Computers and Telephones

A show, buzzwords, and swell gadgets

In the past, most banks, especially large ones, had two wiring systems: onefor phones and one for computers. They were separate down to the wiring closetsand support organizations. Often, integration meant a phone and a computer oneach desk, with a human as the bridge.

Then came computer-telephony integration (CTI). Today, banks and othercompanies, especially large ones, need to combine their phone and computersystems. Small companies also have a great interest in CTI.

This interest manifested itself in March at the well-attended ComputerTelephony Expo '96, here in Los Angeles, California. The show's very existenceraised a couple of important questions for us PC-users, especially novices tothe telephony, or "dial-tone," world. The first question is how topronounce "telephony.'' The answer is Ta-LEFF-o-ney, not Tell-a-FONE-y (asynonym for "infomercial actor'').

The second question is why anyone cares about merging telephones andcomputers. The answer is that users can do more work if you connect computers totelephones. The telephony system tracks who called, why they called, and whomthey talked to, so the person taking calls spends less time on the phone.

The most familiar telephony application is screen pops, CTI parlancefor a popup window that tells you who's calling and why. You can getthis capability at home, and it's very affordable: For under $200, you can buy adevice that reads the Caller-ID information and sends it to your PC's serialport. When a call comes in, a resident program (which, in businesses, is oftenlinked to a database such as ACT!) pulls up the appropriate record.

In a small business, this capability can be a great aid to customerservice. And for large corporations, big-ticket computer-to-phone links aresaving lots of customer-service dollars. Because of this potential to savecompanies money, telephony solutions are quickly becoming affordable, and manyrun on Windows NT.

Faxing: Telephony's Start
Faxing from and to a computer is probably the best known and oldest use ofCTI. People have been doing it since the invention of fax modems, certainlybefore CTI became a buzzword.

Many fax solution vendors attended the CTI show. (For a roundup of NT-basedfaxing products, see "The Fax of Life," Windows NT Magazine,February 1996). All fax products do one thing well: send faxes from yourcomputer. Good fax solutions even decide that a fax from your Altoona branch toWalla Walla needs to hop on the WAN, so your Seattle branch can send it at thelowest transmission cost. Better products do inbound routing: receive a fax,send an email to the recipient, and print the fax to the user's local printer.Programs use the number dialed to get routing information; some even read thefax to determine who gets it. The best products also let you collect faxes, hookthem to other work, and integrate them with the rest of your electronicdocuments.

More complex fax solutions are starting to show up, too. Cardiff Softwareshowed off its Teleform for Windows handwriting-recognition software, whichworks even on low-resolution (coarse-mode) faxes. The vendor's example was afaxed time sheet, with fill-in boxes for the employee's name, time worked, andcomments. Naturally, the software has to guess sometimes, so it allows manualdouble-checking of doubtful entries. This software is not a system hog--the demoused a 486--and, yes, it runs on NT. The basic version is under $600 and you canuse it straight out of the box.

Voice Mail
Voice mail is another "old" CTI application. Heck, voice mail requiresa computer: You need to reliably store hundreds of megabytes of digitized voicemessages with random access, meaning storage on hard disk. Also, you need someadministrative functions, which means some sort of CPU.

Today's voice mail for small offices is a computer: Usually, it's aPC that sits in the phone closet. Because people access this PC only by phone,they don't know it's the same hardware as the machine on their desk. The voicemail system can also provide automated attendant functions, such as "Pressone to connect to sales; two to speak to customer service." Most peoplethink automated attendant features are part of voice mail, though these areseparate functions on the same PC, bolted on to the phone system.

Many people curse voice mail. Often, a less-than-experienced installerprograms the system badly, nobody in the office understands it, and it's poorlydocumented. Such systems drop calls and point people to the wrong mailbox. Thesesystems inspire my rule of computer telephony: If you don't know what you'regetting, deal with someone who does. Although you can do some business withoutyour computers, you can't live without your phones. I've talked about howexpensive cheap computers can be; this wisdom applies doubly to anythinginvolving phones and computers.

Fortunately, help is out there. Computer-controlled and -managed voice mailsolutions were abundant at the CTI expo. The day when one NT program can manageyour system logins, disk allocation, and voice mail is coming--soon. Microsoftis providing the framework in NT, and software companies are starting to code.

NT and CTI: A Marriage Made in Redmond
Connecting computers to telephones is old ground for Microsoft. The peoplein Redmond have long integrated Microsoft telephone systems and computernetworks. Microsoft and hardware vendors are now working on ways for a computerto perform such functions as commanding the switch to transfer a call from oneextension to another.

APIs form the foundation for such solutions that let networks talk toswitches. Novell provided the earliest network-to-computer connection standard,Telephone Services API (TSAPI). To compete, Microsoft introduced the TelephonyAPI (TAPI).

The first version of TAPI provided only "first-party call control":You were able to mind only your own phone. For this reason, the $200 Caller-IDbox between your phone and computer can process only local calls. Once the callmoves away from your desk, TAPI 1.0 can't help you. Windows NT 3.51 has TAPI1.0. TAPI 2.0 allows third-party call control, which provides almost completetelephone control from a computer. With the appropriate level of understandingbetween the switch and the PC, a TAPI 2.0 system can route and track calls aspeople transfer them all over the office. You will have to wait for NT 4.0 toget TAPI 2.0 support. (At the CTI show, Microsoft was pitching NT as "theoperating system for computer telephony," and signs for TAPI compliancewere everywhere.)

Products using TAPI 2.0 were abundant at CTI Expo '96. Even moreabundant were developer's suites and demonstration setups. But what's for saleis better suited to consultants and others with a good feel for the zone betweendial-tone and computer. Like the computer salesman who sold you dBase, saying, "Thisis everything you need to automate your business," the CTI salesman whopoints to Stylus's Visual Voice and says, "This will connect your phones toyour computers,'' isn't telling the whole truth. Visual Voice is a fine productfor building call-processing applications, but it's a toolbox, not something youcan just put on your computer and use. You'd spend months using Visual Voice,Expert Systems' Ease, or the like to design and implement a major CTI project.

Today, CTI is about where desktop publishing was seven years ago (rememberall those laser printed brochures you got with typos and too many fonts?). Sure,CTI tools are available, and powerful, but it will be about a year until you canget off-the-shelf programs suitable to small businesses, and they will run verysoundly on NT.

A Quick Tour of Products
If you're new to CTI, check into Dialogic. This company makes a largepercentage of the call-processing boards sold. These boards plug into a PC.(Call-processing cards digitize calls, play back recorded messages, connectcalls, send and respond to touch-tone dialing, etc.) At the CTI Expo, Dialogicshared a pavilion with many third-party developers, who develop kits to programthose cards. Previously, all these kits were based on DOS or OS/2, but nearlyeveryone was showing off a Windows suite. Of those vendors, most were planningto make NT a primary environment.

Computer telephony means video telephony, too, and Corel rolled out itsCorel Video conferencing system. It's a clever hack that uses a spare twistedpair off Ethernet cabling to move analog video data to a desktop PC. The systemis for medium-sized offices that want internal video conferences, and you canget a digital bridge to connect to the outside world. Corel Video is Windowsbased, and Corel assures me it runs on NT.

Lessons Learned
Businesses small and large can profit from using computer telephony. Butyou'll probably need help to make a solution more complex than one phone, onecomputer. Make sure you figure out what you want to do in connecting your phonesto your PCs, and write specific requirements. Try a pilot. If you hire aconsultant, know what you want before you sign a contract. And remember thatyour customers may understand when you tell them, "the computer's down,''but almost no one accepts "the telephone's being debugged."

Next Time
Next month, I'll report on the future of the PC, as seen at WinHEC, theWindows Hardware Engineering Conference, and NetWorld+Interop. Perhaps I'llsneak in some spiffy NT-based video-editing announcements from the NationalAssociation of Broadcasters (NAB), too.