Nucleus / Carwatch Integration System

Tower Carwash uses two separate point of sale systems in its business. One is the CarWatch Cash Register and Timeclock system from DRB Systems, Inc. This system is used to manage the sales of all car wash and detailing services. The second system is the Dresser Wayne Nucleus System, which is used for all other sales, including fuel, food and store purchases.

The Carwatch System is a legacy DOS system which has served Tower well for many years at relatively low cost, and provides car wash related capabilities that Nucleus does not. On the other hand, prudent management requires that all sales transactions be processed through a single point of sale system — which in this case is the Nucleus System.

As a result, there is significant double-entry data by staff when handling car wash sales. They must enter sales into the Carwatch System, and then must indicate to the Carwatch System when a customer has paid for the service. At the same time, the sale must also be entered into the Nucleus System.

Tower asked Eagle if it would be possible to automate the "connection" between Nucleus and Carwatch as follows: Initial car wash sales would be entered into Carwatch; subsequently, when a customer paid for the service, and this was entered into Nucleus, a special "integration program" would observe the entry of the payment into Nucleus and automatically simulate the keying of a corresponding entry into Carwatch. This would keep the Carwatch System updated, and would permit Carwatch to automatically print the customer's claim check without double entries by the sales clerk.

Eagle studied the operation of both systems and developed a "Nucleus-Carwatch Integration System" (NCI) which is currently in operation at Tower.

The project was performed without the support of any technical documentation for either Nucleus or Carwatch. NCI analyzes all transactions entered into Nucleus, and when it identifies items which correspond to Carwatch transactions, it simulates the creation of keystrokes from one of the Carwatch terminals, and then relays the Carwatch response back to Carwatch terminals and printers.

Multicast File Distribution

The application, referred to as a "Management Console," provides a web-based user-interface to a full-featured multi-cast file distribution (MFD) system. The interface allows the user to upload files for distribution and to set up groups of multicast recipients. Users create profiles, which describe all aspects of a multicast, including the files to distribute, the recipients targeted, and the distribution schedule. Various screens and reports are available to the user for displaying status and billing information on future, past and in-progress multicasts.

The back-end control system handles such tasks as multicast scheduling, estimation of multicast resource requirements, and allocation of resources based on these estimate. During peak usage times, the system is capable of performing a "best fit" to schedule a multicast at the nearest time for which adequate resources are available. The control system is also responsible for interfacing with third-party MFD software via a Java control component and a custom XML-based communication protocol. Messages are sent to the MFD software to initiate multicast file transfers and to obtain status information on previously submitted multicasts. The third-party MFD software is used only for its implementation of a reliable multicast protocol. All other features of the system have been implemented by Eagle Research.

The web site provides a separate interface, which allows administrators to maintain customer and user accounts and to obtain information on the status of the system. Administrators can get a listing of any errors that may have occurred and view information on system bandwidth consumption. The administrative interface also provides controls to shut down and start up the back-end control system.

Unified Mail Messaging System:
Internet Mail Access Protocol Interface

This was a project to develop an IMAP interface to PulsePoint Communication's state of the art Unified Messaging System hardware. It included providing IMAP-based client software access to voice, fax, and Internet mail messages over the internet.

The project consisted of joining PulsePoint Communication's hardware voice/fax/messaging system to an IMAP software service built upon Internet protocol interpreters which provide end-users with Internet access to their messages via software such as Outlook Express and Netscape Communicator.

FlameThrower anti-spam software

FlameThrower is an add-in for Microsoft's Exchange and Outlook mail systems. It transparently scans incoming e-mail using Eagle's proprietary "Spamalyzer" engine to determine whether mail is "junk" or legitimate. FlameThrower places junk mail in its own mail folder. It can automatically reply to junk mail, asking that you be removed from sender's mailing list.

FlameThrower has extensive customization options, including the ability to automatically purge old junk mail and block mail based on specified domain addresses.

FlameThrower's Spamalyzer engine identifies spam by analyzing the content and other properties of incoming e-mail, instead of using a list of known spam senders.

WinFax Access to Unified Messaging

Designed and implemented MAPI store and transport providers to provide access from MAPI and Symantec's WinFax program to PulsePoint's Unified Messaging. The result is a system which allows remote access to e-mail, voice and fax data on the PulsePoint VoiceServer hardware.

The project required Eagle to design and implement custom COM object marshaling to accommodate out-of-proc free-threaded objects in a pre-DCOM environment. We also designed and implemented a custom data marshaling protocol using IStream compliant out-of-proc objects that use mapped memory to facilitate highly efficient cross-process data transfer.

Also designed and implemented stream objects in C++, capable of feeding data to out-of-proc IStream objects while performing "on-the-fly" MIME parsing and data conversion to provide for stream-based access to data in MAPI messages and attachments. The MIME parsing supports n-nested RFC-822 messages in MIME content and presents nested message as MAPI messages within messages.

We implemented a MAPI store provider to give MAPI a view of the structure of the folder system on the VoiceServer for both online and offline operation and supplied MAPI objects to MAPI clients using the above technology to permit the persistence of messages in RFC-822 format in a local database.

A MAPI transport agent is used to provide on-demand and background synchronization with folders on the VoiceServer. The program also supports presentation of MAPI voice and fax messages in the format used by WinFax, in order to provide compatibility with WinFax viewers / players.

This was implemented for Windows 95. The technologies involved include: MAPI (Provider), COM, TCP/IP, MIME, RFC-822 (Internet mail format).

Translator for Telephony Protocol

The Digital Telephone Systems division of Harris Corporation manufactures a variety of telephone equipment, including the Harris 20-20 digital switch. The Harris 20-20 communicates with external hosts via a messaging protocol called HIL (Host Interface Link).

Many competing switches, however, now support the CSTA (Computer-Supported Telecommunications Applications) protocol, while the Harris 20-20 does not. Because CSTA is becoming a standard protocol for controlling PBX's, Dialogic Corporation has developed a product called CT-Connect, which can enable Windows TAPI and TSAPI applications to "speak CSTA" to telephone switches.

In order to make its telephone switching equipment compatible with the CSTA standard, Harris has begun development of a HIL/CSTA translator which will allow the Harris 20-20 to communicate with Dialogic's CT-Connect software. Harris asked Eagle to develop a high-level design for the HIL/CSTA translator. This project consisted of the high-level design only, not implementation.

Extension to Microsoft Exchange for Voicemail and FAX

A team from Eagle designed and implemented a Microsoft Exchange Extension and MAPI service provider which connects Digital Sound's telephone messaging equipment to MAPI and Exchange on end-user computers, using a Voice-View modem. The system uses using MAPI, TAPI, COM objects, RPC and VoiceView technologies, among others.

Specifically, the functionality implemented by this software includes the following:

-- a MAPI store provider that represents the data on the telephone messaging equipment;

--a MAPI transport provider that packages local messages and forwards them to the messaging hardware;

--a server application that uses custom-marshaled COM objects to give multiple instances of MAPI store providers access to the single resources used for communicating with the messaging hardware;

--an Exchange extension that customizes the behavior of Exchange to a context representative of the object on the messaging equipment;

-- a MAPI Form server and Form object that customize presentation of the various messaging types on the messaging hardware.

FAX Gateway

Epigraphx provides "fax-back" services for companies who want to avoid the expense and management overhead of maintaining an in-house fax-back system.

Epigraphx customers can prepare their own documents to be made part of the fax-back library, and then upload these documents to Epigraphx' system.

Eagle developed software which allows the Epigraphx customer to manage their documents, establish communications with Epigraphx, move the documents to the correct location on the fax-back system, and set various parameters which control the manner in which these files are used by the fax-back system.