J. A. Powell, Jr.
Do you ever have the feeling of deja vu all over again? (To steal a quote from a great American, Yogi Berra). I knew that Microsoft Windows 95/98 came with a fax program built in. This is a program that lets one send a fax directly from a Windows program by merely selecting the fax printer and sending the print job to a remote fax machine. This program requires that you have a modem connected to your computer. The fax program dials the other fax machine using the modem and sends the fax.
But recently I was out at that great American Book Store, Sam's. You know, the place where you can buy a book that retails for $49.99 for $1.25. Sam's had a book titled "Window 98 Secrets" and, knowing that I had to stay vigilant in my search for the latest computer information for my fellow bar members, I started looking through it.
Well lo and behold, I turned to the page that tells about the fax program in Windows 95/98. Boring ... until .... I see with my own two bloodshot eyes that this fax program can be used ... OVER A NETWORK! A fax can be sent from a workstation on a network to a fax server on the network. The fax server, using a modem, makes the call to the remote fax machine and sends the fax.
Surely I knew this before I went to Sam's yet I cannot honestly say that I had already heard of this little feature. I went back to the office and looked in our computer closet for a computer to set up as our new fax server. I chose our email server and set it up to tell the network that it was a fax server also. This took about five minutes.
Then I went to my office and set up my computer to look on the network for the fax server. I started WordPerfect and sent a test fax by selecting the fax printer instead of a normal printer. I typed in the fax number and pressed send. I sent this fax to our own fax machine. By the time I arrived at our fax machine the fax server in the closet was making the call to it. The fax came out perfectly. In fact the fax looked almost like it had been sent to a laser printer.
If the fax goes through, a message will appear in the "sent box" of your email program. If the fax does not go through for whatever reason, an email message is sent you your "in box" of your email program.
I had been looking for fax server software for several months but the cost has been too much. Here I found one right under my nose for free. This is not a fancy solution, but it does the job and keeps your staff at their desks being productive instead of standing around the fax machine.
What? You do not know what Y2k means? ...or...What? You are sick to death of hearing about Y2k? I predict that you will go from being in the former group to being in the latter.
Y2k is the abbreviation for the Year 2000 problem with computers. Back in the good old days of computing, computers were designed to keep dates using only 2 digits for the year. The problem is that at the end of next year when the year changes to 2000, a computer date stored as 04 could mean 1904 or 2004. This means that if the computer program is not fixed to know of the century change, you could get a bill from the bank for 100 years of interest. Wouldn't that be a pleasant surprise. Of course, if you have a savings account, you may get 100 years of interest. If you find out that your bank has ignored this problem, please let me know. I may want to make a small deposit.
This problem came about for two reasons. The first was to save hard disk space. I know, your laptop has over 2,000 megabytes of hard disk space but our firm's first mainframe computer had a 5 megabyte hard drive for five people to share. Back then cutting the amount of disk space needed to store a date in half was a good idea. The other reason was that nobody thought that the computers would still be used twenty years after the software was written.
I have been looking into whether this is a problem for attorneys and after extensive and exhaustive research the answer is "it depends."
I read in the American Bar magazine a hysterical article that death, doom and destruction will be caused by this problem. This article said that even our elevators may stop working because of the Y2k bug! Yea, right! Our elevators hardly know how to go up and down. A dog has more need to know what year it is.
Today, I heard on the radio that our investments in the stock markets and bank accounts may disappear come January 1, 2000. The problem with these doom and gloom predictions is that most are made by people trying to sell something. For example, the radio show was sponsored by a gold bullion company "recommending" that some of our investment should be in gold. Obviously a highly reliable source of accurate information.
I have tested our software by setting the date of my computer up to 12/31/99 at 11:59 p.m. and waited to see what happened. The clock ticked over to midnight and nothing happened. Everything worked as advertised. I have determined that if you keep your software and hardware up to date, you will not have a Y2k problem. If you are running DOS on a 386 you may have a problem. This may be time to upgrade your computers and software.
In the next column I hope to be able to review the many Case Management Software products that are available. If you are using one of these products, please let me know how you like it.
I use to make a recommendation at the end of each column of the minimum computer you should buy. For the last few months, I have not made a recommendation because the target has been moving so much. Now the computer market has settled down and it is amazing what you can get for so little money. I recently replaced my paralegal's computer. I bought an IBM brand 300 MHz with a 3.6 gig drive and 64 meg of memory for $1000.00. This is amazing! The pricing of computers is getting so cheap that is almost not worth having a defective computer fixed. Laptop computers have also dropped like a rock.