Breaking the information interchange barrier
Electronic messaging
Electronic messaging, in the form of e-mail and fax, has now become essential to the effective operation of almost any organisation. The "reach" of electronic messaging is huge, with e-mail offering the significant advantage over fax of being able to exchange electronic documents upon which a recipient may apply their own choice of processing.
When you send a fax you have a reasonable expectation as to the form in which it will arrive at the recipient, subject to some fluctuations in quality. The tremendous uptake of e-mail has created similar expectations amongst its users, which in many cases is not being met by today’s technology.
So why is e-mail failing to meet our needs?
Problems with e-mail
Firstly it’s important to remember that e-mail (unlike fax) has not evolved to a single agreed standard. The majority of e-mail systems in use today have evolved from proprietary standards without regard to interoperation with e-mail systems from other manufacturers. The emergence of international and Internet standards has gone a long way towards providing more uniform vehicles for messaging, but even standards can create interoperation pitfalls between their different versions. So here’s our first hurdle to exchanging information – the language barrier. We are not all speaking the same e-mail language (nor are we likely to!) and we are not yet sufficiently multi-lingual.
Even if an organisation uses a single, common e-mail system, it may not be safe to assume that exchanging all forms of information is straightforward. Unless everyone in the organisation uses the same desktop environment and applications, then exchanging application files such as word processor documents and spreadsheets may meet a new barrier of incompatible formats.
For e-mail to be truly useful as a productivity tool it must meet the rightful expectations of its users, namely:
- to reach a recipient regardless of their e-mail system
- that the material received is as complete and useful as that which was sent
The Interconnection Barrier – getting the message across
Different e-mail systems employ widely differing message formats and offer varying service capabilities. Simply "getting the message across" between users on different e-mail systems is problematic.
The sender of an e-mail should not be concerned with having to know what type of e-mail system a recipient uses, in fact the sender should not have to change their behaviour at all. The worst case would be for a user to have to use a different client technology for each type of recipient, e.g. to send the same message by cc:Mail, by Internet mail client and by printing and sending fax copies. The sender should be able to use a single e-mail client in order to reach all intended recipients of a message.
Many organisations possess multiple, incompatible e-mail systems and many more need to communicate with the different e-mail systems of their partners and customers. For these organisations, the bedrock of any effective messaging solution is to put in place messaging interconnection technology that allows messages to be exchanged between these different messaging systems.
There are many different products available today to assist an organisation with the problem of connecting different e-mail systems, however it is important to realise that the quality of these solutions will vary widely both in terms of the level of service they offer and their cost of ownership.
NET-TEL offers a range of Route400 Gateways that provide a comprehensive and effective solution to the interconnection problem. The NET-TEL solution brings together the industry leading messaging environments into a form that enables you to exploit the strengths of each environment rather just cope with the interconnection problem.
Even having breached the interconnection barrier our problems are not yet over.
The Interchange Barrier – making sense of it all
Unfortunately "getting the message across" is only half the e-mail battle, you need to also ensure that all the recipients of your e-mail can make use of the material that is sent.
Even the exchange of straightforward text messages can give rise to unexpected problems. The character sets used to convey textual information can vary between e-mail systems and within variants of the same system. Many e-mail systems are now offering richer textual character sets that offer new challenges to ensuring that all recipients receive what the sender intended. In the international arena the need to support and preserve the characters used in other languages offers yet more potential hurdles to successfully exchanging information.
Most e-mail systems will allow attachments to be sent which may include electronic documents such as word processor documents and spreadsheets. A vital step towards successfully exchanging such information is to ensure that the e-mail infrastructure preserves the understanding of the content of such attachments; if an attachment starts out as a named MS Word document it should not arrive as "Unknown Binary".
The ultimate success of the exchange of a document is not whether the e-mail infrastructure can preserve the attachment, but whether the recipient can make use of the document. Where it is not possible to ensure which desktop environment and applications a recipient possesses, there can be no guarantee that the recipient can utilise a received document.
Faced with this uncertainty, e-mail users tend to send a document either:
- in the "lowest common denominator" format, or
- in as many formats as they can think of
Once again, what the user requires is to be able to send their document in its native format and have it arrive in a format appropriate for each recipient. This approach rightly places the burden on the e-mail infrastructure to have knowledge of the capabilities of the intended recipients and to convert documents to a suitable format.
If you include in this scenario those recipients only reachable via fax, then document conversion should include the ability to render documents in a form suitable for fax transmission.
So what can NET-TEL do help you break down this barrier to information interchange?
Document Conversion – breaking down the interchange barrier
NET-TEL has developed a solution to the problem of the information interchange barrier that utilises a highly flexible and powerful Document Conversion capability.
The Route400 Document Converter determines whether the structure, format and/or coding of a message, or parts of a message, need to be converted to another form before delivery to a user or gateway, or before transfer to a different messaging system. It then performs any required conversions itself, or causes such conversions to be carried out by other software applications under its control.
Message conversion allows the representation of information transferred within messages between senders and recipients to be changed in such a way that both parties are completely unaware of any information format incompatibilities that may exist between them.
In many cases the conversions are carried out within the Message Server itself. However, it is sometimes impractical to do this (for example when a UNIX server needs to perform a conversion using a Windows application). In such cases, the Route400 Document Conversion Accelerator (DCA) can be used in conjunction with the Document Converter.
The Document Converter applies the following processes to a message:
- Data-type analysis
Determines the exact type of each message body part (or attachment) including any file type information, and then identifies any possible conversions that may be applied - Address analysis
Determines the source and destination addresses of a message and for each address identifies any conversions required - Body Part Conversion
Invokes one of the following conversions on selected body parts:- Built-in
Converts text body parts to specific character encodings, converts binary body parts (including file specific information) to particular representations and converts an entire message content from the X.400 1988 form to the 1984 equivalent - User-defined
Coverts body parts to new representations using third-party packages or bespoke applications, either within the Document Converter server or through the agency of a DCA in another machine
- Built-in
- Per-message Conversion
Finally a user-defined per-message conversion may be invoked which may, for example, be used to insert a new body part using the results of other conversion tasks
For e-mail to be a productive tool, the barriers to successful information interchange must be removed. Failing to recognise these barriers will lessen the effectiveness of your e-mail investment
The need for basic interconnection between e-mail systems is fundamental. Beyond this the next hurdle is to achieve the transparent exchange of electronic documents, freeing the sender from involvement in producing the right document format for each recipient.
NET-TEL’s product set lets you overcome these barriers to effective information interchange. The Route400 Gateways provide the bedrock of e-mail interconnection, with Route400 Document Conversion providing for the seamless exchange of electronic documents.
