January 8, 1991 Omicron Software, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of a new communications product for software developers and trade associations. THE INTERCOM ! Being software developers ourselves, we know how important it is to provide both quality technical support and pre/post marketing support for our products and services. This is sometimes a difficult task. People use your products every day. Unfortunately, they don't always use them between 9 and 5. Have you ever had a problem with a piece of software at 2:00am? I know I have. O.K., who do you call at 2:00am? Have you ever called tech support for a product and been told "all the technicians are busy now, we'll have someone call you back". Well, they call back, but inevitable they call while you are out to lunch, and then you have to go through that all over again. Having experienced these types of problems with supporting our own products, we decided that we needed to expand our support services. Hiring more technicians was out of the question. We couldn't justify the expense. Instead, we installed an electronic bulletin board system. We had an extra computer to run it on and we had an extra modem. All we needed was a phone line and some BBS software. After trying several brands of BBS software, we settled on PCBoard by Clark Development Company because of it's tremendous power, flexibility and excellent support. Now came the problem of how to get people to use it. Surprisingly, most of our customers, even the computer professionals were uncomfortable with communications and communications products like ProComm, or Qmodem, etc. Then, when they finally do figure out how to connect to the BBS, they spend large amounts of time fumbling around trying to figure out how the fool thing works. No matter how easy it really is. We concluded that if we were going to be successful with this BBS strategy, we were going to have make it much easier for the user to access our BBS. We needed to find away that ANYBODY with a PC and a modem could connect with our BBS, get and send messages, upload and download files, and not have to learn a complicated comm program to do it. THE INTERCOM to the rescue! The INTERCOM is a front end to the BBS, written in Clipper 5.01 using the Telepathy library for communications. We gave every one of our customers access to the Intercom, and NOW they use our BBS. The user has a familiar point and shoot menu system that he readily understands. He can write messages to technical support or other users on the BBS with the built in editor. He can get messages from the BBS and read & respond to them off line, thus saving him long distance charges. The user can upload and download files to/from the BBS by just typing in the name of the file. File transfers are quick and reliable with the Zmodem protocol. The average time a user spends online, is 1 to 2 minutes (not including file transfers), so they don't mind the expense. Our users get clear concise written responses to their queries. They interact with other users of the products and many times have their questions answered by them. It's wonderful when one user helps out another. Everybody is happy, and we didn't have to a thing. THE INTERCOM - FEATURES Compose/edit messages off-line - read/respond to messages off-line fully automated log-on - fully automated send/receive of messages and files - no user interaction required while on-line - full multi- level security - full featured terminal program included for other comm needs - Zmodem error correcting transfer protocol - ascii file viewer - archive important messages on-line context sensitive help - unlimited distribution license to users of your BBS If you want to turn your tech support nightmares into sweet dreams, give us a call today to discuss your needs and to get a free demonstration version of THE INTERCOM! Contact: John H. Stolte, Sr. Omicron Software, Inc. 2301 Genito Road Powhatan, VA 23139 804-598-2500 (voice) 804-598-3943 (fax) 804-598-2871 (BBS)