WinFax Pro 8.0

Perhaps Symantec has conducted focus groups and usability studies that told them fax software buyers want to set up sophisticated faxing servers that can broadcast in multiple languages, answer phones and schedule appointments and pick up your dry cleaning. And receive a humble fax now and then. Or maybe they just want to be sure every possible bell and every possible whistle their faxing ponytails and propheads could come up with is included so nobody will go away feeling hungry. I mean come on, "remote fax retrieval"? I guess someone does that now and then. Somebody email me and tell me I'm wrong.

Now after I've let all that out, let me back up and say that all this gnarly stuff they include does allow you to set things up quite comfortably to suit your own faxing style. But you have to be willing to fiddle around with preference settings and such for a couple of hours. For instance, setting up custom dialling scripts lets you use different credit cards from different locations - like hotels. I hate to admit it but I've spent hours sitting around with my laptop in hotel rooms trying to dial part of an access number and click on the communications software in perfect synchronisation to get some crazy 79 digit phone number/credit card number-combination connection. It's important to get your out-of-town connection costs on the corporate credit card if at all possible. WinFax Pro helps you to do just that. The point being, you can choose some of the bells and whistles and carefully tweak them to get a nice little faxing routine built into your system. But you have to kind of enjoy fiddling with software like that to get there.

Here's the kind of thing I'm talking about. As soon as the program finishes setting itself up, you need to turn off the Controller feature. I certainly don't want anything with a name like the "Controller" loose on my computer until I know all about it. What they do is assume that your computer needs to spend some of its resources waiting for a fax to come in at all times, whenever the computer is on. This seems a bit presumptuous to me. On the rare occasions I want to receive a fax on my PC, I'll be happy to tell it to get ready for action. Now if you're going to go ahead and let WinFax set up everything it wants to (there are some fine reasons you might want to do just that), then you should go ahead and let the dang "Controller" thing run in the background all the time. The thing is, the program is designed to set itself up by default to become an entire fax, phone, and communications center that is intimately linked to any personal information manager (PIM) software you may have. By coincidence I use Symantec's PIM, ACT!. My complaint is that every time I open WinFax it insists on opening ACT! as well. If the program was really smart, it would realise I usually send faxes from a program, like Word, and never directly from WinFax. However I always open WinFax directly to, guess what, receive a fax. So the dang thing should know I won't be needing my PIM if I'm opening up WinFax directly. If you're so inclined, you can link all these products up in complicated ways that are guaranteed to smooth your office routines, eliminate needless office paper, promote world peace, and a few other things that make me tired just thinking about them.

There's also this phone thing with it. TalkWorks is not a bad idea. One of the first problems you run into when you start using fax software is your answering machine. Fax software and answering machines simply do not play well together. I've tried all sorts of work-arounds and speciality programs with poor results. There's always some quirk with one piece or the other. So the best thing to do is simply turn off the answering machine just before a fax comes in. Simple, right? Or have a separate phone line for the fax. Right? If we wanted to go through all that kind of crap we wouldn't be talking about fax software. So Symantec has this phone answering software bundled with WinFax Pro 8.0 that seems like it might be pretty cool. The manual lists features that boggle the mind with their simplicity, usefulness, and creative approach to business problems. But I have to admit I did not take the plunge and load it up. I'm quite happy with how all my current business systems are working and I've given up on software that promises world peace. Besides, I've been through all that before. I like to just pick up the phone and answer it without having to click a mouse or think about Windows or anything. Crikey, do I need to be doing Windows while I on the damn phone now too? But it might be just the thing for you.

Yes it has optical character recognition that works about as well as most such programs do - be sure to use the spell checker. Even 98% accuracy means several mistakes per page. You can scan faxes straight in from your scanner. So if you have everything turned on all the time, you can pretend you have a real fax machine. The cover page designer is nice to have and the huge library of naff, twee, tacky, cutesy cartoon-like pre-built cover pages is not as bad as it used to be. But you can use the page designer to prepare your own cover page to use over and over. Internet fax capabilities are built in. It runs on NT too.

If your world is centred on faxing, WinFax Pro is the end-all and be-all of all fax software. You can fax some of the people some of the time, but you can't fax all the people all the time. A fax a day keeps the doctor away, etc. I reviewed WinFax Pro in 1996 and made very similar observations in that review. The program had so many features they seemed to get in the way of daily work. At the time, getting a fax program to quietly wait for incoming faxes without making it impossible to use your modem for anything else was quite an accomplishment. So I praised them then for the same thing that annoys me now.