Microsoft at Work (MaW) was a short-lived effort promoted by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

to tie together common business machinery, like fax machines and

photocopier A photocopier (also called copier or copy machine, and formerly Xerox machine, the generic trademark) is a machine that makes copies of documents and other visual images onto paper or plastic film quickly and cheaply. Most modern photocopiers u ...

s, with a common communications protocol allowing control and status information to be shared with computers running Microsoft Windows. Similar efforts for other markets included

Microsoft at Home Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washingt ...

and

Cablesoft Cablesoft was an early attempt to define an interactive television standard. The partners in the new company were Microsoft, Tele-Communications and Time Warner. In fact, much of the effort appeared to be on Microsoft's part, and the two cable co ...

. 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 under

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, ...

. The system consisted of five primary components; # ''Microsoft At Work Operating System'', a small RTOS to be embedded in devices # ''Microsoft At Work Communications'', a

communications protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchro ...

for sending documents between at Work devices # ''Microsoft at Work Rendering'', a unified high-quality rendering system, similar in concept to PDF # ''Microsoft At Work GUI'', a simple UI driver that could be used on the devices to present a common interface # Applications, which were expected to allow users to direct documents to at Work machines 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. It was not until May 1994 that the first at Work device actually shipped, a Lexmark printer, the WinWriter 600. 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, 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 a

Microsoft Outlook Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager software system from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 software suites. Though primarily an email client, Outlook also includes such functions as c ...

fax engine, Microsoft Fax (or ''Microsoft At Work Fax''), which shipped with

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufactu ...

but stopped working under more recent versions of the OS. Although at Work eventually failed, its announcement caused other companies to offer competing systems of their own. Perhaps the best known was

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the l ...

's Novell 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.

References

{{reflist, refs=
/ref> {{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070930185433/http://www.byte.com/art/9405/sec8/art8.htm , date=2007-09-30
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060620215800/http://www.byte.com/art/9507/sec3/art5.htm , date=2006-06-20
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060913234242/http://slipstick.com/addins/SERVICES/msfax.htm , date=2006-09-13 Uncompleted Microsoft initiatives

See also

References