Microsoft at Work (MaW) was a short-lived effort promoted byMicrosoft to tie together common business machinery, likefax machines andphotocopiers, with a common communications protocol allowing control and status information to be shared with computers runningMicrosoft Windows. Similar efforts for other markets includedMicrosoft at Home andCablesoft. By any measure these efforts were a dismal failure; it appears only a small number of devices using Microsoft at Work were ever released before disappearing without a trace. Microsoft has since re-used the "at Work" term for a section of their web site describing various tips and tricks for using Windows in a business environment.
Microsoft first presented the at Work concept at a release party on 9 June 1993. They described five classes of devices as being targets for the at Work system; fax machines, photocopiers, telephones, printers, and hand-held PDAs (personal digital assistants). The idea of at Work was to design a standard set of communications protocols, status codes and commands to allow the devices to be remotely operated in the same fashion as network printers underPostScript.
The system consisted of five primary components;
Microsoft claimed that supporting at Work would add only a few dollars to a device supporting it, making it attractive for office equipment which would normally cost several hundreds of dollars. They also claimed to have signed up fifty partners who were developing at Work devices for release starting at the end of 1993.Ricoh demonstrated a fax machine with at Work at the release.[1]
It was not until May 1994 that the first at Work device actually shipped, aLexmark printer, the WinWriter 600.[1] By 1995 few, if any, additional devices had been added to the list, and the entire concept had essentially disappeared from view.Byte Magazine awarded it a "Whatever Happened To..." in July,[2] noting that "few" products had come to market supporting the standard, and that the original at Work group had been broken up and sent to different divisions within the company. Microsoft continued to claim that it was still being developed, but it seems that by 1995 the effort was dead.
One of the few pieces of software to support at Work was aMicrosoft Outlook fax engine,Microsoft Fax (orMicrosoft At Work Fax), which shipped withWindows 95 but stopped working under more recent versions of the OS.[3]
Although at Work eventually failed, its announcement caused other companies to offer competing systems of their own. Perhaps the best known wasNovell'sNovell Embedded Systems Technology (NEST), which was released in 1994. Like at Work, NEST eventually disappeared, but was somewhat more successful and lived on in a number of products.