Message From the President
Message From the PresidentThe Salutation Consortium Annual Meeting and Board of Directors Meeting were held on July 8-9, 1997. These meetings were hosted by Cisco Systems, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Mary Hill for administering the events.
The meeting focused on our Goals, Strategies and Budgets for the next 12 month, and after a lot of hard work, I am pleased to say that we have set a strong direction with the funding to execute!
Here's a summary of our work.
1997/98 Goal:
ANNOUNCED AND SHIP PRODUCTS IN US!
1997/98 Strategy:
The following action items were adopted to Implement this strategy:
Salutation NewsThe Salutation Consortium is working with Hewlett-Packard Company, a member of the Consortium, on ways to support HP's newly announced JetSend technology in the Salutation Architecture.
Salutation and JetSend are based on the common vision of enabling different types of equipment, including computers, office equipment, and home devices to interoperate. The Salutation Architecture sends a network query to determine the characteristics of a device, application or service, allowing fullest possible use of the characteristics discovered. JetSend is a device-to-device protocol that allows two devices to connect, negotiate data types, provide status updates, and exchange information. In enabled devices, both JetSend and Salutation work without user intervention. Both approaches fit into today's computing environment.
The Salutation Architecture supports a process to determine and make full use of unique features of a connected information appliance. This supports implementations across the spectrum of interconnectivity -- from point-to-point through directory centric environments. For example, a hand held may use IR to determine the characteristics of a local printer, then format interactions accordingly. Or a directory service can maintain detailed information about connected appliances and assure that each device operates to its fullest capacity.
JetSend's device-to-device protocol provides benefits where a directory-centric model does not apply. JetSend ensures that two information appliances can share one of a set of data types and allows the appliances to select the capabilities that will provide the highest available level of information exchange. In this way, JetSend ensures communication can take place between the devices.
Steps Toward Integration
As a first step toward providing users with an integrated approach, the Consortium, with HP's assistance, will investigate adding a JetSend Functional Unit to the Salutation Architecture. The JetSend Functional Unit would allow a user to utilize the Salutation APIs and protocols to determine to the "JetSend capabilities" of an information appliance and adjust interactions based on the response. The Consortium will also investigate other approaches to integrating the two technologies. An initial checkpoint is scheduled for the Salutation Technical Subcommittee meeting in October.
Six member companies of the Salutation Consortium recently announced Salutation-enabled products or announced their intention to provide Salutation-enabled appliances.
These new products support the Salutation vision of a company intranet that automatically detects new peripherals as they get attached, either directly or through remote ports, and makes their functional capabilities available for use. The new products include both hardware models and software applications. Many of them integrate closely with Lotus Notes in a corporate intranet environment.
The Salutation products are:
Canon, Inc. GP30F Salutation System.
The Salutation System combines a Canon GP30F digital copier (known as MEDIO 30F) with Salutation-enabled print control and scanning applications to create new network features for a corporate intranet environment based on Lotus Notes.
The scanning application, MEDIO OfficeScan for Salutation, stores documents scanned by the copier directly into Lotus Notes Server. The user can then view the documents from a Notes client or with a web browser. This function works in combination with IBM NuOffice, also announced today. (See below.) The print control application, MEDIO OfficeTerminal for Salutation, automatically notifies the user when a printing job is complete and ready for pickup. From a web browser, the user can determine what features and optional equipment are installed on the copier.
Fuji Xerox Network Able for Salutation.
Network Able combines the four functions of copying, faxing, printing and scanning on a
network into one machine. The Network Able for Salutation makes full use of the Salutation
Architecture for its network functions.
IBM Japan NuOffice V1.0.
A complete office environment based on Lotus Notes, NuOffice uses the Salutation Architecture to make copiers, facsimile machines, scanners and printers active players on a company network. IBM NuOffice adds intelligence to the scanning function of copiers and fax machines, permitting these devices to input information from paper documents into Lotus Notes.
Using NuOffice, a user can email a scanned document directly from a fax machine or copier.
NuOffice enables users to operate office equipment from Lotus Notes, confirming device status and controlling such functions such as high speed printing, sorting and collating.
IBM Japan NetCube for TME10 NetFinity V1.0.
Salutation-enabled software expands the functions of TME10 NetFinity to provide users with additional control of printers in a PC LAN environment. Users can confirm and change printer settings, control print jobs, and monitor paper supply. This product was previewed in the U.S. at Comdex/Fall I November 1996.
IBM Japan IBM Salutation Manager and Tool Kit V2.03.
IBM demonstrated an update to the IBM Salutation Manager developer tool kit for Salutation-enabled applications. The toolkit supports Windows 95, Windows NT, OS/2, and Windows 3.1. It helps developers build devices, services, and applications that take advantage of the Salutation Consortium's open protocol for locating and controlling Internet devices. Mita Network Connection Kit for Notes.
Mita announces the Network Connection Kit for Notes as an option for the Antico 30 plain paper fax. With the kit installed, documents received from other Salutation-enabled devices can be distributed as email automatically to Notes clients on the network. This fax distributing function is also available from the fax using the Subaddress (SUB) signal as defined in ITU-T Recommendation T.30. Furthermore, users can use the Antico 30 as a network scanner/FAX/printer from a Notes desktop.
Muratec Fax Server F- 120/F-150.
Muratec announces the upcoming development of Fax server F-120/F-150 (temporary name), which will conform to the Salutation Architecture. Fax server F-120/F-150 acts as a network fax modem, faxing documents created on a PC. A document received as a fax can be forwarded without an interim printing step, preserving document quality. Users can query the status of a sent fax and determine whether the document has been opened by the recipient.
Ricoh Imagio MF-P series digital copiers.
Ricoh announces a Salutation software package which allows the Imagio MF-P digital copiers to be used as network printers/scanners in a Lotus Notes intranet environment. With Salutation support, each function of the Imagio copier (copy, fax, print, scan) can be addressed individually for maximum user convenience. A Lotus Notes user can, for instance, have the copier send a document or scanned image as Lotus Notes mail directly to another user's desktop. Ricoh provides supporting print server software and scanner server software.
At present, the Salutation Consortium's Board of Directors is made up of representatives for the each company maintaining Core Membership Status, plus two seats reserved for General Membership representation. This year, the General Members have elected Ms. Mary Hill from Cisco Systems, Inc and Dr. Takamasa Shintani from Konica Corporation to serve in these two positions. Congratulations!
With the success of the Salutation office automation product announcements in japan, the Consortium is beginning to look around at additional opportunities. The use of Salutation in home networks seems to be the next logical focal point. As a result, the Consortium has established a small team to work with the Video Engineering Standards Association (VESA) and its Home Networks committee on understanding the value of Salutation in the Home market.
Bob Pecora, Salutation Managing Director said, "Our primary focus remains the office, but with home coming on strong, we need to be engaged as early as possible."
The Consortium has responded to a VESA Request for Information and has also produced a white paper about Salutation in the Home. Both are available on the Salutation Consortium's web site. The Consortium will maintain an active role in the Vesa committee, assisting in evaluation of related technologies.
From the Managing DirectorBob Pecora, the Consortium's Managing Director, took the lead for Salutation at Networks 97 held June 24-26 at the National Exhibition Center in Birmingham, England. Here is his report.
Networks 97, now in its 17th year, again proved to be the UK's premier networking industry showcase. Featuring products and services from more than 550 exhibitors, the show unveiled the latest developments and networking solutions for business environments. The 3 day event attracted more than 28,000 visitors, even though the weather was typical for the UK -- very wet and cold.
The Salutation Consortium shared an exhibition booth with IBM, UK. My warmest "Thanks" to IBM for their logistic assistance. We were represented by our European contact, David Hand, staff from our European based Public Relations firm, CompanyCare; Kevin Taylor, Chris Bignell, and myself.
Our objectives at Networks 97 were:
To help accomplish these objectives, we staged 11 Salutation theater presentations which were well received by 116 show attendees. These presentations peeked the interest of many attendees who then visited our booth and were able to understand the Salutation story in more depth. In addition we were able to distribute Salutation materials, such as information and membership folders, brochures, and newsletters to the more than 165 booth visitors.
The consortium also had some good press coverage for the show. I started with a pre-show
telephone interview by Network News for their Show Daily. The interview resulted in an
excellent article by John Bernstein, Network News Editor, that appeared in the opening day
Show Daily. Additional interviews and distribution of press kits during the show should generate
some follow-up positive articles in the European press.
Salutation ScenariosIn each issue, this section of the Salutation Newsletter will highlight potential uses for the Salutation Architecture. We aim to prod your thinking as you visualize how Salutation might benefit your business.
First we'll describe how someone might use Salutation-enabled products and services to solve a problem, then we'll take the covers off and show you how Salutation technology made the scenario possible.
Automated Problem Reporting
Nowadays, malfunction of office equipment has to be reported to a repair center manually, by phone for example, usually by someone who unluckily has been operating the machine when it malfunctions. It is difficult for some people to describe machine status in detail. The following is an example of automation of trouble reporting by a Salutation enabled machine.
Let's say we have an on-line multifunction copier/scanner/printer which suffers with paper transport problems. With Salutation, the copier starts a sequence to find an Office Equipment Administrator - a service machine - in the network. A response from an Administrator machine requests details of the trouble. The copier makes up a trouble report, gathering information associated with the machine malfunction and sends it to the Administrator machine. The trouble report indicates that a trained service person is required to fix the problem. When receiving the report, the Administrator machine verifies and logs the problem for later statistical analysis. After searching repair schedules and available resource data, the Administrator machine sends the report to the assigned repair technician via pager, requesting on-site service. The service person responds with a coded message indicating estimated time of arrival at the location of the machine. The service machine, knowing the capabilities of the copier's display, formats an "Out of Order" message for the specific copier interface with a posting for estimated time for correction.
Salutation Behind the Scenes
1. The copier uses Salutation's Search Capabilities to locate the Administrator machine and a Salutation Service Request to open a data pipe for transmission of the problem report.
2. The Administrator machine uses Salutation Data Transmission to request the problem report from the device
3. With Salutation Protocol, the capabilities of the repair specialist's pager can be determined, and the error report can tailored to meet these capabilities. For example, if the pager has text capabilities, a message can be formatted to the characteristics of the output screen, If the repair specialist has a pager component on his/her hand held, the Administrator machine may send a .txt file containing the problem report. The capability exchange with the pager will also determine the input characteristics, identifying how the repair specialist will respond to the problem report.
4. There is no standard established for the displays on multifunction devices. For any given device, the display technology may be LEDs, LCD alpha panel, LCD graphics panel or other technology with varying size and PEL densities. The Salutation Protocol's Capabilities Exchange provides a mechanism for the Administrator machine to determine the specifics of the multifunction device's display, and the Administrator machine can tailor its messages accordingly.
Product FocusKobelco Systems Corporatoin recently announced a Salutation Manager and Software Developer's Toolkit, new developer tools for Windriver Systems' Tornado real-time operating system.
The Kobelco Salutation Manager conforms to the 2.0 version of the Salutation Architecture. The Toolkit contains a Basic Encoding Rule (BER) Tool, as well as a library of Functional Units. The Library provides Functional Units for Print, FaxDataSend, FaxData, DocStorage, Voice MessageStorage, and AddressBook.
Kobelco, a subsidiary of Consortium member Kobe Steel, is a provider of computer systems, software, and communication networks in Japan.
Robert A. Pascoe, President and CEO of Senior Technical Staff Consulting, said, "Salutation development tools for embedded systems gives information appliance manufacturers a short cut to new markets. Kobelco has taken a strong step towards making the information marketplace a reality."
Salutation MegatrendsThe third in a series by Robert A. Pascoe, former president of the Salutation Consortium. Pascoe now operates Senior Technical Staff, a consulting firm focusing on interconnection technologies and interworking.
Remember MEGATRENDS, a 1982 best selling book by John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene which posted prophecies for the decade to come? The authors described ten major shifts in social, economic, political and technological trends, with the premise that these shifts would have wide ranging effects on our lives. We have been reviewing these trends to see if the authors visions have come to pass and what it has meant to our life and lifestyle today. In this issue of Greetings we will take a look at the forth and fifth trends:
4. Short Term to Long Term
5. Centralization to Decentralization
4. Short Term to Long Term
The Trend: This trend predicted the movement toward quality and reliability in consumer products as well as longevity in employment opportunities and relationships.
Today: From a consumer's point of view, this prediction has come true. For example, the reliability of today's automobiles compared to 10 to 15 years ago has increased dramatically. Many of today's cars do not need a tune-up for 100,000 miles.
Companies have also found that their employees are no longer willing to relocate their families to move 'up the organization.' They prefer the stability of established neighborhoods, long-term relationships and extended family ties that diminished in the 70's and 80's. Unfortunately, corporate 're-engineering,' a euphemism for down-sizing, has hampered the ability to meet this goal. Many families have relocated, not as a means to move up in the organization, but rather as a means to get a new job following a lay-off.
5. Centralization to Decentralization
The Trend: This trend predicted that the organizational structures of our governments and industries would move away from a single central control point to regional or project based management. For Capitol Hill, Naisbitt and Aburdene predicted less federal control and more state and local authority. For business, they predicted government de-regulation and team-based management.
Today: Economic factors have always been better motivators than political factors. Although we have seen de-regulation of airlines, phone companies, utilities companies and more, 'big government' continues to be a campaign issue for our elected officials. On the other hand, industry has realized the advantages of implementing self-directed teams, tiger teams, just-in-time supply channels, and employee quality focus groups and have moved towards decentralization quickly. In the new world economy, with resources and employees, parts and suppliers, coming from different companies in different parts of the globe, problems are solved through communication between individuals that have a common goal but do not share a common organizational structure. To some extent, the conference room has been replace by the electronic chat room, the business trip has been replaced by electronic collaboration.
The emphasis on decentralization has created technologies that have penetrated our life styles. Instead of talking aimlessly for hours on the phone with their school friends, teens can chat aimlessly for hours with global friends in Internet chat rooms. E-mail and remote network access have resulted in the ability to 'tele-commute,' giving us the freedom to stay at home with a sick child or wait for the plumber, and still remain productive on the job. As tele-commuting becomes more widely acceptable, we will have opportunities to improve our quality of life by living in rural areas away from the office, attending meetings by conference phone, collaborating by e-mail and reviewing project summaries via electronic document transfer. As expressed by Lisa Sanders in her book, "Office of the Future", being 'at work' has become less about where you are than about what you are doing.
Salutation technologies are a key to this decentralized approach. As ad hoc groups are formed, each device can use Salutation to determine the characteristics of the other devices being connected, maybe for the first time. These devices can automatically adjust there interaction to assure the highest level of information fidelity.
Tech TalkOne value of the Salutation Architecture is scalability, and this is demonstrated in several different areas.
Scalable Registry
The Salutation Architecture provides scalability in the 'size' of the Functional Unit Registry. The minimum requirement is for the Registry to maintain information about the local Functional Units. However, this can be extended (by increasing the amount of storage allocated to the Registry) to registering information about remote FUs that are of importance to the local environment. For example, if the local Salutation environment is a print server, the Registry may include information about all the print Functional Units that have been discovered via Salutation Capability Exchanges. The Registry may also serve as a network directory function, providing information about all Functional Units encountered locally or remotely, regardless of the Functional Unit type. In this case, one of the Salutation Managers on the network would be designated as the central directory. It would have the responsibility of finding all Salutation equipment and registering all discovered Functional Units. All requests by other equipment for Salutation resources would be directed towards this Salutation Manager which would respond accordingly.
Optional Support Layers
The Salutation Architecture provides scalability through optional client/server support. Some Salutation devices, applications, or services need only respond to capability requests, and never request capability information from others. These devices support only Salutation's Server functions. This provides for a lighter weight implementation of the architecture.
Direct Manipulation
The Salutation API set is optional for implementations. This is appropriate for devices which closely integrate the Salutation Protocol into their product implementation, without the need for application isolation. This level of implementation is targeted for entry level or low function devices.
PerspectivesMichael Dertouzos is the head of MITs Laboratory for Computer Sciences. This scholar and entrepreneur has far reaching influence in the computer industry, advising governments and businesses on the future directions for information technology and the World Wide Web. In his recent book, What Will Be, Dertouzos states, "people value greatly the ability to form a community bound by the sharing of information and are willing to readily integrate new information-driven activities into their daily lives." Dertouzos believes that this desire for information will evolve the current Internet and World Wide Web to a new 'Information Marketplace'. Like other marketplaces, it will be a place to buy and sell a commodity -- information. There will be suppliers, brokers, consumers, middlemen, delivery channels, and stores -- the latter being information access devices that provide the trading place in the Information Marketplace.
Dertouzos believes that the current infrastructure and computing devices are not capable of supporting the volume of independent actions needed to support the transactions that will arise in the Information Marketplace. He observes, "the large corporate forces -- the telephone, media, software and hardware companies -- are not helping (create an open network environment). They naturally view the future as a place predominantly for their products and services."
Commentary:
Because of the desire to control markets through proprietary technology, getting competitors to cooperate in defining the 'future shops' is the greatest challenge. With direct access to the delivery channels controlled by the major players, information suppliers must deal with the corporate middlemen to place information into the hands of the consumer. Because of its independence of operating system, communications network, and transmission protocol, Salutation can help provide access to this new marketplace, by providing a single, bridging architecture across proprietary infrastructures.
Upcoming EventsDataquest - Document Management Conference - August 5-6, 1997 Fairmont Hotel, Chicago, IL. R.F. Pecora will speak on August 6, 15:00-15:30 "Making It Easy to Connect to the Network",
CAP Ventures'- Converging Digital Peripherals Conference, September 11-12, 1997, Copley Plaza, Boston, MA. R. F. Pecora will speak on Thursday, September 11, 13:30-14:15 "Salutation Consortium: A Standard for Internet Appliances"
FAX Directions '97 Conference, September 14-17, 1997, Hyatt Regency LaJolla at Aventine, Sandiego, CA R. F. Pecora will participate in a panel discussion, Tuesday September 16, 13:40-14:45 "Where Does the Fax Machine Go from Here? This is Not Your Father's Fax Machine...
Fall Comdex 1997, November 17-21, 1997, LasVegas, NV. The Salutation Consortium will be represented at Comdex in November, 1997. Watch this space in the October Newsletter for more details.