handling expenses, but will also incur telephone costs. Assuming the average phone call is $.15, AS/400 Fax will only result in $15 worth of charges each day, a daily savings of $110, or $26,400 per year!

WHAT IS AS/400 FAX?

The fax machine today is as ubiquitous in the office as the coffee maker or the copy machine. And although it may be the speediest method of transmitting documents, it's by no means the most convenient. Fortunately, like most office technologies, it's maturing rapidly. With AS/400 Fax, the traditional fax has developed into a product that transcends the science of faxing beyond the MIS department down to the end user's terminal.

HOW AS/400 FAX PRODUCTS WORK

All AS/400 Fax products are not created equal, but all of them have one thing in common: the communication between a hardware device, usually attached to the AS/400, and a fax machine. The fax machine may actually be a computer-connected fax machine, but regardless, somewhere in the equation is a hardware device that does the fax communication. That's not to say that the hardware device is necessarily directly attached to the AS/400 either. Some products offer services in which a value-added network, such as AT&T's EasyLink® actually does the physical transmission of the fax. But in all cases, there is a hardware device that connects to the other fax machine.

Fax protocol standards are set by a sub-body of the United Nations called International Telecommunications Unit - Telecommunications Standards Support (ITU-TSS - formerly CCITT). Because this sub-body is part of an international organization, the standard for fax is accepted by most countries in the world, allowing you to send or receive a fax from Singapore without worrying about the local or national phone company compatibility. Hence, the proliferation of fax machines in the world.

Fax transmission is really quite simple, whether it is from a standard fax machine or from a computer-connected fax device such as an AS/400 Fax product. A specialized fax modem dials another fax machine through the public switched network. The receiving fax modem answers the call and then the two modems begin to negotiate an acceptable speed. Group III (with extensions) indicates that the modems will first attempt to transmit at 14,400 BPS, but noise on the line and other problems may cause the two modems to 'train' down to a speed of 9,600 or even 4,800.

Once the negotiating has occurred, the receiving fax machine begins to accept a specialized file type from the sending fax machine, which most often is the Modified Huffman format. The format is actually a compressed file that contains a bunch of dots, in the forms of 1's and 0's. The 1's and 0's tell the receiving fax machine how to re-create the dots once they are received. An algorithm is used with run-length encoding to compress the file and hence speed up the transmission, but the time to receive a fax will depend on not only the amount of black on the sending page, but also on the location of those black dots. In addition, the connection speed and resolution of the fax will also have an impact on the length of the transmission. That's part of the reason why it is virtually impossible to tell someone how long a fax will take to transmit.

At the end of each page of a fax transmission, the fax modems check with each other to ensure that they are still in synch and that the previous page was properly received. The fax standard allows for some errors on the page, but if there are too many, then the two machines agree to end the transmission. At the end of the last page, the receiving machine, having successfully received each page of the transmission, sends a confirmation to the sending fax modem and then ends the call by hanging up.

This is the way that each and every fax transmission works, regardless of whether the fax machines are actually PC's with fax modems or standard stand-alone fax machines. In the case of most AS/400 Fax products, the hardware device that transmits and receives the faxes is either a fax modem itself or has inside of it a fax modem.

IDENTIFYING AS/400 FAX PRODUCTS

There are two types of AS/400 Fax products: those that are processors and others that are modems. The physical transmission process is identical for both types of products, except for the fact that modem products will drain more AS/400 resources to physically send the fax. That's because a modem must hold up the AS/400 communication line during the entire fax transmission process, whereas a fax processor usually cooperatively processes with the AS/400 so that it can act independently without holding up or using any AS/400 resources.

In either case, however, it is much easier for AS/400 Fax products to send faxes than it is to receive them. Sending faxes involves data that the AS/400 is used to working with, namely EBCDIC characters, whereas a received fax involves working with and manipulating a file that is actually an image containing no characters, only dots. The AS/400 is limited in its ability to directly receive and work with images unless it is equipped with the proper hardware, namely attached intelligent workstations (such as the 3489 Image/Fax Display) or personal computers.

When sending faxes, the AS/400 Fax product converts characters into fax format (Modified Huffman), an easy task for any AS/400 Fax product. But when receiving faxes, the information is no longer EBCDIC text, but instead a specialized image. This image, when filed, is sometimes converted to other graphic image types like MODCA in the case of IBM's Fax Support/400 and often times .PCX when dealing with non-IBM fax vendors.

HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE CONSIDERATIONS

Once the AS/400 Fax process is understood, there are several other factors to consider, most notably hardware and software requirements.

Hardware Requirements

Perhaps the most critical factor are the hardware requirements for installing AS/400 Fax. For sending faxes, there are no additional hardware requirements beyond the fax hardware device itself. For receiving faxes, however, MIS directors must consider the effect on their AS/400, which in many cases can be significant.

It's important to remember that received faxes are images, so all the hardware requirements for managing images come into play. Because fax images range from 40K-60K per page, receiving hundreds of faxes per day may require additional storage, or at a minimum, some type of management tool to ensure that the AS/400 does not become overwhelmed with AS/400 faxes. In addition, proper terminals, such as the IBM 3489 Image Fax display, can be used to view faxes.

Some vendors provide integrated software for allowing a fax image to be displayed on a PC that is usually connected to the AS/400 via Client Access/400 (shared folders). Another option is to employ an image-management system such as ImagePlus, but that may be a significantly more expensive alternative for the simple task of viewing and archiving inbound faxes.

Printers are another hardware consideration for receiving faxes. Naturally, companies must have a printer that can support the printing of images. The list of specific printers supported by AS/400 Fax vendors varies, but most support HP LaserJet type printers. IBM Fax Support/400 supports Advanced Function Printing (AFP) - capable Intelligent Printer Data Stream (IPDS) printers, but it can also support HP LaserJet type printers. IBM line printers such as the 4234 are not considered good candidates for printing inbound faxes because a received fax is 100% image, slowing a line printer like the 4234 to a crawl.

Software Requirements

Another critical consideration in employing effective AS/400 fax solutions is software. Taken separately, both inbound and outbound faxing each has its unique requirements. They are as follows:

Inbound Faxing: Although there are myriad hardware requirements for receiving faxes, there are actually fewer software considerations for inbound faxes than there are for creating and controlling outbound faxes.

As the received fax is an image, little can be done to integrate it into an organizations collected business applications, other than implementing into an image management system. Even if an OfficeVision/400 document is faxed from one location to another, it cannot be edited on the receiving AS/400 Fax device or software. Consequently, applications for received faxes are limited to viewing, printing, archiving, forwarding, and purging of the fax. (For more detailed information on these functions, see "Choosing the Right Product").

Outbound Faxing: Software required for the outbound side of the AS/400 Fax is more complex, however, as there are more ways to create faxes. It's important to understand that faxing is really an extension of printing because the receiving fax machine acts as a de facto remote printer to the AS/400 Fax device.

(For more detailed information on sending faxes, see "Choosing the Right Product").

APPLICATION AREAS FOR FAXING

One point worth mentioning is that AS/400 Fax is not just meant to replace today's activity, it's meant to improve operations. While AS/400 Fax can certainly help fax ad hoc items like letters, notes and copies of general business forms, it's really designed to save companies money by streamlining their operations. And one barometer that can be used to measure a given technologies' commercial viability and potential to save money is in the number of workplace applications that can be enhanced through the product.

So, what applications are good candidates for fax automation? The answer is: anything that can be printed from an AS/400 or an attached PC. Taking that point one step further, AS/400 Fax should not be limited to just the applications that the MIS department has time to program in advance. The power and promise of the technology is to enable users to place their personal stamp on fax operations, suggest redefinements and improvements, and save money in the process.

That usually suggests applying a technology - in this case automated fax -in the corporate environment that has the greatest need for it. So far, the most popular application for AS/400 Faxing has been the purchase order. This likely stems from the AS/400's strength in the distribution and manufacturing industries and from the just-in-time philosophy that pervades today's corporate climate. Since purchasing goods drain precious capital, waiting until the last minute to purchase items positively impacts any corporation's cash flow. The reality, however, is that many items wind up on an expedite list, meaning that buyers are probably circumventing the normal process anyway by faxing what is already on its way in the mail. In addition, technologies already exist that speed up this process.

Pioneering technologies like electronic data interchange (EDI), for example, have already forged new paths in immediate payment of business transactions.

But in examining the way that companies treat purchase orders, it becomes easier to see how they can reap the benefits of AS/400 Fax technology. For example, buyers enter information all day regarding items purchased and, due to pressure from internal organizations like manufacturing who don't want to hold up production for normal lead time from vendors, are likely expediting a good number of the items that they buy.

So most resourceful buyers circumvent the operational flow that has been so carefully designed. The normal procedure is to wait for the purchase orders to be printed that night during the purchasing module's batch run, including copies that go to accounting, to the requesting department, the buyer and, of course, to the vendor. Under normal circumstances, the purchase order is actually mailed to the vendor as part of the normal mail processing activity. Expected arrival date: anywhere from two days to two weeks, depending upon the reliability of both the postal service and the vendor's mail room.

But a resourceful buyer is well aware of this "lagtime" scenario and has likely planned ahead to avoid dealing with an angry customer: they take their printed copy and take the 15 or 20 minutes to manually fax it. So not only has good money been wasted on the normal processing of a company's paperwork, even more time is spent faxing the same information during peak business and phone rate hours.

AS/400 Fax changes this scenario by offering a change in purchasing operations. It doesn't just replace the paperwork flow of what is already done, it forces purchasing staffers to reevaluate how their jobs are done. In the above instance, the operations flow changes dramatically. That's because the purchase order is never actually printed. Instead, the program that generates the spooled file that will print the faxes, instead creates the spooled file for faxing. The exact methodology will differ between vendors, but in any case the spooled file is never actually released to print. That's because AS/400 Fax grabs the spooled file, breaks it apart into individual faxes, attaches cover sheets to each transmission and automatically begins transmitting the purchase orders the same night, when phone rates are the lowest. The result is that the buyer comes in the next morning and goes to work knowing that his purchase orders are already at the vendor location and probably receiving top priority because they've circumvented the mail room and are probably sitting on their desk.

The previous scenario can be replicated in many areas of a business, such as faxing invoices instead of mailing them. In theory, if a company can invoice their customers five days earlier than when they would arrive via normal mail, then they would pay for goods and services five days earlier. And, as any accounts receivable manager can attest, the earlier he or she gets paid and deposited into the corporate account, the more the significant the savings for the company.

There are also industry-specific applications for AS/400 Fax. In the transportation sector, waybills, manifests, and shipping notices are excellent candidates for automation. The health-care industry is also a likely user of the technology. The two most common automation areas are transcriptions and lab results, which can be faxed directly to a physician's office, eliminating phone calls between the hospital and the physician's office.

Quotations, order acknowledgments, price lists, and account summaries are also prime candidates for distributors. In addition, some distributors fax their pick tickets to remote warehouses that are not on-line to the AS/400, providing a lifeline between the two sites. And any company's marketing or public relations department could benefit from faxing press releases and even brochures to multiple locations, such as media outlets and/or customers, from one location and in the middle of the night when phone rates are lower.

When it comes to choosing applications that can benefit from technology, the rule of thumb is this: anything that is stored and printed on the AS/400 is a good prospect for AS/400 Fax automation.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT VENDOR

The number of technology companies that offer AS/400 Fax solutions is growing. To keep the selection process clean and simple, MIS directors should concentrate on four key criterion: experience, quality, technical support, and a good warranty. Here's a breakdown of each component:

Experience

Given the relative infancy of AS/400 Fax technology, it's a good idea to place more emphasis on a vendor who has spent several years developing automated fax solutions and focuses on the technology for a majority of its revenues. It's also advisable to consider companies who have grown with the technology and have a customer list that has as many smaller-sized AS/400 companies as it does Fortune 1000 companies. Make sure to take a look at the vendor's list of customers. The list should indicate that the company is able to customize an AS/400 Fax solution that meets the needs of any-sized company and has the track record to prove it.

Quality

Look for a company that scrutinizes all phases of design, development and support. Ask them how hard they will work to eliminate field problems you may run up against, and see if they test their products both in-house and at pre-release customer venues. That will indicate that their products will hold up in the field, because they've already operated there.

Also, find out where development is handled. Vendors within the US can be better relied upon to provide information assistance as their developers are frequently more available to you during your work schedule. Developers on different continents will have a harder time giving you top quality development assistance with their work day many hours different from yours.

Technical Support

Look for a vendor who offers 24-hour-a-day, year-round support, preferably with a toll-free hotline. When conducting due diligence, ask the vendor's customers whether or not their problems were diagnosed and eliminated with one phone call. If not, ask how many calls it took to resolve the problem.

In addition, because a fax product is sophisticated in that it deals with many items outside its control, it is important that a fax vendor can dial into the AS/400 to diagnose the problem. Items outside of its control may be: the AS/400 itself, the user's application, the connection of the fax product to the AS/400, the fax hardware itself, the phone line connection to the fax process, etc. Each piece requires a way in which to diagnose it which top companies are able to do through its remote diagnostic capability and by being technical enough to sign onto the AS/400. Give extra points to companies who are AS/400 specialists and who understand their general operations as such.

Warranty

As with any investment in a new technology, it's a good idea for MIS Directors to protect themselves with a good warranty. Look for a one-year warranty that guarantees that a problem will be corrected immediately. If a hardware problem arises, the vendor should offer to replace the defective device within 48 hours. If a software problem arises, the vendor should guarantee a solution within 24 hours.

Above all, don't choose a vendor who doesn't ask you what your company's needs are. Anyone can sell a commodity, but the best vendor will offer a customized AS/400 fax solution that fits the need of the client company and does so in a way that meets financial and productivity goals as much as technological ones.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT PRODUCT

While selecting a vendor you're comfortable with is a top priority, the final decision on the AS/400 Fax system you ultimately choose will come down to product quality. Yet finding the AS/400 Fax solution that fits your organization's needs and budget is no easy task, particularly when all the marketing hype is added to the mix. Although you already know that you want the power and flexibility to create, transmit, receive and control faxes from the comfort of your staffers' terminals or PCs, how do you go about comparing solutions?

One way to compare different vendors' products is to break the offerings down into several key categories that can help you measure their effectiveness. Four such categories are; Sending, Receiving, Control, and Administration. Let's examine each category:

Sending Faxes - Automatically

Perhaps the easiest way to cost justify AS/400 Fax is when faxes are transmitted directly from a program without any end user intervention whatsoever. As previously mentioned, faxing purchase orders via a program is the number one AS/400 application, but other line of business type applications like invoice, order acknowledgments, marketing brochures, price lists, etc. are also good candidates. There are many different ways to send faxes automatically. Choose the fax product that gives you the most flexibility, as often times different approaches are suited based on how your application runs. There are three types of methods for creating and sending faxes automatically:

Application Programming Interface: Perhaps the most pervasive method for sending faxes from an AS/400 Fax product is the Application Programming Interface (API). Sometimes referred to by different names, the API is a simple method for creating and sending faxes from spooled files by embedding specialized fax commands within the spooled file itself. The spooled file is then moved to a special fax output queue on the AS/400 where a fax program interprets the commands and creates/sends the faxes.

The number and flexibility of commands vary by vendor. All of them, however, offer a way to include a fax number and recipient information. Other commands can control how the cover sheet will look, which form will be merged with the spooled data file and the date and time that the fax will actually be sent. More sophisticated products include a de-bugger with software that makes it easier for you to debug the special fax commands you are including in the spooled file without having to fax hundreds of faxes. De-buggers can save a significant amount of time by showing you an illicit command that might not be quite so obvious to a new user of a fax product.

The powerful side of an API is that most fax products (although not IBM's Fax Support/400) will break apart a single spooled file containing perhaps hundreds of purchase orders with little programming effort. The downside of using the API method is that by modifying your spooled file, you are contaminating it forever, which means that you can no longer simply "print" the spooled file without the API commands appearing on the paper. The only way around this puzzle is to create separate spooled files, one for faxing and one for printing or print the contaminated spooled file with utilities provided by the fax vendor which will "strip out" the fax commands before sending the spooled file to the printer.

No-Programming Method: Gaining the most popularity for sending faxes automatically is the no-programming method. The most obvious advantage of using a no-programming method for creating and sending faxes is that you do not need sophisticated programming talent to modify your line of business applications. The savings alone is significant, but there is even a more compelling reason for choosing this method.

By not having to modify any programs, you can maintain the integrity of your line of business applications. Since many AS/400 customers choose to purchase off-the-shelf software, maintaining custom programs between vendor releases has become an operational nightmare. Many customers choose to not modify their applications to allow them to be able to receive the latest and greatest release from their vendors without having to assess the impact of custom changes on the new release. So keeping an application vendor's package in its original state is an advantage in day-to-day operations of running the AS/400.

The way the no-programming methods work is quite simple. Rather than modify the source code before the spooled file is generated, the no-programming method enables you to establish a "template" definition that describes where in the spooled file the information for faxing resides. The spooled file is allowed to be created as it normally would, but instead of going to a printer, the "template" definition from the fax program captures the spooled file and squeezes the fax information from the spooled file itself.

More sophisticated products will handle not just a spooled file that contains a single document, but a spooled file that contains many documents each having different numbers of pages and all going to different locations. The best fax products will allow some of the documents in the spooled file, based on selection criteria that you choose, to be faxed while the others will be printed. Again the key is that this sophisticated logic is completed without any programming or technical gurus required.

Another feature of the top-of-the-line products is their ability to relate information from the spooled file to your database. Since most line of business documents such as purchase orders and invoices were never originally intended to be faxed, many do not include the fax number on the document itself. Since all AS/400 Fax products require a fax number in order to transmit the fax, it is critical that the product be able to find the fax number back in your vendor or customer master file. With high end products you can relate other information on the document such as vendor number or invoice number to your database to then select the fax number.

The big advantage of the no-programming method of creating and sending faxes is that you can install the product in the morning and have your applications up and in production the same afternoon, a far cry from the normal barriers created when adding a new application for users.

CL Interfaces: Although requiring programming, CL interfaces to fax products provide you with great flexibility in creating faxes from single spooled files. That's because there is no need to modify the spooled file itself, but instead "call" the fax interface software after the spooled file has been created. This allows the spooled file to be printed or faxed and look identical without embedding specialized fax commands inside of the spooled file as described in the API section above. In addition to creating faxes to be sent, some vendors provide other CL interfaces to ensure that the system is self-containing and does not require any end user intervention. Other features include: checking on the status of a particular fax to ensure that it has been sent so that you can update your application program; programs to automatically capture a particular screen, OfficeVision/400 document or spooled file; and CL programs to notify your program when a fax has been received so that you can send a confirmation fax to the original sender. The CL interface method is particularly powerful when integrating with interactive applications that generate a single document/spooled file but is inadequate for a multiple document spooled files.

Sending Faxes Automatically Summary: As you can see there is more than one way to skin the proverbial fax cat, but the key to it all is flexibility. Each of the above methods have their own strengths and their own weaknesses, based on what it is you wish to accomplish. Choose a fax product that gives you all three choices, ensuring that your fax product will last not only for its original intended use but for future uses that you may have not even envisioned yet.

Sending Faxes Ad Hoc

While there are also many ad hoc or interactive faxing functions in which programming in advance is impractical, if not impossible, that doesn't mean you can't be flexible or creative in managing your automated fax operations. The leading AS/400 Fax vendors provide interfaces into OfficeVision/400 so that users can fax documents without leaving the application. Other popular ad hoc examples are quick memos (particularly useful if you are not an OfficeVision/400 user), screen capture facilities, and the ability to fax spooled files and queries from Query/400. The key element for each of these items is that the AS/400 Fax vendor provides software that enables end users to fax items that the MIS staff has not had to program in advance. Let's examine some of the more sophisticated ad hoc features:

Memo Generator: Not available on most AS/400 Fax systems, the memo generator allows users who don't have OfficeVision/400 to enjoy the full-feature benefits of the technology. With on-line prompting to help add custom graphics, logos, and signatures, any AS/400 Fax user can create, share, save, edit and fax memos to any fax machine in the world using the memo generator. Advanced products also include support for character attributes such as bolding and underlining.

OfficeVision/400 Interface: Sending OfficeVision/400 documents is also easy with AS/400 Fax products. Whether it's a single document transmitted to a single recipient, or as general as a broadcast letter to thousands of people, AS/400 Fax has the seamless interface to make it all easy. There is even an option to add letterheads, cover notes, and signatures to any transmission. Look for products that work with the Work with Documents in Folders screen as the starting point for faxing, making it easier for you to train new, unsophisticated users.

Screen Captures: AS/400 Fax screen capture capabilities will send your captured screens WYSIWYF (What You See Is What You Fax). The capture facility will fax standard and wide (132 columns) screens and will allow you to edit those screens before transmission, protecting your internal-only information from being faxed.

Spooled File Interface: With spooled-file capture and fax, users can access and keep any AS/400 spooled file with a single keystroke. Users can then fax any portion of that report, and AS/400 Fax will automatically reduce it, enlarge it, or rotate it and attach a cover page. In addition, the most sophisticated systems will enable you to take selected passages or pages from a report and fax them directly, without having to send them with the rest of the document.

Query/400 Reports: The premium AS/400 Fax products will work seamlessly with any IBM application. Take, for example, the IBM Query/400. With AS/400 Fax, you can create and fax custom reports directly from Query/400. The system will run the report, attach a cover sheet, reduce it to fit the fax machine, and broadcast that report to your list of recipients.

Sending Ad Hoc Faxes From PCs: With over 90% of all AS/400's having at least one PC attached to it, it's important to include PC faxing with a centralized product such as AS/400 Fax. With AS/400 Fax, users can opt to fax from their PCs as easily as they can fax from their AS/400s. Some top-of-the-line AS/400 Fax companies offer seamless Windows-based modules that enable users to print their documents or spreadsheets to the AS/400 Fax, designating who is receiving the fax and the automated fax system will take care of the rest. It's akin to having your own centralized fax product within each AS/400 or PC you own - all transparent to the end user! By choosing a centralized fax product for PC faxing, you can send faxes from popular PC packages like Word, WordPerfect, Excel or Lotus 1-2-3 without having to manage individual fax cards in each PC and their associated monthly changes.

Receiving Faxes

The ability to receive and store faxes should be a staple of any AS/400 Fax you buy. Faxes should be able to be stored and accessed from the AS/400 in a way that gives complete control and secured access to all of your user community. In addition, you should be able to resend a received fax and include a new cover sheet, eliminating the original one.

Your AS/400 Fax should also support the IBM 3489 Image/Fax display, and should enable your users to rotate and zoom on received faxes because many faxes may be difficult to read on a display or arrive upside down. It should allow the viewing of a fax by multiple people without creating a duplicate copy, and let them forward inbound faxes without the overhead of multiple copies. Archiving of necessary faxes and purging of unwanted ones is also an option that you'll find beneficial in your AS/400 Fax. Make sure that the product you're considering does both in a self-maintaining way that doesn't overburden your storage requirements.

Printing is also a chief concern. Make sure you ask vendors what types of printers can the inbound faxes be printed on. Also note whether or not the printer has to be attached directly to the fax processor or can reside anywhere in your location.

Controlling the System

Traditionally, inbound and outbound faxes are handled by myriad hands in standalone fax environments. But with AS/400 Fax, faxes are centrally handled once they are created or received. Considerations to mull over regarding the centralized control include; resending faxes, cost-efficient methods of routing and bundling; retry algorithms; fax forms, attachable items, logos and signatures, among others. Let's examine them one at a time:

Resending faxes: A few simple keystrokes is all it should take to re-send an archived fax with AS/400 Fax. The original spool file should not have to re-created to resend a fax and the address or destination of the resent fax along with the cover sheet note should be able to be easily changed by the end user. In addition, archived faxes should be able to be resent with updated cover sheets.

Cost-efficient routing and bundling: Saving money is the name of the game. That's why it's wise to ensure that an AS/400 Fax includes sophisticated bundling techniques that can help your organization save thousands of dollars in phone charges. Specifically, the bundling features should enable you to bundle faxes from different users of applications into one phone call. Faxes should also be able to be automatically bundled (without user intervention) bundled for transmission after work-hours, when phone rates are least expensive.

Attachments: When creating faxes to be sent, users often need to attach other items to the fax. For example, a user who is sending a sales letter to a prospect may want to include the company brochure and a form that includes that weeks' specials. Since each of the items may be created separately and often at different times, it is important for a fax product to be able to "attach" the other items to the fax. Check the items that can be attached and ensure that the list includes captured screens, other spooled files, received faxes and documents created on the PC.

Retry algorithm: A sophisticated retry algorithm that retries faxes by priority should be standard with your AS/400 Fax. When considering this option, make sure that faxes are retried based on priority sequence (with more important faxes going first). Also ensure that, if a busy signal is encountered, the fax does not redial immediately when the fax is most likely to receive another busy signal, finally failing after a certain number of attempts. Lastly, check to see if the number of retries is controllable and that end users, and not just the MIS department, are notified of retries.

Forms, signatures, and logos: AS/400 Fax products should provide you with powerful graphics handling capabilities, such as signatures, logos and form overlays, with complete insulation from AFP. The product should allow for auto-adjustment of the text on a form so as not to have to re-scan the form.

Form creation should be easily handled with PC scanning package and not with a special forms creation tool with all pre-scanned forms stored by the end user for easy access. Lastly, the AS/400 Fax package you choose should be integrated with major AS/400 form vendors packages, such as Xpoint Corporation's FormsXpress.

Canceling and holding faxes: Empowering end users is a primary benefit of AS/400 Fax. Part and parcel of that is allowing end users complete control of all their faxes, enabling them, for example, to cancel their own faxes and allowing them to place faxes temporarily on hold and then re-releasing them without having to recreate the fax. Because each end user has complete control over their faxes, support and training costs for the MIS department are significantly reduced.

Viewing faxes: Most AS/400 Fax products also provide a centralized screen for received faxes, giving end users even greater control over fax operations. With a central screen, users enjoy on-line access and visibility to their own faxes allowing them to view outbound AS/400 faxes while they're waiting to be transmitted. In addition, the central screen provides users with detailed, on-screen information about the details of a received fax such as the date and time it was received.

Fax confirmation: Having a completely reliable way to confirm that faxes have been sent or received is a critical necessity in today's corporate environment. That's why it's important that your AS/400 Fax product sends on-screen messages directly to end users confirming the success or failure of a transmitted fax and to do so on each transmission attempt. An on-line history log should document reasons for any failures, i.e., busy signals or no answer and an on-line summary screen should be available that shows end users the details of each fax.

Cost accounts: Monitoring the savings you earn by using AS/400 faxing and designating charges to specific departments are benefits that some AS/400 Faxes provide. Look for a product that enables you to track each fax by user and cost account, enabling you to determine departmental usage for chargeback. Reports determining total system usage should be available to you as well.

Landscape faxes: Rotating of faxes to fit on a fax machine (up to 218 columns) is a staple among top-of-the-line AS/400 Fax products. These products support the landscaping of faxes, i.e., transmitting a fax sideways. Choose only products that can do this automatically as users often find it difficult to know when to send a fax sideways. Avoid products that need special PC's or devices other than the fax processor to rotate a fax because the download process is usually cumbersome, unreliable and tricky at best.

Partial resending of errors: Your AS/400 Fax should have an intelligence mechanism embedded in the software to attach a continuation page before sending only pages that have not been transmitted. Many fax packages will re-send the entire fax again rather than only those pages that did not transmit - costing you thousands in phone charges and unhappy recipients.

Fax history and purge: Part of the fax maintenance process is making sure that you control the transmission and receipt process on your AS/400. Make sure you ask your fax vendor whether their product keeps a complete history of your fax transmissions and receptions on the AS/400, how long faxes can be saved for, and how old faxes are purged. Purging of old faxes should be done automatically and you should have the choice for the amount of history you wish to maintain, purging either daily, weekly, or at month end.

Performance and reliability: Make sure that the AS/400 Fax solution that you choose is architected to be up and running continuously, designed to detect errors and automatically correct and recover from them. Also ensure that your fax system can operate unattended and is designed to be redundant, with no single point of failure. Finally, check to see that the fax vendor supports the IBM Integrated Fax Adapter, a sign of a premium fax vendor with a strong relationship with IBM.

Fax Administration

Ensuring that your AS/400 Fax is completely secure from unauthorized usage and saves all activity for printing to any AS/400-attached printer is critical as well. Make sure you ask vendors if their products are secured by each user thereby preventing some users from transmitting some types of faxes or viewing others' received faxes. Also check to see if the system is self-maintaining and if activity reports are readily available. Your best choice may be to select a fax system that is designed to be self-maintaining. Once defaults are established, such as when to purge old faxes, there is no system administration required on a regular basis.

THE FUTURE OF AS/400 FAXING

With 16 million fax machines currently residing in businesses nationwide, it's obvious that a wealth of opportunities exist for automated fax solutions that can take business-to-business communications to the next level and beyond. Choosing the right one, however, needn't be a difficult task.

While there are only a handful of leading AS/400 Fax developers, they are easily recognized. Their products offer you the power and flexibility to create, transmit, receive and control faxes directly from your application programs, without any user intervention. They'll also reduce your hardware costs, save printing and phone expenses, and offer you productivity enhancements in the form of reduced fax times that can mean the difference between your company recording its balance sheet in black ink or red.

They'll give you the power, flexibility and creativity to design bold faxes with the use of electronic signatures, form overlays and personalized cover sheets. They'll allow you to save money by taking advantage of international time zone differences. They'll provide centralized control over the receipt of faxes, keeping detailed activity logs, and distributing the fax to a printer or specific user for on-line review.

In short, they'll offer you the most technologically advanced AS/400 Fax products on the market, with the unparalleled support and assistance and full warranty you expect from the best. And, with the experience of already installing thousands of AS/400 Faxes worldwide, they'll have you up and running today.

That's right. Today. The technology, priced at less than $15,000, is already delivering on its promise of lower costs and higher productivity to legions of corporate customers. With AS/400 Fax automation, it won't be long before paper documents finally go the way of the typewriter or the carbon copy. By that time, AS/400 Fax solutions will no longer be a corporate luxury, but a necessity.