PC Communications At Your Command

Jack Snell, president of TinyTot Toys in Toronto, runs his business from
his home - but you'd never know it. Right now he's sitting by his home
computer, waiting for an important fax to come in from Hal, his sales guy
in New York. Hal thinks he can get a columnist at the New York Times to
run a review of TinyTot's latest product. Jack's anxious. He's working on
a marketing report, but he's told his PC to let him know when Hal's call
comes through. Meanwhile, a light on his screen is flashing. He clicks on
the flashing icon and a list of his voice and e-mail messages comes onto
the screen. Shoot. Seems like everyone but Hal is trying to get a hold of
him today. He's set up his PC to answer the calls. When people call in,
they hear the message: "Welcome to TinyTot Toys. If you'd like to leave a
message for Jack Snell, press 'one' now. If you'd like to leave a message
for our sales force, press 'two.' If you'd like more information about our
products, press 'three,' and our automated attendant will take your fax
number." Now the phone rings again and Jack sees a message on the screen.
It's Brad calling from San Diego. Drat it. Brad's been bugging Jack to
e-mail him an article from the Wall Street Journal that Jack told him
about. "Doesn't he have anything better to do?" But it's a no-brainer for
Jack, he simply clicks on his news feed to pick up the article and drops
it into e-mail to send it off to Brad. Meanwhile, no word from Hal, and
Jack decides to go for a short run to calm his nerves. Fifteen minutes
later, he's heading back to his apartment and his pager goes off. The PC
has just sent the notification that a fax from Hal has arrived. Jack runs
back to the PC and sees the indicator light flashing again. Hal's message
is music to Jack's ears: "All systems go! The New York Times loves us."
Jack hunkers down to finish that marketing report so he can shoot it off
to Hal.

Welcome to the new age of personal computing. No matter who you are, where
you are, or whatever you need to get done -- send a fax or an e-mail,
program your phone to take messages, tour the Internet, talk to someone
else's computer -- it's all possible from your PC. And the best part is,
it's all so easy, even Brad in San Diego can do it.

This bright new world comes to us courtesy of Delrina Corporation, which
has designed a suite of software products -- called CommSuite 95 -- that
pull all the popular elements of communications together in one place and
get them working as a team. CommSuite 95 is built on a firm philosophy:
give people everything they want in communications, and bring it together
in one package that's simple, easy to use, and lets people save money,
too.

"We're aiming at the person who's continually frustrated by current
communications capabilities," says Delrina President Mark Skapinker. "The
person who's continually asking, 'how do I get there?' 'why do other
people find it so much easier than I do?"

Overview

People want to use their computers to communicate, but up until now, it's
been so difficult. Imagine what our lives would be like if, in order to
chat to another person over the phone, we had to know how to install our
own phone lines, and then how to configure our local connections to talk
properly to the hundreds of computerized exchanges across the city, and
the hundreds of thousands around the world. Well, until just recently,
that's pretty much what PC communication was like. If you walked into a
computer store and said you wanted to get your computer to talk to another
computer, or to a fax machine or a telephone, often the salesperson would
sell you a few pieces of software and then courteously point you toward
the book section. There you'd find a library full of thick, mind-numbingly
technical tomes revealing the secrets of jumpers and switch settings and
ports and addresses. Sure. Technically, you could get your PC talking, but
the whole exercise was equivalent to studying to become an electrical
engineer. It wasn't fast, it wasn't efficient, and it sure as heck wasn't
easy.

But the world is changing and Delrina is leading that change. Microsoft
Corporation has designed a much-anticipated new operating system, Windows
95, that promises to create another explosion in the mass consumer market
for PCs by making computers more friendly and accessible. "Now Delrina can
do what it's been wanting to do for a long time," explains Mark Skapinker,
"That is, provide people with software that makes communications simple to
do." Delrina has designed programs that work in complement with Windows 95
and maximize all its best features.

An operating system is literally the guts of a computer. It's the software
base that works with all the other programs you use on your machine, plus
all the peripheral devices you plug in -- like modems and CD-ROM drives.
Microsoft has put new technology called "Plug-and-Play" into the Windows
95 operating system that promises to erase the traditional problems of
getting all the pieces of hardware to talk to one another. Buy the
program, plug it in, and you're up and running.

Delrina, meanwhile, has incorporated that same plug-and-play technology
into its CommSuite 95 product. But that's just the beginning. Once you're
up and running, and you've got your PC talking to your modem and your
modem talking to the wide world, there's one other big question: Now what?
That's where Delrina really adds value. In designing all the CommSuite 95
products, Mark Skapinker says Delrina's people kept one thought in mind,
"How can we improve on what Microsoft is doing? It's not a question of
throwing more software at the marketplace, but helping people find out
what to do with the stuff once they've got it." Delrina's Vision: "PC
Communications at Your Command"

According to Skapinker, the concepts of messaging and communications are
often thought of as the same today, but those two terms are really very
different. Skapinker says messaging is an important part of communications
but communications as a whole means much more than just messaging. "PC
communications is made up of two major components which include messaging
and on-line/interactive," added Skapinker.

"Delrina's vision is to deliver powerful yet simple PC communications, in
essence, PC communications at your command," says Skapinker. "Delrina will
achieve this vision by delivering high-quality solutions encompassing the
four key elements of communications -- types, functionality, integration
and intelligence."

Skapinker explains, "Delrina will focus on all communication types
including messaging types such as fax, e-mail, voice/telephony and paging
as well as on-line/interactive such as the Internet and terminal
applications like bulletin board systems."

In terms of functionality, Skapinker sees people using each of these
communication types in different ways. Yet each type has its own unique
requirements in terms of functionality. "Delrina's strength is to leverage
its expertise in application development and end-user simplicity -- to
establish a balance between 'sophistication' such as an application's
features, capabilities and power, and 'simplicity' like usability and
ease-of-learning," says Skapinker.

"To achieve powerful PC communications, we must address the last two
elements: integration and intelligence," adds Skapinker. "For integration,
Delrina will provide users the ability to share and access common elements
between the different messaging types like fax, e-mail, voice, and paging.
And finally, Delrina will deliver capabilities for people to automate
certain tasks using the computer rather than having to do each task
themselves -- this is the intelligence element," says Skapinker.

When you bring these key elements together -- types, functionality,
integration, and intelligence -- all in one package, all from one vendor,
you have the formula for very powerful yet simple PC communications,
according to Skapinker.

At ten million copies sold, and with 70 per cent of the fax communications
software market in the U.S., WinFax is the best-selling communications
package of all time. Now Delrina has a new version, WinFax PRO 7.0, which
not only lets you send out messages, it lets you send e-mail, or lets your
PC send a message to your pager when a fax has arrived You can also use
WinFax PRO 7.0 to get your telephone talking to your PC.

Functionality

People haven't always had this freedom of choice, and Delrina recognizes
that. "There's a whole area of communications that hasn't been addressed
because of this issue of whether one message-type, fax or e-mail, is going
to take precedence over another," says Mark Skapinker. "We don't think any
one message type is going to dominate over the others. So, Delrina's
focusing on bringing all the types together and getting them working in a
seamless fashion."

Integration

Marc Camm, General Manager of Desktop Communications at Delrina, says
Delrina's integrated approach makes PC communications mirror what people
actually do in their everyday lives. "What do people do when they come
back from lunch? They check their voice messages, they check their e-mail,
and then they may go on-line to see if they missed anything on the news
wires," says Camm. "That's real world, today." It's cumbersome and
time-consuming having to go to separate machines to do all these things.
But CommSuite means it all becomes much simpler. Now when you want to send
a message, you can send it out to one person as an e-mail, another person
as a fax, and third person as message to his beeper, all your PC.

Intelligence

Picture this. You're working at home, and you're expecting a call from your
boss, but you've got to skip out for a last-minute client call. No
problem. Your PC answers your calls with the message that you've gone off
to visit a client. And meanwhile, you've given the PC caller-I.D.
functions, so, your boss hears a message that you've left specifically for
him: "I've gone out to see Mr. Mercer. Please call me in his office."
Nifty, isn't it?

Back at your computer, if you want to know right away when your boss calls,
you type in his caller I.D. so the PC will tell you when he calls. The
phone rings, and a message comes up on the screen telling you it's Mr.
Smith calling. If you have a voice modem, in future versions of WinFax
you'll actually hear a voice saying, "Bob, pick up the phone, it's Mr.
Smith calling."

Or, picture this. You're running your own desktop publishing business from
your home. You're writing up a brochure for a client and you've got a
tight deadline to meet, so you don't want to be disturbed by the phone.
You've set up your PC to take the calls. When the phone rings, an
automated attendant comes on, saying "Welcome to Perle Publishing. If
you'd like to leave a message for Winnie Perle, press 'one' now. If you'd
like a free catalogue of our services, press 'two' and we'll take your fax
number." The PC takes the message and an indicator flashes on your screen,
letting you know there's a message waiting. Meanwhile, the automated
attendant has taken the customer's fax number and your PC is now faxing
out that catalogue - that's called fax on demand, and the new features
built into WinFax make it all possible.

WinFax PRO 7.0 comes with other new features, including compression
technology. Compression squeezes a file into smaller bits, so it travels
faster over the phone line. The benefit to you? It takes less time to send
your fax out, and when you're sending faxes long-distance, costs matter.

Delrina is working with the telephone companies to let WinFax users do
broadcast faxing. Let's say you've got a fax that has to go to 500
different people. Just send the fax normally, once, to an assigned number,
along with the numbers of all the people you need the fax to go to. The
rest is taken care of. You'll get confirmation that the faxes have been
sent, and you'll save money, too, because the faxes will be sent in
parallel, instead of one at a time.

WinFax PRO 7.0 features an intelligent scanner that lets you scan in those
loose pieces of paper. "It's even smarter than a fax machine," says Albert
Behr, Senior Director of Marketing Desktop Communications at Delrina. "I
take a piece of paper, and I literally drop it in. The scanner turns
itself on, it scans automatically, and it asks me what I want to do with
the image: fax it, store it, edit it."

WinFax is simple to do because Delrina takes maximum advantage of the
Windows 95 features, things like Object Linking and Embedding (OLE 2.0) --
a tool that allows in-place activation. Here's one way in-place activation
is applied: Let's say you're working in WinFax and you receive a file in
Microsoft Word. You only have to click on that file and you can read it
and work with it in Word without leaving WinFax. Tools like plug-and-play
and drag-and-drop make the software easy to use from the outset. Get the
software, plug it in, and you're up and running. Using the software is as
simple as dragging icons from one area of the screen and dropping them
onto another.

That's good news, because it means that with Delrina CommSuite, you can
cruise Cyberspace without being a rocket scientist. Cyberjack, Delrina's
own program, built from scratch, hooks you onto the Internet as easily as
plugging in a phone jack. Cyberjack gives you everything you need to take
advantage of all there is to offer on the Internet - without having to
study a library full of books to get there. No more Internet for Dummies.

There's a reason why Internet for Dummies is so popular, says Mike
Brookbank, Delrina's Internet Product Manager. "One of the principal
problems with people using the Internet is that when they finally get
there, it's like, 'Okay, I'm on. But what do I do?"

Hooking onto the Net is like walking into the world's largest library and
finding no card catalogue, no index, no order. "It's a library where the
books aren't even on shelves," he says. "They're just tossed around in
piles that are scattered around at a million different sites." In short,
it's a mess, borne of the fact that no one person or group is building the
Internet. More data gets added to it every day, and it's all just more
stuff thrown onto the pile.

On-line and Interactive

So, Delrina has designed the Guidebook, a quick and easy travel guide to
Cyberspace. You can change your Guidebook as often as you like by
downloading another version from Delrina's file server. "The Guidebook is
a pre-delivered collection of cool and interesting places on the Net, and
the user just has to point and click," says Brookbank. So, if you're
interested in art, you click on the art section in the Guidebook and
you'll see a choice of places to go -- maybe the Louvre in Paris, or the
Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Popular places like these now have what
are called Web Pages -- files of information thrown into what's known as
the World Wide Web, the portion of the Internet that's captured the
attention of the popular press.

But the Guidebook is more than just Web browsing. It's best described in
Star Trek terms: You know how, when Captain Kirk says, "Beam me up,
Scotty," and suddenly he's no longer out fighting the Klingons, but back
in his ship? Well, that same idea has been built into Cyberjack.
 You click on an icon in the Guidebook, and it might take you to a Web
site, but it might also take you off the Web to an FTP site to retrieve a
file, or a news group or perform a search by asking you a couple of
questions. "It's like morphing," says Brookbank. "You click on an icon and
suddenly you're doing something else."

That's a hot new innovation. "Ordinarily, when you're on the Web, you can
only go to another Web site," Brookbank explains. "If you click on
something else, the software would do its best to show you what's there,
but it would only be an approximation. In our application , we give all
the tools you need, so when you click on a link to an FTP site, it
actually takes you there." That's in-place activation, and it's a key
benefit of Cyberjack that Brookbank says Delrina has "used to the max."
Cyberjack is also integrated with Microsoft's e-mail client, Exchange. So,
if you're scanning a news file on the Internet, and you want to send a
message out at the same time, you can do that right from where you are.
You don't have to quit the Internet and open up the e-mail function. "You
need that integration," says Brookbank. "It's something that has been very
poorly done in the past, and it's something we do very well."

Other Internet packages don't offer this level of integration, they don't
give people access to everything on the Net, and they don't offer this
same ability to cruise around in it live. Nor do other services offer a
quick and easy way of transferring files from the Internet onto your
desktop. In Cyberjack, transferring files is simple and easy. Let's say
you've found the FTP site where Sotheby's keeps its catalogue of upcoming
items for auction. You want to keep that catalogue. Simply drag the file
name onto your desktop and the file is saved there as an icon. But it's
not just a text file, it's a live connection back onto the Net. "The
object contains all the information necessary to make the connection,"
explains Brookbank. "I click on it and it makes the phone calls, it makes
the connection to the proper machine, and, there you are." And the best
part of Cyberjack is that now you can share the Internet, live, with
someone else. "There are some very cool things on the Internet that people
are unaware of," says Albert Behr, "and one of them is Internet Relay
Chat," or IRC. Delrina incorporates this tool in the Cyberback package,
and strips away the complexity of it, so now, with a click of the mouse,
you can send messages back and forth to other people on the Internet,
live. Soon IRC will include a voice option, so you can get on the Net in
New York and link up with your buddy at the Moscow University and actually
talk to him (if you both have voice-modems) "and guess what?" says Behr,
"You're not paying any long-distance charges."

If you want to hook into an on-line bulletin board service or even get your
PC talking to another PC, WinComm PRO 7.0 will let you do it simply.
WinComm PRO offers a quick and easy way to get to on-line bulletin board
services. Plug in the disk, make a few clicks with the mouse, and you're
on-line. Imagine this scenario. Jane Smiley is a housewife who works from
her home in Toronto as president of the local chapter of an international
agency that wants cities to clean up toxic waste. She uses WinComm PRO 7.0
to get to an on-line forum where she can share her experience with other
like-minded people.

This sort of thing has been possible before, but with one big drawback --
there was no live dimension to it. The files you downloaded were just
words on a screen. But with WinComm PRO 7.0, those icons on the screen
behave like live objects, not just text. This is another example of that
tool called in-place activation. Click on one of the icons and it brings
you right back on-line.

"It's like a short-cut to get back on-line," says Ashley Desatlik, program
manager for WinComm. "Instead of having to go into WinComm, open up the
program, open up the session you want and click on that, you just click
once and you're in.

And WinComm makes it easy for you to share the experience of being on-line,
says Desatlik. "You can download a file and send off an e-mail to your
friend and say, 'Hey, Fred, check this out'."

And WinComm also comes with virus detection that's activated with a simple
click of the mouse. With other on-line packages virus detection means
quitting your application, opening up another program called PKUNZIP , and
going through a bunch of complicated commands that unzip the file, then
running another piece of software to check for any viruses WinComm PRO 7.0
not only lets you detect viruses on the fly, but it comes with an Image
Manager that lets you download complicated graphics from a bulletin board
service and watch the image unfold right on your screen as it's being
retrieved.

Delrina is operating on a higher level than other PC software developers.
"Asking what it is that people really want to do with their PCs, and
creating a solid package that people would prefer to pay money for because
they know it's going to be reliable, well-integrated, extremely capable
and very simple to use. That's what we're focusing on. Nobody else is
focusing on that," says Mark Skapinker.

Adds Marc Camm, "Windows 95 is an excellent operating system. While Windows
95 has basic fax and Internet hook-up features, Delrina's vision takes
these capabilities to a new level -- where they're integrated in a much
more significant way. Every application has to be robust and able to stand
alone. They have to be fully-functional. It can't be a grab-bag of
stuff."

"There are many exciting things coming down the line in the very near
future," says Rich Goldher director of Delrina's Voice/Telephony Labs.
"Right now, the two most important pieces of equipment a person uses are
his PC and his phone. These two pieces of equipment are going to be merged
into one. So, you'll no longer have a phone on your actual desktop, but
the phone will be on your electronic desktop. And the phone will no longer
be a dumb instrument, but will have all the functionality of your
computer."

Imagine this. Your PC is in your office in Toronto. A customer from San
Diego calls in with an urgent matter that needs attention. Meanwhile,
you're away on business in New York. Your computer calls you in New York
to say that Mr. Walters from San Diego is calling, and that he's holding
for you on the other line. You accept the call, and the computer patches
Mr. Walters through to you.

That future isn't so far off as you might think.

"In the future, your fax, your phone, even your computer -- these will no
longer be separate pieces of equipment, but their function will be built
right into your PC. So you, the user, will be removed from the burden of
having to think about what type of message you're sending or receiving,
and by what method, " says Marc Camm.

"Our business is creating the best communications software and developing
an environment for people to be productive," says Mark Skapinker. "So,
however the different pieces of hardware converge, Delrina will be there
creating applications to make them work together simply. Our vision is
that you'll always be able to walk into a computer store, buy a PC, some
additional software, and then buy the latest version of Delrina's
CommSuite software for all your communications needs."

Delrina Corp
895 Don Mills, 500-2 Park Center
Toronto, Ontario M3C 1W3 CANADA
416-441-3676,  fax 416-441-0774
 
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