Message centers - six message center software packages are reviewed - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Nov, 1997 by Charles H. Gajeway

Never has it been so easy to contact people or to be contacted. Easy contact means taking more orders, fielding more questions, and scheduling more meetings and appointments. But how do you handle the onslaught of work--the administrative legwork of phoning, faxing, and e-mailing--without a team of secretaries?

The answer is with a message center, where phone calls, e-mail, and faxes are received, sorted, and delivered on time, no matter where you are. Up until a couple of years ago that would have been an impossible dream for most small businesses. Today, a new generation of programs has teamed up with fax/voice modems to provide an affordable solution.

More powerful and reliable than most modem software bundles, these programs set up impressive voice-mail systems that help sort messages and can even page or forward calls that need immediate attention. They funnel fax, voice, data, and e-mail messages from clients into your computer. And their automated faxback features help avoid repetitive manual faxing. These programs can turn a notebook into a mobile communications center. Just plug in a modem and link to a single analog phone.

Selection and Testing

We selected programs offering compatibility with a variety of voice modems. We tested six candidates that offered features above and beyond the voice modems' bundled software. Five of them were Windows products; the one Macintosh program to meet our criteria was so new it was still in beta, though it should be shipping as you read this.

Our setup scenarios were comparable with what any company would probably need to handle its day-to-day communications. We set up a voice-mail system with several mailboxes, including one that would forward a call or send a page and one that would faxback a message. We sent and received faxes, used a cover page with attachments to combine documents from several sources, and sent a newsletter out to a small broadcast list. Whenever possible, we collected e-mail from a variety of sources, including several messages that arrived with attached files, and we sent replies and original messages. Particular features were evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

As always, we jumped into each program feet first, trying to get things working with a minimal amount of peeking at the manual. From our experience with communications programs, though, we kept the manuals close at hand. These are powerful programs dealing with complex technology, and a little time spent with the manual can reduce a lot of pain and frustration as you go along.

Communicate!

WIN ** 1/2

We wanted to like Communicate because it has industrial-strength e-mail and contact management features in addition to a wonderfully easy-to-use interface for its data, fax, and voice features. There's even a slick graphics editor that can double as a drawing program. On paper, this program probably has the best balance and range of all of the programs we tested. Unfortunately, Communicate's real-life performance doesn't quite measure up to its advance billing.

Communicate's e-mail and fax functions worked well enough. We could set up multiple mailboxes and combine different accounts. If you rely heavily on contact management to keep your client base up-to-date, then you'll want Communicate. But there's a pervasive feeling of the entire application being rough around the edges, the kind of thing you get sometimes with beta software. Take outgoing voice messages. We wanted to record a new message for a particular voice mailbox, but several of the program's included scripts use more than one predefined file. So to get the whole message to sound like our voice, we had to look up several files in the appendix and rerecord each one of them, a tedious and error-prone process.

The documentation uses a series of quick-reference cards rather than a detailed description of the techniques and procedures needed to create and operate a system. The tech support team is very helpful, but they shouldn't have to field basic queries on how to build a voice-mail system. Worst of all is a slight instability of operation that shows up most often as a reluctance to connect at speeds over 9.6Kbps and occasionally as a system freeze.

HotFax MessageCenter 3.0

WIN 95/WIN ** 1/2

HotFax, like most of the Windows programs we tested, is compatible with both 95 and 3.x, but it offers more functionality under 95. The program is supplied on CD (3.5-inch floppies are available on request), which makes short work of the installation process.

Things got under way smoothly. We created a basic mailbox with the help of HotFax's setup wizard, which walked us through using the bundled prerecorded voice messages. The program also provides the means of recording your own outgoing messages. When we tried it, the audio quality was acceptable but we were disappointed that there was no guidance on improving the quality.

The messaging system worked quite well, with the program quickly and accurately differentiating between voice, fax, and data calls. In trying out the fax function, we thought the cover page editor was easy to use, and we liked its distinctive stamps, including Rush and Confidential. There is also a graphics editor that allows you to mark up or edit a fax you've received and send it back directly from your computer.