It's no small wonder that business travelers often look spent upon arrival at their destinations. They wither under the weight of schlepping to and fro the requisite hardware and software for sending and receiving voicemail, email, and faxes on the road. Fortunately, this will soon end.
Tornado Software Development has winnowed down their cargo to a single universal messaging technology - the Tornado Electronic Messaging System (TEMS) - thus liberating these road warriors when a free beta version becomes available on its Web site on Friday.
Tornado's twist is Java, which allows platform- and device-independent communications, so you can retrieve any kind of message with whatever device is at hand - a friend's computer, a hotel fax, or the nearest pay phone - all for US$10 per month. Java applets can be downloaded each time as needed, or reside on the CPU, where they'll be automatically updated as needed when you log on.
TEMS serves as a sort of "message warehouse" for communications. "We don't care what accesses the warehouse - TEMS handles all the different devices in the same manner," said Tornado president Kevin Torf. "And with every new instrument that comes along, we won't have to redesign our system."
TEMS will follow the convention of the Windows interface, a paradigm most users should be familiar with, Torf said. Although Java enabled the creation of a powerful system, Torf said, "This was accomplished through pain, blood, and suffering. Java meant a tremendous amount of extra effort on our part."
When TEMS development started, relatively few Java classes existed. Classes are small chunks of code, available in libraries, for simple routines such as drawing a box on the screen. The lack of classes meant that coding for TEMS functions such as drag-and-drop for files, or handling folders, took weeks instead of days.
TEMS - designed for small businesses - will compete with a plethora of other systems, including Lucent Technologies' Intuity 4.0, and InterResearch & Development Group Inc.'s iPost Universal Inbox. Most of these, however, are designed for large businesses - where sales of such services prove lucrative - and run in conjunction with proprietary systems such as Audix voicemail.
Nonetheless, small business is a segment with some growth opportunity, said David Thor, research director of Sherwood Research. Thor believes Tornado wants to use TEMS to "get a jump start on cornering the market for messaging on small-display, handheld devices," such as PDAs.
TEMS offers many retrieval options. The service issues subscribers a toll-free phone number with private extensions from which they can retrieve voicemail or have email read back through a voice synthesizer. Voicemail can be delivered to the computer as a streaming WAV file, while faxes can be received as GIF files. A rules-based scheduling system lets you prioritize or select messages for the various delivery systems. TEMS can also be configured to retrieve messages from several email addresses, with the option of saving or deleting them on the original POP servers.
Although Java apps typically execute more slowly than other languages, Torf said that email transmission is handled by the ISP's POP server, not Java, so delivery of mail is instantaneous. There is a slight slow-down in screen refreshers, he said, but the difference is mere "microseconds."
Torf said the beta trial isn't intended to get users to find bugs; rather, Tornado wants users' performance analysis. Approximately 3,000 users - out of a possible half-million that the Solaris-based system can handle - will be enrolled initially, followed by the global roll-out in late August.
