The “Do Not Fax” regulations proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to go into effect January 2005 have been delayed until July 1, 2005. The new rules will require businesses to obtain signed, written permission from recipients prior to sending “advertisement” related faxes. For building service contractors, this would include materials such as price sheets, sales bulletins, inventory lists and invoices.

Combating these new rules, however, is the Junk Fax Prevention Act, passed by the House in July and waiting Senate approval. Under this act, businesses would be allowed to fax any customer as long as a business relationship has been set some time in the past seven years. In addition, the recipient must have the chance to opt out of receiving future documents.

The Junk Fax Prevention Act would help small businesses save time and money by not having to mail out approval forms to customers in advance.

Health And Hygiene Help At Your Fingertips
Workplace Wellness Guides, a series of Web-based resources relating to health and hygiene issues in away-from-home settings, offered by Kimberly-Clark Professional, are available for downloading and printing.

The guides cover important hygiene tips in many building service contractor markets including office buildings, educational facilities and health-care facilities. Less common BSC market segments such as lodging properties and industrial facilities are also covered.

BSCs can pass along the information found in these guides to customers as a value-added service. For office buildings, information includes restroom germ hotzones, the benefits of no-touch products and the importance of handwashing. BSCs can also find tips in the guides that can have a direct impact on building occupant health, especially during the cold and flu season. Examples include increased availability of tissues and hand-hygiene products and providing dispensers for used tissues.

Grab the phone from the glovebox
It happens to everyone. When driving to an unfamiliar destination, even the best of us will sometimes get lost along the way. And, building service contractors have their fair share of confused drivers — sales representatives who take a wrong turn en route to meeting a new client, or new employees lost in a strange neighborhood, trying to find the building they’ve been hired to clean.

Now, however, if they can’t pull over to unfold the map, lost drivers can simply use their cellular phone to get back on track.

By dialing the phone number 800-555-TELL, callers can get free easy step-by-step directions by speaking the street address or intersection. Each step gives the mileage until the next turn and users have the option of repeating, or going back to the previous step if still lost.

And while on the go, callers can also use this phone number to receive updates on traffic reports, news, weather and stock quotes.

Two months after Google Inc. offered a desktop search tool (see TechTalk in November/December) that allows users to sort through documents, e-mails and other files stored on their hard drive, Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Ask Jeeves Inc., are all set to follow suit.

With the desktop search tool, users can search through hard drive files much faster than with the search or find feature currently used in Windows.

Similar to Google, all three companies offer their search tool free of charge. But unlike Google, some of the other companies’ tools will be able to search through e-mail attachments, photos, appointments and documents in Adobe’s PDF format.

Businesses tired of e-mail inboxes overflowing with spam will have to remain patient a while longer.

After its first year, the Can-Spam Act has shown little, if any, effect on the amount of unwanted e-mail, known as spam, sent to Internet users. The Can-Spam Act was designed to curtail spam by allowing e-mail service providers to sue spam senders.

In 2004, the monthly average of spam was 73 percent of all e-mail traffic, up from 40 percent last year, according to data from e-mail security service provider MessageLabs.

Some companies such as AOL, however, have reported a drop in spam, but analysts say this is the exception to the rule.

The United States is responsible for more than 40 percent of all worldwide spam.




POSTED ON: 1/1/2005