20 Ways of Improving Your Business with Computerised Fax

20 Ways to improve your business with computerised faxing

1) Increase payment rates by faxing statements to accounts depts
2) Increase sales by direct fax-shots
3) Make fax shots completely personal
4) Fax product pictures or sketches with technical info
5) Automated responses for information

6) Automated quote generation
7) Send order confirmations automatically
8) Send customer service notices
9) Send sales reports, stock reports or other info to remote workers
10) Automated faxing from your web site could go direct to the sales branches

11) Location maps arrive with quality and clarity intact
12) Snapshot graphs & charts can be faxed to management or shareholders
13) Faxed Christmas messages
14) Customer satisfaction surveys
15) Automated faxes of renewal notices, change of terms, maintenance periods, etc

16) Fax product sheets to customers - while the salesman is there
17) Fax newsletters
18) Fax orders to suppliers direct from stock control modules
19) Fax remote workers not on email
20) Fax customer details to remote sales staff
21) Important announcements, change of legislation notices, product recalls

Centreline 2000 can provide fax solutions for Unix and NT.

Fax solutions can be integrated with your office system, such as Uniplex or MS-Office. We can also integrate with your email solution to give a complete seamless mail/fax package.

5 Little Windows Secrets

1) Need a quick restart, hold down the Shift key when you click on the Restart option and Windows will restart without rebooting your whole machine.

2) Want to skip the Microsoft logo on startup, add the line LOGO=0 to c:msdos.sys in the Options section

3) Want your own logo on startup? You can modify the file c:logo.sys to provide your own logo (Make sure (a) you have a backup copy, (b) your replacement is the same size). Paint is fine for creating your own logo.

4) Want to delete files, really, really, really want to delete files, not just drop 'em in recycle? Hold down the Shift key when you press Delete.

5) Fed up with being asked to confirm everytime you send a file to recycle? Select Recycle Bin, Properties to turn off confirmations.

Using Unix commands on a PC

And now, a treat for old Unix hackers forced to live with DOS and Windows. Younger PC "power users" need not bother reading this as they won't have they faintest idea what I'm on about!

Personally I've always felt at a loss when I want to process DOS files, no sed's, grep's, tr's etc. (All the PC folks are now saying "What is he on?"). Sed, grep, tr are part of the vast range of standard Unix tools for manipulating files.

So for example, I could take a list of user names, sort them alphabetically, make sure that they were listed first name, last name and already comma separated ready for import into a database. Can I do that on a PC. Nope. Well, not till I found winxs32.

Written by Mick Meaden, of Software Online Ltd in the UK, winxs32 is an extra-ordinarily useful collection of Unix type tools available either as DOS commands or through a Windows shell.

They work as much like their Unix counterparts as possible (bearing in mind the limitations of a PC). So you can still use all those dash flags you still remember. (With file -? to list those you can't!)

This is the list of commands available:

cat	cmp	col	cp	csplit	df
diff	dircmp	du	expand	file	find
fmt	fold	grep	head	ls	man
mv	nl	od	pg	rm	sed
sort	split	strings	tail	tee	touch
tr	wc	whence
dos2unix	compress	expand	unix2dos	uudecode	uuencode

Some of my favourites?

ls: at last an automatically sorted directory listing

diff: a proper file comparison utility

tr and sed: between them, I've always missed having on-hand file manipulation tools

df: something that quickly tells you how much space you used, and got left on all your disk drives, at once....

Oh, and don't forget being able to redirect these out to a printer for an instant hard copy of a directory listing. Why did Windows programmers forget to put any print facility into anything.

'Scuse me while I digress, but have you ever tried to get a print-out of your Exchange configuration for example? How about your Word setup, how about just a list of files in a directory? What is it with these guys, why do they think you never want to print anything. A print button should be mandatory on all bits of software!!!! Climbs off soapbox...

Winxs is shareware, cost of registration is $30, a bargain in my opinion. Meanwhile, you can download the zip file from our web site or get in touch with Mike direct - his compuserve address is 100345.2641@compuserve.com

OK, all you non Unix wimps can start reading again!