Virtual Secretary

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Here’s another dinosaur of a piece that I found on an ancient hard drive, but can find no tearsheets in my files that would show me the published product. I’m guessing it ran in about mid-1995. If you find a copy in your mildewed archives, let me know. The chief attraction here is to see how far technology has driven us since I wrote the piece, almost every aspect of which, from a software-and-hardware perspective, has been supplanted.

                                                                                          

MANAGING YOUR LIFE these days is like keeping track of a small business. You’ve got to keep track of people like doctors, bankers, brokers, and insurance sellers, not to mention trying to remember a birthday or two. If you’ve got kids, the names increase exponentially. Now let’s say you’re starting to third wave it, working at home a couple of days a week. You need to track who you’re calling and who called you. And if you’re not there to take a call, you don’t want to miss a message.

I do it all with my home computer. I’m too kindhearted ever to bark, “Get Chicago on the line!” to an employee, but I have no problem bossing around my modem. Combine one of the new multifunction modems with good support software and you’ve got yourself a virtual secretary.

If you’re planning to go anywhere near the Internet, you’ve probably already got your eye on a 28,800 bits-per-second modem. Because there’s such a high demand for them, manufacturers are offering all kinds of extras to sweeten the deal. You get faxing. You get voice mail. You even get Caller ID info.

I chose the Cardinal external speakerphone modem for this project because it’s easy to set up and comes up with a good voice mail program. Last time I suffered from one of those “Press 2 for customer service” voice mail labyrinths, I gnashed my teeth and longed for the chance to show how it should be done. And now I’ve done it, and it couldn’t be simpler.

The Cardinal Call Center coordinates your messages and faxes with a mailbox system that lets you route incoming calls efficiently. It’s a simple tree system, with a main mailbox greeting telling your callers where messages should go. In my setup, you press 1 to leave me a work-related message, press 2 to leave a message for my wife, press 3 for a personal message for me, and press 4 if you’re trying to get me to pay overdue bills. Funny how those bill collectors, who have the most annoying voice-mail systems themselves, don’t take my system seriously.

Your voice line becomes your fax line, too, because fax calls are automatically detected and the program reads and stores the info for you, giving you options to save or print the pages. Best of all, the modem is also a full-duplex speakerphone with surprisingly good clarity. When you set up the modem, you’ll plug your phone into the back of it, but you may never need to lift the handset again.

Before you go shopping, check the serial port on the back of your computer. Typically, there are two of them, and a mouse may be plugged into one. The port, which has a male connector, uses either 9 or 25 pins. The back of the modem is a 25-pin female connector. Make sure to get a cable that fits both the modem and your computer properly.

Step 1: Install the Modem

Place the modem near your computer and plug the serial cable into the back of it. Plug the other end of the cable into your computer’s serial port. Attach the small end of the AC adapter to the back of the modem; plug the other end into a nearby outlet. Disconnect the modular plug from your telephone and connect it to the modem jack marked LINE. Find the telephone wire that came with the modem and plug one end into the modem jack marked PHONE. Plug the other end into your telephone.

Step 2: Add the Microphone

Assemble the four parts of the microphone. Slide the tubular base of the mike itself into the groove of the small drum, which you then snap into place against a support strut. Slide the strut into the back of the flat-bottomed base and you’re all set. I put the microphone just behind my keyboard, swivelled so it doesn’t block the monitor.

Step 3: Plug in a Sound Card

If you have a sound card and speakers, unplug the speaker cable from the sound card and plug it instead into the SPKR OUT jack on the back of the modem. Plug one end of the supplied stereo cable into your sound card; the other end goes into the LINE IN jack on the back of the modem. (If you don’t have a sound card, you’ll use the modem’s built-in speaker.)

Step 4: Install the Software

Click the Start button on your Windows 95 screen and choose Shut Down. Select Restart the Computer. As Windows 95 reloads, it will detect your new modem and ask how you want to configure it. Select “Driver from disk provided by the hardware manufacturer.” Place Disk 1 of the Cardinal Setup Software in Drive A:, and click OK. When the process is complete, click the Start button, select Run and type A:\SETUP in the dialog box. Confirm the destination directory and change disks when prompted.

Step 5: Record the Greetings

You’ll be recording outgoing messages – called “greetings” – in a moment. Don’t record the Main Greeting until you’ve finished the subsidiary greetings. That way you’ll keep all the mailbox numbers (and purposes) straight. Click the Start button, choose the FaxWorks group and select Call Center. Choose the Setup button from the Call Center screen and select Mailbox Setup. At the next screen, choose New. Assign a name, mailbox number (this is what the caller will select)  and password to the mailbox, and click OK. To record a greeting, select the red Record button, wait for the beep, and speak into the microphone. Repeat the process for each mailbox you want to configure, and remember which number goes to which mailbox.

Step 6: Record your Main Greeting

Go back to the Mailbox Setup window and choose Greetings. Highlight Main Greeting and select Record. Now give your hello and describe the mailbox options you created. You can replay and fine-tune your messages as often as necessary. As long as you keep the Call Center running, the computer will answer your phone and process those incoming calls.


Timex sidebar

Scheduling devotees lug oversized appointment books to keep track of their days, which is dangerous. If you don’t sprain your wrist from the weight of it, you might follow my practice of leaving the book behind in restaurants and taxicabs. Timex offers a Dick Tracy-like solution with its Data Link watch, a high-tech appointment book/rolodex/alarm system that reads info from your computer screen and coordinates with Microsoft’s Schedule+ to make sure that the info is always up to date.

Using it in conjunction with Janna Contact 95, a full-featured contact management system that also coordinates through Schedule+, I was able to set up a to-do list for myself as well as an schedule that beeped 15 minutes ahead of each appointment. Best of all is immediate access to my most-needed phone numbers.

The watch stores up to 150 entries, and the process of updating comes right out of a sci-fi film. Press the watch’s Mode button a couple of times to put it in data receive mode, set the Timex software to send info, and your monitor flashes with a changing series of parallel lines, like a UPC code gone mad. The watch beeps in acknowledgment and it’s done. That two-way wrist TV will be here yet!

Cardinal MVP288XS modem and accompanying software, $259
Cardinal Technologies, Inc.
1827 Freedom Road
Lancaster, PA 17601
(717) 293-xxxx
Fax: (717) 293-xxxx
BBS: (717) 293-xxxx
America Online: Cardinal

– Computer Life, c. July 1995